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Ask HN: What Happened to DHH's Uber Post?

21 points by cmmn_nighthawk ↗ HN
DHH wrote a blog post on Medium that is critical of Uber and YCombinator. The link was posted to Hacker News and received enough upvotes to get to the #2 spot.

The article sharply dropped in position (off the front page) at around the time west coast work day began.

As far as I can tell, nothing in the article violates the 'Hacker News Guidelines'.

Is there an technical explanation of why this would happen related to the algorithm? Has YCombinator offered an explanation of why something like this would happen in the past?

links--

https://medium.com/@dhh/deleting-uber-is-the-least-you-can-do-30c0601103ea

https://twitter.com/dhh/status/833701507585437700

https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/833697426846396416

12 comments

[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 51.4 ms ] thread
carlmcqueen
You mean this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13687493
cmmn_nighthawk
Yes--that is the post. As of right now, it is ranked #135 with 302 upvotes in 3 hours.

That doesn't make any sense. In position #137 is an article with 289 upvotes from 2 days ago.

Check out the votes/time on the first page. I'm asking why this article isn't ranked within the top 10.

detaro
The answer nearly always is "because users flagged it", which adds a high penalty to the ranking (which the mods sometimes override if they feel like a story shouldn't be punished this way). (Other cases are articles with more comments than upvotes, which afaik get penalized as potential flamewars, but that doesn't apply to this example with as of now ~300 points and ~100 comments).

If you want an official answer by HN, please contact them via e-mail.

temp-dude-87844
There is a feature of HN that is sometimes called "flamewar detector" that tends to apply various countermeasures to threads that are getting a lot of replies and/or upvote/downvote churn. One of the observed effects is that the thread drops off the front page. For example, see this post from moderator dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7508443#7509979

You can see more discussion about these behaviors when you search HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flamewar%20detector&type=comme...

dang
Users flagged it and a mod applied two kinds of standard penalty to it: one because it was a copycat post that added no information to the two major articles/threads already on the front page, and two because it was an unsubstantive rant.

Those penalties are standard because follow-up posts (e.g. that try to capitalize on hot stories to get cheap attention) and informationless rants routinely get tons of upvotes—many more than the substantive stories that HN is supposed to be for. That's a well-known weakness of the upvoting system. HN can't live by upvotes alone. If we didn't have countervailing mechanisms such as moderation, the site would not survive. I've written about this lots of times, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10292239.

It had nothing to do with San Francisco (the moderator was elsewhere), nor with the rant being about Silicon Valley, etc.; anyone familiar with HN knows that critiques of all those things appear here all the time, and that's fine. We're hoping for thoughtful critique, though, not rage trolling.

cmmn_nighthawk
I very much appreciate the reply. Thank you, @dang.
dang
You're welcome! Good to know that it's worth the effort to post these things.
tptacek
Can I agree with and appreciate the actual moderation step you took here while calling out a concern about the justification you just wrote?

Twice in this comment you managed --- I think unintentionally --- to suggest that DHH wrote an unsubstantive rage-trolling post. I think it's very easy for people on HN to forget that all writing on the Internet is not in fact intended for HN. For DHH's own audience, an angry post about Uber might be totally appropriate.

It's not just possible but likely that a lot of Internet writing is toxic to HN, but valid and important in its own intended context. I think it's important that we work to avoid confusing these concepts.

dang
Yes, that's a fair distinction and I will try to keep it in mind for the future.