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.

Looks algorithmic to me. Reverse-chronological with upvote threshold(?), where upvotes are correlated with sort rank on vanilla HN.

Again, not a thing if you are on the site I mentioned.

There’s clearly decision-making going on because it’s not listing most HN posts. How is it deciding what not to show?

Not to mention HN posts don’t spontaneously emerge out of the randomness of the cosmos.

Presumably this has gotten way, way more complicated in the last 13 years.

+ if (this.moneyPaid > 10000USD) = instaPostToFrontPage.

Have you come across a quantitative analysis of this?

you gotta be kidding right?

Why?

I don’t think it’s much more complicated, they just tweaked it a little. I think the underlying system is still very simple

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 haven't seen overly political links in a while; I would assume the experiment failed.

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?

Controlled narratives

Yup, with just enough of an unmistakable ideological slant to force posts with differing views to take a Kharma nose dive. It seems that the addition of Kharma is proportional to posts that align with the overall narrative of the board post sentiment. In my case, I've noticed that some of my posts don't appear as originally created. Can't really confirm if this is inherent to the algorithm or just internal interference. The latter would be my guess. :(

Yep. Particularly obvious with comment ranking too.

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.

Interesting I didn’t perceive it that way (I see the irony lol)

I’ve always seen it as a place that is quick to tell people to back off/treat each other with respect

the design goal is not to maximise interactions

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.

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.

This isn't very satisfying to me, as that ranks pretty low on the list of potentially damaging threads, don't you think? The genesis period of a petition? I see way more alarming stuff on here every day that further disillusions me to the biggest players.

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.

as that ranks pretty low on the list of potentially damaging threads, don't you think?

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)

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.

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 thing is, it doesn't even have to be PG/HN doing this. Case in point, look at reddit being astroturfed by every company.

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.

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.

Yes, I'm very aware of that effect. The difference is that this was so aligned with the general attitude of HN users[*] that it stuck out as an anomaly; similar posts almost always hang around for a little while, usually several hours but sometimes over a day,

(*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.)

Remember the average person doesn’t comment, they just lurk and maybe vote. Our sense of who the average HN person is comes from an incredibly skewed sample.

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?

Not sure when it started, but the second chance pool has moderators putting stories that didn’t get much attention when they were submitted directly 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.

Author here. I don't know why this popped up 13 years later, but hi :-)

I don't know why this popped up 13 years later

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.

Would you say it is still roughly the same?

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?

The mods are much more sensitive now to anything they consider flame-bait, flame-baiting, or controversial. Much quicker to intimidate/threaten, de-emphasize posts, flag-kill, etc. I presume because HN may be influencing/affecting some billion dollar bottom lines now and they can't afford a bad look

intimidate/threaten

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.

why would you think they would make that publicly visible?

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.

they aren't gonna send a threatening email, they just ghostban you.

Do you have showdead enabled?

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 think HN became the CNN of tech news (not journalism but “journalism”).

weird that posts with lots of comments are also penalized though, the `controversy` reasoning is not solid enough for me.

It's not just "lots of comments" though. It's more comments than upvotes. You may disagree, and it may not be a perfect metric, but in reality I think it's works very well. 90+% of the time when I look at a post with tons of comments and a relatively small number of upvotes, it's flamewar central.

True, but there's that 10% posts where there's (eg) a good cancer breakthrough, and it's two guys going back and forth on the methodology adding a lot of comments. Not always, but not never either.

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.

Back-and-forth conversation isn't high quality by definition, it's just the baseline for not being bad enough to downvote. I think Hacker News wants the baseline to be some degree of exceptional.

I concluded long ago that voting rings are active here, along with paid/inauthentic upvote farms.

What led to that conclusion? Genuinely curious.

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.

I've frequently encountered this same thing. Often the downvotes come a day later, but quickly.

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.