How do some submissions with less than 10 votes react top 10 on front page?

6 points by hidden-spyder 4 years ago | 4 comments

(Not an official answer, I'm just a regular user)

The ranking is a function of votes, flags, and time. Not all votes are equal, as some votes are determined to be correlated via voting-ring type considerations.

But if a submission gets four or five independent votes very shortly after submission then it can easily make the Front Page. It won't happen if the votes trigger the voting-ring detector, or if the submission is flagged by someone.

Why do you ask? Why are you surprised? What other reading have you done before asking the question?

disadvantage 4 years ago | |

> as some votes are determined to be correlated via voting-ring type considerations

I was thinking the other day: asking a few friends to up-vote submissions is common practice and something probably done all the time on HN. On the other hand, deliberately creating new accounts to up-vote all your sockpuppet account submissions can be detected. HN doesn't go into how they detect it for obvious reasons though.

LinuxBender 4 years ago | | |

HN does a decent job detecting this automatically. When it does not, there are regulars here that might see the anomaly and email the moderator. This is an external feedback loop that improves the automatic detection.

petercooper 4 years ago |

1. They might be really new. This is how most posts go from 3-4 votes to 100+. Few people visit /newest, so posts either get a lot of points over time (less common) or briefly make the front page and "take off."

2. dang emails people who submitted items that were good but didn't take off and then puts them into a system that pushes them to the front page at a certain time to see if they would work once there. This has happened to me a couple of times.