I would use the same form factor, but give each story a unique decay rate based on word count. You could also take the ratio of pageviews to upvotes into account. That problem with HN is that by the time enough people have time to read a longer story it's already gone forever, so all we really get on the front page is the text equivalent of lolcat pictures. By keeping longer stories around for longer on the new page (and then on the front page) you are putting everything on more equal footing.
Like I said, I don't necessarily know. I'll tell you what, I'm going to go think about it for an hour and come back.
For now, stating the problem correctly will have to suffice: What form factor rewards Depth over Sensationalism? The latter should be understood both in the journalistic sense and in the "wow, that's a cool animated gif" sense. NB: if there's a universal law of content aggregators, it's that the less time it takes to absorb content, the higher its upvote ceiling and the more that category dominates. E.g., on Reddit, imgur > gifs > youtube > political headlines > short articles > your niche. Call me crazy, but you may seriously want to consider doing away with votes, headlines, even the "next" button. I really don't know. Brb in an hour or so.
I think you summed up the problem very well. The next step is how do you get a COMMUNITY of people who value that and will vote accordingly?
Really, the problem isn't filtering / upvoting articles; that is a really well solved problem. The problem is creating a community that values what you value, and ostracizing those who don't (or at least ensuring they don't have a vote).
See my response to the other guy. I don't think you can "explicitly" solve the community problem, due to the issue of poseurs. E.g., if you explicitly create a site called FilmEnthusiasts.com, you'll get some film enthusiasts (i.e., exactly what you're after), but you'll also get a bunch of knuckleheads who think the Dark Knight was the 6th best movie ever made. http://www.imdb.com/chart/top
You have to solve the problem implicitly, which means setting up barriers/hurdles/shibboleths to entry, which is anti-thetical to the web, which is why it's so goddamn hard to do on the web.
Constraints:
1. The web as it exists today is largely slanted toward clickthrough. Yes, this means that the Reddit Comment Model dominates, but it also means that the content users link to is sensationalist and, frankly, poor quality, because the publisher doesn't much care how long the user stays, only how many clicks they generate.
2. Content vs. comments. In my web forum experience, which is more extensive than I'd like to admit, form factors tend to favor one or the other, either in terms of quantity or quality. There is no such thing as a high-quantity, high-quality forum; if there were, you wouldn't be trying to make one.
3. Growth vs. loss of cohesion, aka the Eternal September problem. I've seen this solved only twice in countless tries, but each under very unique circumstances. (One of them is r/SRS, which I think is a bunch of silly people, but they've both grown a lot and kept being exactly what they want to be, which is something virtually no online forum can say they've accomplished.)
Potential exploits:
1. Your name, The List. You're not a bunch of submissions that happens to appear in ranked order, you're The List. How many items are on The List each day? If the answer is infinite, not much thought went into making the list, which means you aren't a site that rewards depth. One alternative model: Take link/topic "requests" and let users vote on which will appear the next day. This avoids the ever-present problem of reposts, which is what drives away longtime users fastest. Whatever, say, 7 topics win, those 7 items are linked and up for discussion the next day. Losers are cast into the abyss and nothing from that domain can be resubmitted for another week. (Or you could just hand-pick from among the requests. Whatever.)
2. Lack of time-sensitivity. You're trying to be the opposite of the 24-hour news cycle. If somebody has a thought-provoking piece from 2001 about 9/11 (like Hunter S. Thompson's take on the event), then awesome! People would love to see that. But it'll never match up against Fox, CNN, et al., who put food on the table by shortening your memory. So don't let them compete. No news. Fuck news.
Why I think the above can defeat Eternal September:
First, to characterize the problem: it is not people. People are never the problem. People are largely whatever situation you put them in. Eternal September was Usenet's fault, not the fault of incoming college freshmen, as former Usenet folk like to claim.
Take it out of the internet context. What's something else people get sick of? And then are super surprised to find out later that other people are into? I.e., the same way people get into Reddit, enjoy it, decide it's declining, leave altogether, then vomit when they hear it's getting 5B pageviews a month?
Music. Top 40. Whatever you're listening to when you're in your teens/20s, you're going to be listening to the rest of your life. But it's not like the Backstreet Boys were so much better than Justin Bieber. (Let me tell you, the people hating on Justin Bieber now freaking loved NSYNC, and I've got the photos to prove it.) It's just that after listening to X amount of music, your tastes are established, and everything new after that sounds the same because it all sounds sufficiently different from what you're used to.
How do you defeat that? Change the form factor. No more radio. 5 songs a day. They better be fucking good.
One thing that I'm keen on someone trying out is this:
Instead of having upvotes (or likes or +1s or whatever), separate the concept out into different notions. You have a different goal in mind than I do, but my list was "Agree, Eloquent, Beautiful, Laughed". You might instead have "Agree, Promote, Eloquent, Useful".
The principle is to have a small list to capture the different ways someone reacts positively. It's a short list to prevent the paradox of choice, but it's descriptive enough that you can still meaningfully express your upvote in more than one dimension.
Not only does it pad out the page, which prevents users from digesting many headlines at once, but it gives the submitter a "sticky" comment at the top of their submission page for them to elaborate on their post. If you're aiming for high quality content and discussion, it might be worthwhile to consider it.
Also, thanks for making your alternative open source and documenting your sorting algorithm!
Wow thanks for pointing this out (about the algorithm). That's perfect for people like me who hobby around in algorithms! Big thanks for considering your users!
Love this idea....I actually don't like that HN makes me choose to either click through directly or read comments. Wish it (or TheList) would just do blurbs!
You can use tldr.io plugin to get some blurbs before deciding if the link is worth clicking. It works great on HN. However there isn't many of them yet.
