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.
If there's a vote threshold, it's still profoundly influenced by the HN algorithm, because front page exposure is the principal component in how many votes a story gets.
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.
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?
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. :(
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.
It shows that the design goal is not to maximise interactions otherwise "controversial" posts should stay up.
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.
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 maybe reasons why a post might be suddenly hidden?
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 think there is a difference between what is important and what is intellectually interesting.
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.
The part of this I always forget is how lazily the ranking is applied. HN does not rescore the list on every page load. A story is rescored when someone upvotes it, and separately one story out of the top 50 gets picked at random every thirty seconds and rescored. Pages cache for another ninety seconds on top of that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Indeed, if you go out of your way to circumvent automatic story ranking, the particularities of automatic story ranking no longer affect you...
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.
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.
If there's a vote threshold, it's still profoundly influenced by the HN algorithm, because front page exposure is the principal component in how many votes a story gets.
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.
Sure they do. Just with extra steps.
Remember that thing Carl Sagan told us: “if you want to complain about AI from scratch you must first invent the universe.”
Saying it a second time doesn't make it any more true.
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.
How does that differ from turning on showdead and going to /newest ?
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?
More powerful bots and more incentives to game the system.
maybe dang and team can use the new system 1 classifier hotness like jev now ;)
I don’t think it’s much more complicated, they just tweaked it a little. I think the underlying system is still very simple
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.
Officially, should be protecting the site by keeping things interesting. (Just saying officially.)
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...
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
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/active
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.
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 seems like circular logic? Hasn't dang offered maybe reasons why a post might be suddenly hidden?
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.
Well I definitely think the site is heavily bogged, I was speaking more to moderation.
I think there is a difference between what is important and what is intellectually interesting.
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.
The part of this I always forget is how lazily the ranking is applied. HN does not rescore the list on every page load. A story is rescored when someone upvotes it, and separately one story out of the top 50 gets picked at random every thirty seconds and rescored. Pages cache for another ninety seconds on top of that.
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.
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.
I think I started getting Second Chance emails about ten years ago...give or take a couple of years.
[delayed]
Author here. I don't know why this popped up 13 years later, but hi :-)
Still relevant! Very interesting topic.
Just so they could penalize it, obviously.
was very interesting :)
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.
Note the trajectory of any stories about the IDScan drivers' license leak. They don't stay up long, after US East Coast SoB time.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171656
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.
Easypost is a YC company, for those who claim hacker news moderation favoritism
Great analysis. I think there must be even more going on in the comments section. There are a lot of shenanigans especially on “controversial” topics.
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.