[wdewind]

Thanks for replying, dang, I appreciate it.

I'm on this site a fair amount and don't feel super informed about the ongoing plans (was surprised to hear about the artificial movement of stories, for instance). Any details you could provide there would be really helpful, and I'm sure the community would appreciate knowing what's in store. Maybe even a dedicated page for news about the hn platform/algo and experiments.

> The existing mechanisms—upvoting and /newest—are insufficient for the community to sort out which stories are best by that standard. The trouble with upvoting is that stories that gratify intellectual curiosity regularly attract fewer upvotes than stories that are interesting for other reasons.

I think this fact is undebatable but the question is which scales better? Large communities with heavy moderation have frequently descended into corruption quickly. Again, I think communicating your plans/experiments would be really helpful (and also gratifying of intellectual curiosity!)

[dang]

I'm in the process of expanding on my comment above; "I'll add more in a bit" means in a few minutes when I have time to write more. That's the only reason I don't post more about this, by the way—it's time-consuming, and takes already-limited time away from actually doing any of the things being written about. So I mostly just reply to questions when people have them. Anyhow, please check back in a little while and I'll try to explain more.

[wdewind]

That's cool, but with respect, it might be better to turn it into a brief summary and repost it as a top level item. This child thread is deep and buried now so few users are going to see it.

[dang]

That's a natural suggestion, but my experience is that it doesn't work so well. If I make a top-level post out of this, it will lose the feeling of "conversation with a user", become something official, and other factors will kick in. There's a place for that, of course, but it's a different thing and one mustn't overdo it. I will formally ask for feedback when we get closer to knowing what we're asking about, but for now it's just thinking out loud.

Also, you'd be surprised at how much the information in discussions like this makes its way into circulation. People do find this stuff, and I think it's more fun to run across it this way.