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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 bot
by 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 agoI 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 ago1) 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 agoDownvotes of comments don't lower stories.
- throwaway5752 10y agoI 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.