Have noticed a lot more repeat submissions that didn't get that much attention first time around getting a ton of more upvotes lately. A comment on the nature of the audience changing. Annoying somewhat.
But what's worse is stuff that already got submitted a year ago, two years ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago, got a ton of discussion and upvotes, but now is much reduced as far as relevancy and newsworthiness and gets submitted again. Need to maintain balance of that oldie-but-goodie stuff with actual new topics.
Vested interest in this sort of because I often find myself digging up those old discussion threads to share like Dang does also, mainly because old is old, but also because we all end up having the same endless repeated conversation points and people can see all the discussion before posting the same stuff again
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
The point of combing through obscure submissions is to find things that haven't been repeated much, and to prevent HN's front page from collapsing into the same handful of hottest and/or most sensational topics.
Btw, to digress a bit: this is really a tragedy-of-the-commons problem. The few hottest topics get upvotes because individuals optimize for what momentarily attracts their attention. Left to its own devices, that mechanism reaches a state which is less interesting, and would probably burn out the system. Local optimization produces a global sub-optimum. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
If the same individuals were giving HN their full, sustained attention, thinking about the site as a whole, then a different result would be possible—but why should they? Users have better things to do, and it's HN's job to interest them. The solution is to have a small number of humans a.k.a. moderators whose job it is to give HN their full attention, thinking about the global optimum and trying to steer things in that direction, and jigging the machine when it gets stuck in one of its failure modes. That's the function of moderation.
Maybe this is too shop-talk to be of interest to many readers, but I find it interesting because I think this business of full vs. partial attention is the solution to the puzzle of why upvotes alone, i.e. community plus software alone, doesn't produce the most interesting community. Previous thoughts about this, if anyone cares:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25652161
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25391088
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22863209
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
An example, to my first point, is like some old cyphernomicon txtfile from 1994 that's been submitted every few years for like 10 years and never really gotten many upvotes nor discussion, now gets submitted a day ago, I'm assuming not much traction again, and then submitted to Pool and now has 74 upvotes. It's weird. Never got much attn before, over and over and now all of a sudden all these things are getting large amount of upvotes. It shouldn't really get that much more attention and my gripe is that it shouldn't be on my radar as something new/interesting for the day because overall it really isn't. It's old and never warranted much interest repeatedly over time. Changing audience (a decline imo) or like something else driving more HN votes in recent year...hmm
I agree with you that it's weird for some old file from 1994 to suddenly get traction, but I think it's good for HN to be weird. I wish it were weirder.