The inscrutability of how page ranking works in HN is increasingly a problem in my eyes. I understand it's an attempt at preventing gaming the system, but I'm not convinced it works.
> The inscrutability of how page ranking works in HN is increasingly a problem in my eyes. I understand it's an attempt at preventing gaming the system, but I'm not convinced it works.
HN downweights threads that receive more comments than upvotes. It's a quite useful heuristic to avoid flame wars, in my opinion.
I sometimes wish some stuff would stay up, but, in the aggregate, I'm pretty happy with the result.
Whenever I see some article posted, that is likely to generate a storm of bickering (many platforms elicit this; not just politics), I'm usually happy to see it take a nosedive.
I had something that I submitted, fairly recently, get plonked. It was actually fairly sensible and relevant, but one of the commenters posted something that was "sort of" a "dox," and I understood why it disappeared.
> E.g. could a controversial thread (plenty of upvotes, plenty of downvotes) get pushed off the front page because it has a low upvote:comment ratio?
You can't downvote submissions, just flag them. As for comments, I'm not sure how the sorting works there (but it seems like net upvotes, with comments younger than an hour being pushed to the top).
Only that more than half of the time a peaceful discussion gets buried by that automated system and then dang comes several hours later and says "oooops this got caught by the anti-flamewar system and now the discussion is dead!! oops!! our code monkeys are working hard to fix this!"
As a suggested experiment, randomly select 25 stories with comments>votes, and 25 stories with votes>comments. Go through the comments on those 50 stories and score them for flamewarishness. It's probably a half day's work. 50 stories * 3 minutes each for scoring, plus some time for the random sampling and stats.
You could present the data as a plot of your subjective flamewar score vs. log(votes/comments)
I don't find this revelation particularly interesting, or this particular source to be very good, so the ranking algorithm is working exactly as intended for me.
This is news, but it's not curiosity-sparking news, its boring tech news. Give me more physics and LL(V)M, please.
25 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 62.6 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38514537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38515123
Not sure why it's getting pushed off the front page when, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38515123 has 41 points and 2 hours old whereas a front-page article, e.g. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/50-years-made-a... only has 57 points and is 14 hours old (as of this comment)
The inscrutability of how page ranking works in HN is increasingly a problem in my eyes. I understand it's an attempt at preventing gaming the system, but I'm not convinced it works.
HN downweights threads that receive more comments than upvotes. It's a quite useful heuristic to avoid flame wars, in my opinion.
E.g. could a controversial thread (plenty of upvotes, plenty of downvotes) get pushed off the front page because it has a low upvote:comment ratio?
I get that YC probably don't want to deal with controversy, but, well this is a community, of sorts...
Whenever I see some article posted, that is likely to generate a storm of bickering (many platforms elicit this; not just politics), I'm usually happy to see it take a nosedive.
I had something that I submitted, fairly recently, get plonked. It was actually fairly sensible and relevant, but one of the commenters posted something that was "sort of" a "dox," and I understood why it disappeared.
You can't downvote submissions, just flag them. As for comments, I'm not sure how the sorting works there (but it seems like net upvotes, with comments younger than an hour being pushed to the top).
these two are the same since you can't downvote submissions.
As a suggested experiment, randomly select 25 stories with comments>votes, and 25 stories with votes>comments. Go through the comments on those 50 stories and score them for flamewarishness. It's probably a half day's work. 50 stories * 3 minutes each for scoring, plus some time for the random sampling and stats.
You could present the data as a plot of your subjective flamewar score vs. log(votes/comments)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
This is news, but it's not curiosity-sparking news, its boring tech news. Give me more physics and LL(V)M, please.
Very hard to prove
https://hckrnews.com/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38515123 (42 points, 80 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38514537 (93 points, 126 comments)