I've noticed lately that posts stay for a much lonfer time on the main page. Half year ago I almost never saw a post twice if I checked every 24 hours but now I do. What happened?
The algorithms were changed at some point, that could be what you're referring to.
You can use news.ycombinator.com/classic to view the front page curated using the older algorithm(s) (For me this is actually a more relevant front page compared to the default one)
Can also just use hckrnews.com which is much better in my opinion (and also retains flagged stories, which I am often interested in because I don't share the HN community's news-worthiness ideology).
They made some changes to how upvoted stories get turned into karma points. There is some threshold of votes (I don't know what it is) that a story needs before upvotes count toward karma. I noticed this a week or two ago and inquired with the moderators.
I don't think that is related. My assumption is that might have to do with caching and when the old value gets evicted from the cache the new value just happens to be different by that much.
Information about algorithms is generally kept secret to prevent people from gaming the system. (there are some unwritten heuristics that I wish were written though, such as the inherent penalty for self-posts)
As minimaxir said the algos are kept someone secret. The higher level concepts are shared in a manner to prevent people from exploiting and taking advantage of them (and I agree that they should be kept that way).
I was curious but not masochistic, so I used a termless custom-time-range search for the first full week of July, August, and September of 2014, 2015, and 2016:
I don't know if full news posts are deleted for any reasons that would cause these numbers to naturally fall off over time, but this abbreviated sample doesn't suggest any downward trend.
> Less people are checking the "new" page and so posts are not being promoted to the front page
I check New all the time, and find some good stuff there, most of which never gets above 3 or so points, and thus never makes it to the front page.
If you are ignoring New because you think you don't have time, I urge you to reconsider. If we all ignored the New queue, then nothing would change on the Front Page (kinda... I know there's manual promoting and stuff going on in the background, but you get what I mean).
I've noticed lately that a lot of stories that manage to make the front page, but don't end up getting discussed heavily, tend to just camp out there in the lower two-thirds of the page for hours.
Things with a lot of discussion seem to trip the flamewar detector, unless they really rake in the upvotes.
I believe OP says they check around the same time every day and doesn't remember seeing the same comment thread stay on the front page a second day in a row. At least that is how I understood it. That is an issue - it might read a little like yesterday's news I suppose.
You can use news.ycombinator.com/classic to view the front page curated using the older algorithm(s) (For me this is actually a more relevant front page compared to the default one)