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Is this permanent? HN is a good source of google juice for interesting new startups, and it would be a shame to see that go away...

• qeorge 17y ago
  That's probably the main issue. HN's authority and DoFollow'd links make it a prime target for linkspam. There's a lot of reasons I'm bummed about this, but I have to say: startups missing out on free PageRank is not one of them.
  • ericb 17y ago
    The links are nofollow'd now. edit: Oh wait, seems that only comment links are nofollow'd.
    • weaksauce 17y ago
      Actually some of the links are nofollowed until it hits a karma threshold. Not sure of the value but it seems that a story with >50 votes is not currently nofollowed.
      • new_account 17y ago
        It seems that a lot is going on - in secret. Example: I just discovered that if I reload the page my votes for comments get rolled back.
        • blasdel 17y ago
          It wasn't rolled back: it was never counted. There's a disenfranchisement heuristic that causes your votes to be recorded (can't vote again) but not counted. It usually persists for about a day. I think it's supposed to kill voting rings but its behavior is pretty odd. The number in your browser gets incremented or decremented client-side independently of reality — it's doing a blind GET request by pre-fetching an 'image', not making an XHR POST and getting the new karma value in the response. Like a lot of things in Arc, it's just poor HTTP.
  • pierrefar 17y ago
    The way it's done now is that all new submissions are nofollowed until they hit a certain karma threshold. A while back when I looked at this, the threhold was about 3-5 up votes. This is actually a very neat and simple way to exercise editorial control to remove the nofollow: if enough people in the community like it, there is something useful about it and it is vetted.