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Problem with by points is that over time as more people come to HN the number of points are worth less, unless HN does like Reddit does and weighs them but even
by bringtheaction 9y ago
Problem with by points is that over time as more people come to HN the number of points are worth less, unless HN does like Reddit does and weighs them but even then such a system tends to change over time and so it’s still not comparable.
For example say that several years ago a post might hit front page and 500 people would vote on it. If 300 people voted up and 200 down then it gets 100 points.
Fast forward and now there are more people on the site. That means greater confidence in the percentage but because only points and not percentage of up/down is revealed, a post with similar percentage up- vs downvotes appears to be better. 600 up and 400 down is still 60% up vs 40% down but it results in 200 points total.
Like I said though maybe HN does account for this and 100 points today means the same percentage of people upvoted it, I don’t know.
- ZenoArrow 9y agoYou can't downvote posts on HN, you can flag them but you can't downvote them. On HN, downvoting is only possible on comments.
- bringtheaction 9y agoYou are right I forgot that, heh. Anyway, the problem remains that over time there will be more people to upvote so a post is likely to get more points if it was posted in the future than in the past.
- fghtr 9y agoNot really. Just tried to upvote an old post from 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243417 As a result, its score did not increase, although upvoting "worked".
- bringtheaction 9y agoNo I mean that a front page post five years ago had fewer people to vote on it so it would get fewer points simply for that reason compared to a front page post today.