> 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?
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.
There may be some survivor bias here, but second-chance stories seem very front-page sticky to me. At least those I have recognized.
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.
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.
Easypost is a YC company, for those who claim hacker news moderation favoritism
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 really wish there was a way to "mark" such posts as "high quality, ignore comment to vote ratio" just like how you can vouch a comment. Enough such marks and it gets auto turned off the flamewar parameter.
So the front page is never a clean rendering of the formula. A story that stops getting votes can sit at the wrong position for minutes at a time.
Which is also why the penalty figures in the post are ranges rather than numbers. Shirriff is inferring them from stories ranked lower than their raw score implies, and a story that simply has not been rescored recently looks exactly the same from outside. He lists that as one of his sources of error, along with neighboring stories carrying their own penalties.
A capability available without visiting any third party sites, by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest
I just hope you don't believe that somehow this magically allows you to escape bias. A (reverse) chronological sort is still a sort.
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.
What I believe to be a less human-moderated version of the front page still exists on HN. It is interesting to compare it to the default. Both have their benefits.
I’ve always seen it as a place that is quick to tell people to back off/treat each other with respect
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)
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...
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.
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?
As a rule of thumb, promoting an agenda (and that's what a petition is) tends to be toward the less intellectually interesting end of the spectrum...occasionally promoting an agenda might involve interesting arguments.
A petition is not much of an argument. A petition is a call to action that requires very little action and typically minimal commitment.
By which I mean, I might have flagged it if I saw it on the front page. And maybe I did.
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.
(*examples include 'right-to-repair, Louis Rossman, all the John Deere and phone hackers, general "I want to own the shit I buy". You get the idea.)
I don't like Paul Graham, but I don't know if he really gives a shit what's happening on here. HN is not a super influential forum.
Yes, exactly. That's why it struck me as being so weird; something so innocuous on its face getting hammered that badly suggests some kind of outside coordinated influence.
(oh, and edit; apparently industry lobbyists had been holding private counter-op meetings with the EU Commission before said petition was even finished, so there's that. Not immediately relevant to this discussion but it does speak to what goes on behind the curtain in government topics)
And also, look how good Graphene OS posts do, and now compare that to Stop Killing Games. These both have a similar overlap (unless you work at Google, both are interests/hobbies), yet GOS almost always hits front page (and rightly so), yet SKG failed to, despite being a Stallman-ian topic.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Reading yet another thread where commenters go back and forth on, eg how Elon Musk sucks/is awesome doesn't make for interesting reading because it's the same conversation that's been had before, and neither side is getting convinced by the other side's argument.
Remember that thing Carl Sagan told us: “if you want to complain about AI from scratch you must first invent the universe.”
That seems like circular logic? Hasn't dang offered many reasons why a post might be suddenly down rated?
There's just got to be more than "I think I saw a post get down rated, so it must be a bot army"
The SDV/SKG petition thing was none of those, and people were generally positive about it during the discussion. So it seems to me it was either an unexplained random down-voting event or something a little more malicious.