HN's second-chance pool is a way to give links a second chance at the front page. Moderators and a small number of reviewers go through old submissions looking for articles that are in the spirit of the site—gratifying intellectual curiosity—and which seem like they might interest the community. These get put into a hopper from which software randomly picks one every so often and lobs it randomly onto the lower part of the front page. If it interests the community, it gets upvoted and discussed; if not, it falls off.
We started doing this in late 2014. There's an explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380, with links back to others. We've talked about it in comments and whatnot (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and have intended to publish the list, but only did so recently. We're slow.
If you see a submission that didn't get attention and which you think is particularly good for HN, please tell us at hn@ycombinator.com! We love getting those requests and usually add them to the pool. It's fine if it's your own article, but we like it better when it's just something you ran across and recognized as good. That's more the kind of interest that HN is for.
A related list is https://news.ycombinator.com/invited. Those are old submissions that we ran across and thought deserved attention, so we emailed and asked the submitter to repost it. Yesterday's top story was one of these (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26982286). They all go into the second-chance pool, but maybe it's interesting to see them broken out as a subset too. (If you don't have an email address in your profile, please put one in so we can send you repost invites!)
If you read the old explanations I linked to, you'll see that the original plan was to turn this system into software that anyone can participate in, likely as a new way to earn karma: users who discover second-chance links that hit the jackpot (that is, which interest the community) would get karma along with the original submitter. That is still the plan! We're just slow.
I think that's about everything there is to say about the second-chance pool. Questions, feedback, ideas, and views are welcome as ever. And please, everybody keep an eye out for obscure, out-of-the-way stories that got overlooked and let us know when you run across them. It's one of the best things you can do to help make this place more interesting. Best of all are the kind that can't be predicted from any existing sequence: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
We started doing this in late 2014. There's an explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380, with links back to others. We've talked about it in comments and whatnot (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and have intended to publish the list, but only did so recently. We're slow.
If you see a submission that didn't get attention and which you think is particularly good for HN, please tell us at hn@ycombinator.com! We love getting those requests and usually add them to the pool. It's fine if it's your own article, but we like it better when it's just something you ran across and recognized as good. That's more the kind of interest that HN is for.
A related list is https://news.ycombinator.com/invited. Those are old submissions that we ran across and thought deserved attention, so we emailed and asked the submitter to repost it. Yesterday's top story was one of these (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26982286). They all go into the second-chance pool, but maybe it's interesting to see them broken out as a subset too. (If you don't have an email address in your profile, please put one in so we can send you repost invites!)
If you read the old explanations I linked to, you'll see that the original plan was to turn this system into software that anyone can participate in, likely as a new way to earn karma: users who discover second-chance links that hit the jackpot (that is, which interest the community) would get karma along with the original submitter. That is still the plan! We're just slow.
I think that's about everything there is to say about the second-chance pool. Questions, feedback, ideas, and views are welcome as ever. And please, everybody keep an eye out for obscure, out-of-the-way stories that got overlooked and let us know when you run across them. It's one of the best things you can do to help make this place more interesting. Best of all are the kind that can't be predicted from any existing sequence: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
I feel good when a re-upped post or an invited repost makes #1, like Yayagram did yesterday, and Internal Combustion Engine has now (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26991300), because that's such a strong indicator of the community finding a story interesting.
Pinning things to the front page in some new way would be the sort of UI disruption that users hate, and we kind of agree with them.
HN's system consists of community, software, and moderators, just as it always has. Moderation is a feedback module tacked on to try to prevent the system from landing in any of its default failure modes. That, alas, requires humans.
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...
I'll try to add /pool to hnrss.org this weekend, too, if time allows.
I'm biased on this though, as someone this might impact (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=thume.ca). From talking to other technical bloggers the consensus does seem to be that when we put a lot of effort into a technical article it nearly always makes it to the top of https://lobste.rs/ and /r/programming because it starts on the front page there but will sometimes flop off new on HN and maybe only make it months later if someone else resubmits the post.
When we're putting an article in the second-chance pool, we do prefer the original submitter where possible. Often, if there's time, I'll go through the submission histories of the other submitters too, to see if there's something else we could put in the pool for them.
In your case, though, you just run into the fact that /newest is a bit of a lottery and it's unpredictable which submission of a story will be the one that gets traction. We do have plans to do something about that someday: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... In the meantime, the lottery does at least even out in the long run if you submit a lot of interesting stories.
IIRC, the second-chance pool was our next experiment after that one. It has worked much better. The difference is human judgment or, if you will, taste.
It's not easy to come up with new mechanisms that might help with this problem. Every software mechanism we've tried allows many things through that don't pass muster. Community mechanisms, as soon as you open them up, get overwhelmed by people trying to game them to promote their own stuff. There's a feedback loop with that: the more interesting HN is, the more attractive it is to a high-quality audience, and therefore the more attractive a target it becomes for manipulation, which makes the site less interesting again. So there's a cap on how good it can ever get (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
Also, a lot of those media and BigCo stories really are of interest to the community. We try to dampen the stuff that's repetitive, and most of those sites are downweighted by default, but HN would not get better if they were excluded. It's all just more complicated than it seems like it might be.
What ultimately matters is how interesting a story is, not what site it comes from. I'm suspicious of encoding proxies for that, because it would be easy to end up optimizing for the wrong things. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Will the second-chance pool be added to the top bar?
Would be great if non-commercial blog domains that have produced good discussions on HN in the past have that somehow reflected in future submissions. Sure, not every piece we write will be worth a front page discussion, and obviously we don't want to recreate digg where some people start getting disproportionate power. Writers can put hours and hours of thought into a piece, and we'd probably be fine if jo one thought it was interesting, but it's discouraging when it feels like a coin flip.
https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/hack-for-hacker-news-developer...
That's a vivid way of putting it (good writing on your part!) but - yes, that's pretty much how HN works. I usually describe it as "non-siloed": https://hn.algolia.com/?query=silo%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all.... The DNA of the site is that everyone sees the same things—it doesn't get sharded. Other sites have social graphs and follow lists and whatnot, but this one doesn't. More on that at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
Also, forgot to mention this before, make sure to subscribe to https://hnrss.github.io/updates.xml if you want to be notified of project updates!