Your findings are completely consistent with what people have been saying many, many times over the past few months. If something doesn't get noticed quickly on "newest" then it can sink without trace, regardless of its inherent value. Unless you get some friends to check your submissions and upvote them if appropriate, it's very hit-n-miss.
It's mostly because of this that I have always visited "newest" which then also means that I recognise things when seeing them second time around. Recently I've stopped bothering marking repeats and duplications, in part because some people find it deeply irritating, in part because it seems unvalued, and, yes, in part because it drags down my average karma. If one of the metrics PG has put in place gives me a poor grade because of some activity, I'll think twice about continuing.
So certainly your hypothesis "a" seems true. Not sure about "b" because it depends on what you mean by "small fraction," but I would agree with that too.
I will still upvote you (or anyone else) if I see a comment that a submitted article is a duplicate submission. There are many cases that are missed by the automated duplicate detector, and I appreciate knowing that I am not remembering incorrectly when I see a story that I think I have seen before.
I completely agree. I've actually started browsing "newest" much more lately (almost exclusively on some days). My solution is to pick out quality submissions and try to give them the bumps that they need to make it to the front page for other users to see.
I rarely upvote articles, even if they're generally interesting to me (front page or /newest). Because upvoting also functions as a saving mechanism on your userpage, I only upvote things I want to save (mostly on a certain topic). If there were some distinction between upvoting and saving, I might be more liberal in upvoting interesting stories.
Right now, upvoting conflates at least three (relatively) distinct intents:
- "save for later"
- "looks interesting"
- "did read; was interesting; would recommend"
It's the same w/ many other services, e.g. Twitter's stars. It would be rather interesting to see whether a service offering finer-grained options would add much in terms of actual usefulness.
I'm curious if a lot of other users do the same. I rarely (if ever) look at my saved list and probably therefore end up upvoting a lot more than you (or others) do.
It's mostly because of this that I have always visited "newest" which then also means that I recognise things when seeing them second time around. Recently I've stopped bothering marking repeats and duplications, in part because some people find it deeply irritating, in part because it seems unvalued, and, yes, in part because it drags down my average karma. If one of the metrics PG has put in place gives me a poor grade because of some activity, I'll think twice about continuing.
So certainly your hypothesis "a" seems true. Not sure about "b" because it depends on what you mean by "small fraction," but I would agree with that too.