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HN doesn’t show different results to different people, does it? Though I suppose things that the majority disagree with are less likely to be upvoted.
by ryukafalz 7y ago
HN doesn’t show different results to different people, does it? Though I suppose things that the majority disagree with are less likely to be upvoted.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoThe only way it does (that I know of) is whether you have "showdead" turned on or not.
- rahimnathwani 7y agoThe headlines are shown to only a subset of people: those who choose to visit the site.
- dredmorbius 7y agoNot based on user behaviours, excepting whether or not users have opted in to "showdead". Posting new or low-rated stories will appear on some but not all front-page views, effectively by random assignment was tried in the past, it fared poorly. The idea was that those that pick up votes are rated more highly. The result was that readers reacted viscerally and negatively to junk. Discussion: Apparently tried, but reverted (from 5 years ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9333178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9333178 And from a month ago: When we tested a variant of this idea, we found that it didn't work for what I guess you could call psychological reasons: readers reacted negatively, even violently, to seeing junk on HN's front page. By "junk" I mean stories that were placed there randomly and that weren't of high-enough quality to otherwise be credible candidates for the front page. Basically, it was an "ow my eyes", "get that shit away from me" effect. (I don't mean to demean the submissions people posted that got randomly placed in this way; it's just that words like junk and shit reflect how users reacted to the random placement thing.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868365 Apparently my theory on front-page submissions and karma accumulation is officially validated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10228866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10228866