&#62; <i>Possibly it would be better to extend the length of the 'new' page because in practice once something moves to page 2 it is lost. It is very rare that something makes it to page 2 without enough upvotes and after that still collects enough votes to make it to the homepage, no matter how topical or interesting.</i><p>I don't think that's true at all. I'm not sure if pg logs enough data to test this, but I am quite sure that a lot of the popular stuff that makes it to the front page got there via multiple-submission, not off the new page. It's fucked if the first submitter is more than a day before the second, but the usual course is for multiple people to see something their feedreaders around the same time. This doesn't require fresh content, fresh references to old content work too.<p>Because of this, news.yc generally ignores any links that aren't presently being talked about elsewhere -- it's not the locus of discovery. Metafilter is the only site like this that manages to really handle it well.