4 ms·

You can't downvote submissions. Some of the things that affect submission ranking is number of points, (increases) age, (decreases) and number of comments. Som

You can't downvote submissions. Some of the things that affect submission ranking is number of points, (increases) age, (decreases) and number of comments. Somewhat surprisingly, having more comments will penalize the ranking of a story, to push flamewars off the front page. This is to prevent HN from being Reddit, where r/all is a constant rolling flamewar. (The FBI submission has 5 times as many comments as this story, and has already fallen off the front page)

throwaway5752 10y ago
1) It happened 3 hours ago, 2-3 hours after the story in this submission was filed; 2) You can flag submissions, though, and you can downvote comments - and both lower the story's rank; 3) You can also spam a story with critical/spammy comments to provoke downvotes, also pushing down its rank. Easy peasy.
- mark-r 10y ago
  I managed to push a post off of the first page the other day, because my finger is too big for my phone - I clicked the Flag button instead of the actual link. I immediately clicked Unflag, but it took a while for the post to recover.
- sbierwagen 10y ago
  1) Okay, so the comments penalty is especially strong. Sorry. 2) I don't think that downvoting a comment on a submission will affect that submission's ranking. If you leave a bunch of spurious flags the moderators will disable the flag feature on your account, though. (Happened to me) 3) Assuming a pool of colluding users, this would actually be a plausible attack-- except that HN's userbase is tiny, and the moderators are active. Voting rings show up easily, but I don't know if they're looking for "comment rings". An easy technical solution would be to ban users with "throwaway" in their name from commenting on submissions.
- dang 10y ago
  Downvotes of comments don't lower stories.
  - throwaway5752 10y ago
    I really strongly had the impression that it was a combination of flags, some sort of metric of polarity (lots of upvotes/downvotes among the comments, and then moderator actions. I don't recall why I have that recollection, but apologies for any mistaken impression. It's probably better that it's not entirely transparent, either.

throwaway5752 10y ago

1) It happened 3 hours ago, 2-3 hours after the story in this submission was filed; 2) You can flag submissions, though, and you can downvote comments - and both lower the story's rank; 3) You can also spam a story with critical/spammy comments to provoke downvotes, also pushing down its rank. Easy peasy.

mark-r 10y ago
I managed to push a post off of the first page the other day, because my finger is too big for my phone - I clicked the Flag button instead of the actual link. I immediately clicked Unflag, but it took a while for the post to recover.
sbierwagen 10y ago
1) Okay, so the comments penalty is especially strong. Sorry. 2) I don't think that downvoting a comment on a submission will affect that submission's ranking. If you leave a bunch of spurious flags the moderators will disable the flag feature on your account, though. (Happened to me) 3) Assuming a pool of colluding users, this would actually be a plausible attack-- except that HN's userbase is tiny, and the moderators are active. Voting rings show up easily, but I don't know if they're looking for "comment rings". An easy technical solution would be to ban users with "throwaway" in their name from commenting on submissions.
dang 10y ago
Downvotes of comments don't lower stories.
- throwaway5752 10y ago
  I really strongly had the impression that it was a combination of flags, some sort of metric of polarity (lots of upvotes/downvotes among the comments, and then moderator actions. I don't recall why I have that recollection, but apologies for any mistaken impression. It's probably better that it's not entirely transparent, either.