HN Explorer

Why is a highly ranked, recent story being buried?

17 points by unethical_ban ↗ HN
The Mozilla CEO story[1] is on page two of the feed on HN with 600+ points, 700+ comments and is 3 hours old. What part of the algorithm allows it to be put below items that are simultaneously older and ranked lower, such as [2]?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525198 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523229

14 comments

[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 51.7 ms ] thread
wmf
It has been speculated that the threads set off the flamewar detector by having more comments than votes.
benched
The Hacker News community wants to discuss this story much more than the Hacker News mods want to allow it to be discussed. They think they've reasonably allowed the community to discuss it "enough", already, so they're intervening. Not annoying at all, is it?
dang
I just lightened the penalty.

The Hacker News community is deeply divided about this—I don't mean about Eich, I mean about the impact of political flamewars on HN. What you say is only true of part of the community.

epeterson19
Because the only reason it was posted on HN in the first place is that the company is a tech company. In that way the story is only tangentially related to hacking and startups, so it doesn't need to be on the front page.
daturkel
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think the sheer number of comments indicates that the community certainly finds this "interesting." It's just a matter of keeping the comments civil and high-quality.

epeterson19
Right, but this is an issue that everyone is talking about; it's interesting to everyone including good hackers. I don't need to come to HN to see this. This story is/was on every news website.
logn
Right now there's an HN front-page story on this from NYTimes. I don't think anyone's burying the story, except from individual users flagging it or because of points-to-comments ratio being too low (flame detector).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7527690

It currently has 3 points and is position 29. Recency of votes also counts for a lot.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
dang
That one ended up getting flagged heavily by users.
dang
I'll be posting more about this, but the short answer is that I've been demoting (or killing) some of the threads as duplicates.

I don't even remember the NYT one that logn mentioned, though. Many users have been flagging as well.

sillysaurus3
For what it's worth, it's a tough problem that you're trying to solve, and the feedback that the community has received thanks to your comments has been awesome. It's probably the most significant step toward fixing the uncivil comments on HN.

I just wanted to mention that this is the first time that I can remember missing a major tech news story because it was buried off of the front page of HN. So it's the first time I've felt "out of the loop" due to relying solely on HN as my source of tech news.

That said, it's not a big deal. I just felt I should mention it in case others are feeling the same way but aren't speaking up. It might just be me though.

And there's nothing wrong with special cases. If this resignation story is just a special case, and the mods wish to bury it due to the sensitive nature of the topic plus the uncivil comments on HN, then that makes a lot of sense. I'm just hoping it doesn't become a trend to bury major tech news stories...

EDIT: Er... the story's still on the front page, position #24. I guess I just missed it and then assumed it was buried.

sillysaurus3
After thinking about it some more, I've changed my mind. I think it's far more beneficial to bury a toxic story. I wrote the above comment before actually reading the commentary in the resignation thread.

EDIT: The solution of "keep it near the bottom of the front page" is very creative, and it seems like a good plan. It's appreciated that the mod team is putting in so much thought about how to handle this.

vxNsr
That discussion is just brewing hate, people can't seem to discuss their politics that same way they can discuss the best C# compilers.

I too have flagged it as after reading 100+ comments all I saw was a yelling match and anyone with a moderate view getting downvoted heavily (because both extremes hit her/him).

Note: as soon as I saw the news I ran here to see how this community felt, but all I'm seeing is a reddit ragefest and as such I don't think we should discuss it anymore.