> By the time it's written and posted, the site has moved on to the next new thing.
I noticed this within the context of submissions and /new when I posted two blog posts of mine. Both posts were x000 words so minimum reading was over 3-5 minutes (average time on site was 1.5 minutes so not everyone read to the end).
Both times neither posts got any upvotes until half way down the first page. They were surrounded by topical submissions, news or etc. Stuff that either had a simple message in the title or was only a few paragraphs long.
Except a strange phenomenon occured when the posts fell to the second page, readership doubled. Whereas on the first page Google analytics real time reported 10-14 active readers this jumped to the low 20s. By this time the posts had received 5 upvotes. On page 1 they were maybe the 4-5th most upvoted submission but once they reached the 2nd page they stole 1st or 2nd place among their non-frontpaged peers.
The lesson I took away from this is that short or topical submissions have a strong advantage. It is easier and quicker for someone to decide to upvote. In same cases they may upvote without reading at all if the title is descriptive enough. Meanwhile people do like longer posts but reading a full essay is barrier to upvoting.
One way around the burying effect of the new page would be to not let it be ordered by age but delivered in a random order (but removed altogether after a certain amount of time).
Perhaps votes should be weighted by the length of the submitted post. So, e.g., votes on short submissions are worth less than votes on full essays. Length of the post can be gamed, but I guess when that happens some form of information theoretic measure can be used as part of the weighting.
I don't suppose this is already being done, is it?
Actually, I strongly doubt it can be easily automated in a way that doesn't reduce readability, which I expect to lead to a sharp drop off in number of up-votes. If the number of up-votes drops off faster than the advantage gained from the longer post, the system can't be gamed.
I noticed this within the context of submissions and /new when I posted two blog posts of mine. Both posts were x000 words so minimum reading was over 3-5 minutes (average time on site was 1.5 minutes so not everyone read to the end).
Both times neither posts got any upvotes until half way down the first page. They were surrounded by topical submissions, news or etc. Stuff that either had a simple message in the title or was only a few paragraphs long.
Except a strange phenomenon occured when the posts fell to the second page, readership doubled. Whereas on the first page Google analytics real time reported 10-14 active readers this jumped to the low 20s. By this time the posts had received 5 upvotes. On page 1 they were maybe the 4-5th most upvoted submission but once they reached the 2nd page they stole 1st or 2nd place among their non-frontpaged peers.
The lesson I took away from this is that short or topical submissions have a strong advantage. It is easier and quicker for someone to decide to upvote. In same cases they may upvote without reading at all if the title is descriptive enough. Meanwhile people do like longer posts but reading a full essay is barrier to upvoting.