Tell HN: One URL Per Day

[tsally]

I think an interesting experiment would be to only allow users to submit one URL per day. Find two really interesting URLs in one day? Submit it the next day. How many people think that they are actually going to find more than 365 worthwhile stories in one year?

This also serves the dual purpose of focusing attention on discussion, which I believe is the most important part of this site. It'd be an interesting system to try, if only to see how it turns out.

[ambition]

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nickb submits more than 365 worthwhile stories in a year.

The number of new submissions correlates with the number of users. Number of users correlates with number of people looking at and voting on the "new" page.

[ojbyrne]

It's another experiment :-(. I've been here 400 days, and made 60 submissions. None of which have been "Ask HN," "Tell HN," or polls. A tip for building karma here -- spend less time here and go do something notable.

[endtime]

A tip for those who want to build karma...rethink your priorities.

[kwamenum86]

Karma has something to do with your conduct on HN but for many much more to do with your conduct outside of HN. Users submitting identical stories will almost certainly not receive the same number of upvotes after controlling for other factors.

[tom]

A few results I think we might see if pg were to try this experiment. 1. Refocus karma on discussion, as opposed to submission. 2. Flatten the karma curve. Not sure what good this would do, though. 3. Help some folks get more work done as I wonder how some folks here get anything done with all the reading of, and posting of articles/content. I'd be interested to see how many, if any, "good" submissions were missed. Sure this is pretty hard to globally quantify, but if you want to post something, and can't as you're still in your 24 hour post post no post window, how long will it take for someone else to scoop you? I wonder if it will actually hurt the community (ie: missed content). I bet little of value would slip through the cracks, but some posts wouldn't attain the point heights that we see now as they'd be posted by regular folks, not the same, always voted up, uber-submitters.

[astrec]

Refocus karma on discussion, as opposed to submission.

While the quality of discussion here is almost unrivaled (Business Spectator's conversation section is the HN of APAC business), not everyone is here for the discussion. This site is unrivaled as a news aggregator.

Why is a discussion worth more than a submission? Typically a great submission leads to an even greater discussion, but this is not always the case. And sure, we occasionally see low value articles accumulate a lot of points, but the same can be said for the odd low value comment.

not the same, always voted up, uber-submitters

With the exception of PG, who has long since removed himself from the leader board, we don't really see this too much.

[ihartley]

As to the potentially missed content, perhaps you could submit multiple stories, but they'd go in a queue and only one story from your queue would be pushed public per day.

[jackowayed]

But why should we have always voted-up uber-submitters?

Shouldn't the upvotes be based on the merit of the post, not that of the poster?

[psyklic]

Or modulate the URLs/day based on average pts per URL submitted.

[lastkarrde]

Agreed. It will reduce spam as well - startupnz.