This falls apart completely if you’re like me and only see the list presented on brutalist.report which is strictly chronological and with zero algorithms.
That site's interesting, but it would be super helpful with some summaries of the stories and maybe of the comments. Though I imagine that would make it a LOT more expensive to host.
There have certainly been huge changes regarding the handling of political topics. Such topics used to be an anathema in general, and then three years ago, there were four posts about the Palestine conflict on the front page for many hours in a single week, and IIRC, the mods even explicitly stated that this represented an “experiment” of sorts.
I wouldn't be too surprised if the ranking system worked pretty much exactly as the article describes still.
But I also assume the automated (and manual) penalty system has evolved significantly. I'll bet it's evolving rapidly right now, in response to attacks trying to game ranking by people deploying agents. I'd be a little surprised if YC/HN are not right up there with state of the art bot detection tech.
The penalties are interesting. It shows that the design goal is not to maximise interactions otherwise "controversial" posts should stay up. Still though, I wonder what's the point of deranking said posts. Minimise the potential for a flame war to hit critical mass? Stop people from perceiving HN as an argument-filled forum?
HN is already perceived as an argumentative forum. Now imagine if the ratio rule wasn't there. FWIW I find it just as effective on Bluesky and Twitter for myself. Ratioed threads are usually more heat than light.
Yes I second this, HN is one of the least argumentative places I’ve encountered on the internet. Now people disagree with each other a lot, but it’s usually quite respectful compared to most of the internet.
Actually HN is a great place if you have different opinions than the majority.
As long as you make a good argument that's not flippant or rude, people will engage with it.
I hold very controversial points of views and never really experienced personal attacks (perhaps sometimes downvotes but that's not a deal breaker for me) when I express them here.
More to it, I tend to upvote comments I disagree with it.
The design (not sure about its goal) maximizes incentive for medium-complexity ideas being expressed in comments with at most a handful of replies.
The “comments on a submission with ranking based on votes” model is fundamentally unsuited for in-depth, thoughtful discussions. Everything we write in this comment section will be mostly forgotten by tomorrow because there is no notification system for when someone replies to your comments.
Zero people are going back through old submissions more than a day or two old and looking for insightful comments to reply to.
One could stretch into saying their business model is providing HN for free as a place to attract and gather the startup/tech people they fund and profit from.
Paul might say controlling the algo which decides which submarines [1] make it to the top of the probably most visited website by VC's, Software Engineers, and general Startup people, might be a strategic moat, even if it brings 0 dollars on the books and costs a few grand to run and employ some mods (of some who might do other stuff/workf on YC already)
Personally the first HN algorithm anecdote I really noticed was when the "stop destroying videogames' petition hit the front page a couple years ago. In the first hour it got a modest ~100 votes and comments with some organic discussion, so pretty typical for a good HN post. In the next hour it was dead and buried several hundred posts down.
I don't want to be a tinfoil hatter here, but I think certain industries have a lot more influence over this site than most people realize.
I’m guessing you got a surge of the people passionate and interested in that cause more than they cared about intellectual curiosity. Then the rest of us who don’t really want to see the same things everywhere didn’t engage and it dropped.
It seems very difficult for some people to imagine that their passions aren’t universal, or that people might be tired of endless “awareness raising” campaigns shoehorned into every digital space.
I had a post about Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing that I was hoping would go viral because that's the only way I ever saw Amazon ever fix anyone's KDP issues. I posted, then went to bed. When I woke up, it had 250+ points, but was on page 5 with a bunch of posts that were much older and/or had single-digit points.
It must have been on page 1 for a while to rack up that many points, then it sank almost immediately to page 5 where all the other posts with even 50+ points were days old. I've always wondered what happened there. Was it the algorithm, or did a mod step in?
It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that was purely automated based on 4chan organised Gamergater's dogpiling and looking exactly like voting rings and/or manufactured controversy.
Not sure when it started, but the second chance pool has moderators putting stories that didn’t get much attention when they were submitted on the front page.
There may be some survivor bias here, but second-chance stories seem very front-page sticky to me. At least those I have recognized.
Maybe we the HN nerds are recomputing your proposed formula and quirks, and seeing it in real time, which may have worked since it's #1 now and I can prophetically reassure everyone it's gonna disappear in a few hours, per the article. Self fulfilling prophecy as they used to call it.
I see “please stop fulminating” “we’ve asked you not to do this [guideline violating behavior] and we’ll have to ban you if you keep it up”, which is gentler than [shadow]banning even with the ‘threat’ of punitive action. Assuming you’ve seen mod comments I’ve missed.
I've never heard anybody claim that they got a threatening email from dang before though. The moderators could easily block any such story from appearing on HN, but there are plenty of other sites where they could post it, and I suspect that a credible claim would become popular quickly.
So I'm not saying that it's impossible, just that if it did happen, we probably would have all heard about it by now.
In my experience, if someone is going to be contrarian or pivot the topic to something else or move a conversation from primarily non-political into political, they have the burden of explaining the connection to the main topic and to be exceedingly diplomatic. One-liners that go against the grain or that will generate a lot of adversarial back-and-forth get warned.
I really think it's a good thing. I think it balances the ability to allow dissent and debate while helping ensure the comment isn't flamebait. Without slashdot-style metamoderation it's the only way to keep trolls at bay. I've crossed the mods here once or twice in heated arguments, and it's almost always been a reasonable request from them to clean up my argument. Though I was unreasonably banned on my original account about 14 years ago (hence the username created in angry haste).
There is a firehose of the dead submissions and this is a good day today - just about 1 per minute and only 30% are dead. Somedays it's much, much worse.
HN attracts every wannabe out there and there is always a banal spam. So no wonder people don't want^W have time to hand hold anyone.
> Do you think that the math is irrelevant now that the audience itself has become so woke that it’s basically an echochamber?
I do very much believe that that is your own cognitive biases at work. While it certainly feels like there is a slant in a certain direction to me, I do see plenty of dissenting opinions from that perceived slant that get pretty much as much visbility. Most discourse here IS civil, too, which permits those dissents.
If you do believe that there is bad faith discourse going on, you can always email the mod team to get that sorted out.
Check out this thread I made. It quickly moved to the top of the front page but then somehow moved down to like page 3, even though it had more upvotes and discussion than all or most of the other threads posted that day.
I independently came to that conclusion after noticing that my comments on some controversial subjects will slowly acquire upvotes, then nose dive 2 or 4 votes very quickly. At first I thought that some mods might have double-value votes (Hi Cowboy Neal!) but then I realized it's sometimes 4 successive downvotes, not only 2.
Does anyone have an explanation of when you get a lot of karma why there isn't a 1:1 relationship between the votes a post gets and how much the account?
Somewhere around 100k karma (I know, "on the leaderboard" problems...) the amount of points I got for posts (but not comments) reduced considerably compared to the number of upvotes a post gets.
I'd assume the algorithm has changed over the last 13 years. And they're probably better off not sharing exactly how ranking (and penalties) work.
It's clearly easy to mobilize armies of users (or, these days, agents) to upvote submissions or warm up an account. I receive emails all the time offering this kind of service across virtually every website I have any presence.
But without explicitly published rules, it's harder to figure out what works through trial and error, especially if account history plays a role. Agents will clearly optimize around the rules, so I it's probably more important than ever that they're vague. X "open sourced" its algorithm (sort of...), and the bot problem there is as bad as its ever been.
87 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 51.3 ms ] threadBut I also assume the automated (and manual) penalty system has evolved significantly. I'll bet it's evolving rapidly right now, in response to attacks trying to game ranking by people deploying agents. I'd be a little surprised if YC/HN are not right up there with state of the art bot detection tech.
Thanks to dang, links:
curiosity and repetition: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
downweighting follow-ups: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I’ve always seen it as a place that is quick to tell people to back off/treat each other with respect
As long as you make a good argument that's not flippant or rude, people will engage with it.
I hold very controversial points of views and never really experienced personal attacks (perhaps sometimes downvotes but that's not a deal breaker for me) when I express them here.
More to it, I tend to upvote comments I disagree with it.
What I believe to be a less human-moderated version of the front page still exists on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/active
The design (not sure about its goal) maximizes incentive for medium-complexity ideas being expressed in comments with at most a handful of replies.
The “comments on a submission with ranking based on votes” model is fundamentally unsuited for in-depth, thoughtful discussions. Everything we write in this comment section will be mostly forgotten by tomorrow because there is no notification system for when someone replies to your comments.
Zero people are going back through old submissions more than a day or two old and looking for insightful comments to reply to.
https://hnrss.github.io/#reply-feeds
It seems like there is a direct explanation, HN doesn't show ads.
Paul might say controlling the algo which decides which submarines [1] make it to the top of the probably most visited website by VC's, Software Engineers, and general Startup people, might be a strategic moat, even if it brings 0 dollars on the books and costs a few grand to run and employ some mods (of some who might do other stuff/workf on YC already)
1. https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
I don't want to be a tinfoil hatter here, but I think certain industries have a lot more influence over this site than most people realize.
It seems very difficult for some people to imagine that their passions aren’t universal, or that people might be tired of endless “awareness raising” campaigns shoehorned into every digital space.
It must have been on page 1 for a while to rack up that many points, then it sank almost immediately to page 5 where all the other posts with even 50+ points were days old. I've always wondered what happened there. Was it the algorithm, or did a mod step in?
There may be some survivor bias here, but second-chance stories seem very front-page sticky to me. At least those I have recognized.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
Maybe we the HN nerds are recomputing your proposed formula and quirks, and seeing it in real time, which may have worked since it's #1 now and I can prophetically reassure everyone it's gonna disappear in a few hours, per the article. Self fulfilling prophecy as they used to call it.
I look when I comment on something that suddenly disappears from the front page.
> It's unclear if these penalties result from HN administrators or from flagged articles.
Any answers or insights on this within the last 13 years?
Links to examples?
I see “please stop fulminating” “we’ve asked you not to do this [guideline violating behavior] and we’ll have to ban you if you keep it up”, which is gentler than [shadow]banning even with the ‘threat’ of punitive action. Assuming you’ve seen mod comments I’ve missed.
So I'm not saying that it's impossible, just that if it did happen, we probably would have all heard about it by now.
There is a firehose of the dead submissions and this is a good day today - just about 1 per minute and only 30% are dead. Somedays it's much, much worse.
HN attracts every wannabe out there and there is always a banal spam. So no wonder people don't want^W have time to hand hold anyone.
> Lot of the time it is stuff I'm not surprised is dead.
You can't see something doesn't exist [anymore].
Just now it's 10 dead of 30, #30 is just '48 minutes ago'.
I think HN became the CNN of tech news (not journalism but “journalism”).
I do very much believe that that is your own cognitive biases at work. While it certainly feels like there is a slant in a certain direction to me, I do see plenty of dissenting opinions from that perceived slant that get pretty much as much visbility. Most discourse here IS civil, too, which permits those dissents.
If you do believe that there is bad faith discourse going on, you can always email the mod team to get that sorted out.
Even more interesting to know when X.com, famously published its algorithm. Perhaps someday we'll find the fairest of them all
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171656
Easypost is a YC company, for those who claim hacker news moderation favoritism
Somewhere around 100k karma (I know, "on the leaderboard" problems...) the amount of points I got for posts (but not comments) reduced considerably compared to the number of upvotes a post gets.
It's clearly easy to mobilize armies of users (or, these days, agents) to upvote submissions or warm up an account. I receive emails all the time offering this kind of service across virtually every website I have any presence.
But without explicitly published rules, it's harder to figure out what works through trial and error, especially if account history plays a role. Agents will clearly optimize around the rules, so I it's probably more important than ever that they're vague. X "open sourced" its algorithm (sort of...), and the bot problem there is as bad as its ever been.
(and how many of them are disgruntled founders who were rejected by YC?)
Just did a pass and merged some PRs.