Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News Hello HN! TLDR; - Quality News is a Hacker News client that provides additional data and insights on submissions, notably, the upvoteRate metric. - We propose that this metric could be used to improve the Hacker News ranking score. - In-depth explanation: https://ift.tt/IwfTmLZ The Hacker News ranking score is directly proportional to upvotes, which is a problem because it creates a feedback loop: higher rank leads to more upvotes leads to higher rank, and so on... → ↗ ↘ Higher Rank More Upvotes ↖ ↙ ← As a consequence, success on HN depends almost entirely on getting enough upvotes in the first hour or so to make the front page and get caught in this feedback loop. And getting these early upvotes is largely a matter of timing, luck, and moderator decisions. And so the best stories don't always make the front page, and the stories on the front page are not always the best. Our proposed solution is to use upvoteRate instead of upvotes in the ranking formula. upvoteRate is an estimate of how much more or less likely users are to upvote a story compared to the average story, taking account how much attention the story as received, based on a history of the ranks and times at which it has been shown. You can read about how we calculate this metric in more detail here: https://ift.tt/IwfTmLZ About 1.5 years ago, we published an article with this basic idea of counteracting the rank-upvotes feedback loop by using attention as negative feedback. We received very valuable input from the HN community ( https://ift.tt/oYwbUq5 ). Quality News has been created based largely on this feedback. Currently, Quality News shows the upvoteRate metric for live Hacker News data, as well as charts of the rank and upvote history of each story. We have not yet implemented an alternative ranking algorithm, because we don't have access to data on flags and moderator actions, which are a major component of the HN ranking score. We'd love to see the Hacker News team experiment with the new formula, perhaps on an alternative front page. This will allow the community to evaluate whether the new ranking formula is an improvement over the current one. We look forward discussing our approach with you! Links: Site: https://ift.tt/SYKwbik Readme: https://ift.tt/IwfTmLZ Previous Blog Post: https://ift.tt/3KCc6Mf... Previous Discussion: https://ift.tt/oYwbUq5 https://ift.tt/O2pGgPm March 15, 2023 at 09:06PM
Show HN: Tape It, iOS recording app for musicians Hello HN, Over the last 15 months, two friends and I developed the music recording app we felt we wanted based on our own needs as musicians. It's called Tape It [1] and has just recently hit the Apple App Store [2]. We put a lot of effort into a good UX to help musicians really focus on playing their instrument instead of pretending to be a recording engineer. The app records in stereo on newer iPhones (although that's a premium feature; the free version only records in standard mono audio quality). I would be really grateful for advice from this community on how to best approach marketing. We had a great TechCrunch article covering our launch [3], and we posted it on various music websites. Turns out advertising on Google or Apple Search is a dark art, though. We have some good ideas for developing a good social media presence, but they will take time. Please hit us with feedback, opinions and advice that you think a young ind...
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