7 ms·

HN is equally rigged. The mods regularly change headlines, remove posts, and allow YC companies to post on the front page.

by jl87 11y ago

minimaxir 11y ago
1. Headlines are changed to match the article verbatim, or if the article is linkbait, the title is changed to nonlinkbait (the latter might be more frequent case from your submission history) 2. Again, users flag. Rarely moderators remove posts other than that. 3. Those are job ads, which have a set decay time and always start at #6.
- gearoidoc 11y ago
  I think you're off on 2 and 3 - although I only have anecdata to make me believe so. On point 2: I've often found posts which are gaining traction on the homepage which do not subscribe to the 'scale fast'-centric belief system of YC are pulled. Most recently this one by DHH: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3972-reconsider https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3972-reconsider 3. They're not all job ads. Stripe updates their API and it goes straight to #1? Come on...
  - minimaxir 11y ago
    2. Er, the Medium version of that article got 906 points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10506422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10506422 3. Stripe is a rather large company that happens to be a YC company. Keep in mind that Product Hunt is YC too and you're commenting on a negative article about it currently ranked at #4 on the front page.
    - gearoidoc 11y ago
      2. I don't see what its performance on Medium has to do with it. My point is that it was a perfectly good article pulled from the front page. 3. There are plenty of rather large companies that don't get as much attention here as Stripe does (I don't have anything against Stripe btw, just using them as an example in this case). If HN pulled this article it would be pretty damning on the part of YC. The placement of this article in question does not disprove my previous points. FWIW, I've enjoyed relatively decent success from my own product launches on HN. EDIT: re: medium - I mistook you the first time. Apologies. My point still stands re: posts being pulled.
      - girvo 11y ago
        > 2. I don't see what its performance on Medium has to do with it. My point is that it was a perfectly good article pulled from the front page. Oh come on now, you've been here long enough to know that HN attempts to avoid duplicates within days of each other. Of course that one was pulled when the other post of the same content had a huge upvote count and lively discussion.
    - barrkel 11y ago
      I didn't see either version of the article and I visit HN several times throughout the day. You'd think an article with such a high vote count and low comment count would stick around much longer than it did - there's even mention of its amazing disappearing act in the comments.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - dang 11y ago
    If you want a response to this and you don't see one here in the next few hours (I'll try, but can't right now), you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. The short version is that you're partly right on #2 but probably less than you think, and definitely not on #3. Edit: ok, here you go. Long, but hard to make shorter. Here are all the things that can make a post fall in rank: user flags, software penalties (for voting rings, flamewars, etc.), and moderator downweights. All try to optimize HN for the core value of the site—intellectual curiosity—and all are mechanisms to countervail the upvoting system in some way. Why? Because pure upvoting optimizes for other things than intellectual curiosity, such as outrage, gossip, and gaming the system. Think of HN like a flower garden. The flowers are stories that gratify intellectual curiosity, and to have these we must protect the garden against weeds, rabbits, motor vehicles, and other things that otherwise would soon take over. User flags and software take care of much, but not all, so moderation is needed. (We'd love to make it not be needed, but that's a hard problem.) Our criteria for downweighting come from a general sense of what attracts upvotes for reasons other than intellectual interest. It's not about what we personally believe, or have a vested interest in, or even what we happen to be interested in ourselves, with the possible exception of APL. When we downweight, we try to use a light touch. When you see a story plummet off the front page, it probably wasn't moderators who did that (or there was a clear-cut reason, such as a duplicate). In judgment call cases, we're more likely to make a story go from #1 to #4. It's all about balance. You may reply that "a general sense" is hopelessly subjective, and I'd have to agree, yet it's not as subjective as you might think. For example, we wouldn't downweight a substantive article about startups just because it disagreed with YC's philosophy. We might do so if it included a lot of tricks to stir up controversy. Do you see the difference? The latter is procedural; not much different than editing linkbait out of titles. If you do this job across tens of thousands of stories, and you're conscious of the obvious biases, you can mostly guard against them, especially since the same patterns come up over and over. Not sure if I've succeeded here in getting across the gist of what we do, but I hope it helps a bit. As for #3, that's an easy one. We don't give YC startups extra favor when it comes to boosting stories. If a Stripe API went to #1, that was because the community heavily upvoted it. We also are less likely, not more, to downweight stories when they are critical about a YC startup, such as the thread we're currently commenting in.
    - 11y ago
  - detaro 11y ago
    If you look at the submission history for signalvnoise.com you'll see that this article was submitted many times and most of them were marked as duplicates by users (including me, probably, at least I remember noticing how often it was submitted), often with a link to the highly-voted post.
- eterm 11y ago
  If you look at HN ranking trackers then you'll see there are definitely artificial adjustments to the rankings of articles. Mostly that is downwards but sometimes upwards too. HN is mostly fair, but don't trick yourself into believing it is completely fair.
  - venning 11y ago
    There are factors beyond naive weightings, as well. I remember reading somewhere that if a thread becomes too heated or turns into a flamewar, the mods have the ability to suppress it in the rankings artificially to let it cool off. That functionality makes sense, but wouldn't be easily identified in a third-party tracker. A lot of comments here seem to be assigning moderation as bias.
- jl87 11y ago
  Ya - I think #1 is crap. If it gets upvoted then let it stay. Let the people decide what they want - not one person. IF that's the case, just get rid of upvoting completely and make this all about the mods.
  - minimaxir 11y ago
    > Let the people decide what they want That isn't valid when the linkbait nature of titles entices uses to upvote content they otherwise would not have.
  - dang 11y ago
    I understand the logic there, but it would mean the end of HN, because intellectual curiosity is not the most powerful curiosity, even among intellectually-oriented people.
gearoidoc 11y ago
This shouldn't be downvoted. HN is far from a meritocracy. Gamey as f*ck.

HN is equally rigged. The mods regularly change headlines, remove posts, and allow YC companies to post on the front page.

by jl87 11y ago

HN is equally rigged. The mods regularly change headlines, remove posts, and allow YC companies to post on the front page.

minimaxir 11y ago

1. Headlines are changed to match the article verbatim, or if the article is linkbait, the title is changed to nonlinkbait (the latter might be more frequent case from your submission history) 2. Again, users flag. Rarely moderators remove posts other than that. 3. Those are job ads, which have a set decay time and always start at #6.

gearoidoc 11y ago
I think you're off on 2 and 3 - although I only have anecdata to make me believe so. On point 2: I've often found posts which are gaining traction on the homepage which do not subscribe to the 'scale fast'-centric belief system of YC are pulled. Most recently this one by DHH: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3972-reconsider https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3972-reconsider 3. They're not all job ads. Stripe updates their API and it goes straight to #1? Come on...
- minimaxir 11y ago
  2. Er, the Medium version of that article got 906 points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10506422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10506422 3. Stripe is a rather large company that happens to be a YC company. Keep in mind that Product Hunt is YC too and you're commenting on a negative article about it currently ranked at #4 on the front page.
  - gearoidoc 11y ago
    2. I don't see what its performance on Medium has to do with it. My point is that it was a perfectly good article pulled from the front page. 3. There are plenty of rather large companies that don't get as much attention here as Stripe does (I don't have anything against Stripe btw, just using them as an example in this case). If HN pulled this article it would be pretty damning on the part of YC. The placement of this article in question does not disprove my previous points. FWIW, I've enjoyed relatively decent success from my own product launches on HN. EDIT: re: medium - I mistook you the first time. Apologies. My point still stands re: posts being pulled.
    - girvo 11y ago
      > 2. I don't see what its performance on Medium has to do with it. My point is that it was a perfectly good article pulled from the front page. Oh come on now, you've been here long enough to know that HN attempts to avoid duplicates within days of each other. Of course that one was pulled when the other post of the same content had a huge upvote count and lively discussion.
  - barrkel 11y ago
    I didn't see either version of the article and I visit HN several times throughout the day. You'd think an article with such a high vote count and low comment count would stick around much longer than it did - there's even mention of its amazing disappearing act in the comments.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- dang 11y ago
  If you want a response to this and you don't see one here in the next few hours (I'll try, but can't right now), you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. The short version is that you're partly right on #2 but probably less than you think, and definitely not on #3. Edit: ok, here you go. Long, but hard to make shorter. Here are all the things that can make a post fall in rank: user flags, software penalties (for voting rings, flamewars, etc.), and moderator downweights. All try to optimize HN for the core value of the site—intellectual curiosity—and all are mechanisms to countervail the upvoting system in some way. Why? Because pure upvoting optimizes for other things than intellectual curiosity, such as outrage, gossip, and gaming the system. Think of HN like a flower garden. The flowers are stories that gratify intellectual curiosity, and to have these we must protect the garden against weeds, rabbits, motor vehicles, and other things that otherwise would soon take over. User flags and software take care of much, but not all, so moderation is needed. (We'd love to make it not be needed, but that's a hard problem.) Our criteria for downweighting come from a general sense of what attracts upvotes for reasons other than intellectual interest. It's not about what we personally believe, or have a vested interest in, or even what we happen to be interested in ourselves, with the possible exception of APL. When we downweight, we try to use a light touch. When you see a story plummet off the front page, it probably wasn't moderators who did that (or there was a clear-cut reason, such as a duplicate). In judgment call cases, we're more likely to make a story go from #1 to #4. It's all about balance. You may reply that "a general sense" is hopelessly subjective, and I'd have to agree, yet it's not as subjective as you might think. For example, we wouldn't downweight a substantive article about startups just because it disagreed with YC's philosophy. We might do so if it included a lot of tricks to stir up controversy. Do you see the difference? The latter is procedural; not much different than editing linkbait out of titles. If you do this job across tens of thousands of stories, and you're conscious of the obvious biases, you can mostly guard against them, especially since the same patterns come up over and over. Not sure if I've succeeded here in getting across the gist of what we do, but I hope it helps a bit. As for #3, that's an easy one. We don't give YC startups extra favor when it comes to boosting stories. If a Stripe API went to #1, that was because the community heavily upvoted it. We also are less likely, not more, to downweight stories when they are critical about a YC startup, such as the thread we're currently commenting in.
  - 11y ago
- detaro 11y ago
  If you look at the submission history for signalvnoise.com you'll see that this article was submitted many times and most of them were marked as duplicates by users (including me, probably, at least I remember noticing how often it was submitted), often with a link to the highly-voted post.
eterm 11y ago
If you look at HN ranking trackers then you'll see there are definitely artificial adjustments to the rankings of articles. Mostly that is downwards but sometimes upwards too. HN is mostly fair, but don't trick yourself into believing it is completely fair.
- venning 11y ago
  There are factors beyond naive weightings, as well. I remember reading somewhere that if a thread becomes too heated or turns into a flamewar, the mods have the ability to suppress it in the rankings artificially to let it cool off. That functionality makes sense, but wouldn't be easily identified in a third-party tracker. A lot of comments here seem to be assigning moderation as bias.
jl87 11y ago
Ya - I think #1 is crap. If it gets upvoted then let it stay. Let the people decide what they want - not one person. IF that's the case, just get rid of upvoting completely and make this all about the mods.
- minimaxir 11y ago
  > Let the people decide what they want That isn't valid when the linkbait nature of titles entices uses to upvote content they otherwise would not have.
- dang 11y ago
  I understand the logic there, but it would mean the end of HN, because intellectual curiosity is not the most powerful curiosity, even among intellectually-oriented people.

gearoidoc 11y ago

This shouldn't be downvoted. HN is far from a meritocracy. Gamey as f*ck.