33 ms·
Open secrets about Hacker News
- polote 5y agoAnother open secret is that you can have the history of any posts' position here : http://hnrankings.info/ http://hnrankings.info/ But they don't seem to compute the ranking exactly as HN does it. I guess they use the same formula but HN discard some upvotes from 'bots' accounts
- wink 5y ago>HN users have an intense emotional relationship with the front page this is interesting if you only see it like once per year or less, when logging in on a new device. I'm not a daily user, but I exclusively come in via RSS and a direct link to a post.
- husamia 5y agoBest is the page I visit. How is "best" determined?
- vadfa 5y ago>readers reacted negatively, even violently, to seeing [...] stories that were placed there randomly >HN users have an intense emotional relationship with the front page If a "greatest 80s hits" radio station started broadcasting music from the 00s and people got pissed off you wouldn't say "listeners of this station have an intense emotional relationship with it". When they tune in to the "greatest 80s hits" station, that's the only thing they're looking for; they don't want to listen to random songs.
- mattc15 5y agoYou can't scroll past a song on the radio
- bborud 5y agoSo as long as something doesn't challenge our beliefs, values, opinions or prejudices it's OK.
- have_faith 5y agoPlaying 00's music on an 80's radio station isn't challenging someone's fondness of 80's music, it's just annoying.
- bborud 5y agoI was disagreeing with the premise that Hacker News is, or should be, very narrow in scope. Though I'll grant you that there are certainly degrees to this. There are regularly posts that make me wonder why they were posted to HN when I first see them here - and yet, these often manage to enrich my day. There are risks to making too many rules about who gets to be a member in your club.
- mindcrime 5y agoThere are risks to making too many rules about who gets to be a member in your club. And no risks in being too open about who gets to be a member of your club?
- bborud 5y agoOf course there are, but it can be hard to keep in mind what one is trying to achieve. It is easy to think you are doing one thing while really living by a different set of principles. For instance I've worked for companies (at least two) where, the set of goals for the hiring process, and what was actually practiced, were pointing in somewhat different directions. In the end it really came down to "how like us is the candidate". All while sailing under a "diversity is good" flag, being convinced that we lived our values, and (in one case) increasingly experiencing the problems stemming from a hardening monoculture. What happens when you try to resolve that situation is, to put it carefully, "interesting".
- dang 5y agoWhat I was talking about in the quoted bits of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024069 didn't have to do with topic scope. It had to do with article quality, which is orthogonal to that. I agree with you completely that HN should be broad rather than narrow in scope—that's highly desirable and we spend a lot of time trying to nudge and nurture things in that direction. Just for clarity, when I was talking about how users are emotional about the front page and react intensely when they see something they don't think belongs there, it was in the context of an experiment we'd run to randomly place stories from /newest on the front page. Users reacted disastrously, not so much because of scope but because the median article's quality is just really low. That's true about in-scope topics like programming as well as other topics. I hope that makes sense. As for 'who gets to be a member' - we don't restrict that nor want to restrict that. Everyone with intellectual curiosity, i.e. everyone, is welcome. The only requirement is actually using the site in that spirit. This is not so easy, of course, especially when the more activating topics show up.
- fragmede 5y agoRadio is a one way medium though. HN missed an opportunity to sell users on it but adding it as an opt-in/invite feature instead.
- kergonath 5y agoHN is not a “greatest 80s hits” radio, though. Users submit links and users vote on them. There is nobody making editorial decisions about what goes on the front page, beyond extreme cases. Sure, there is some tweaking, but in the end it’s all stories posted and upvoted by us, collectively. So it is entirely pointless to whine about the content: it is what the community wants to see.
- pvg 5y agoThere is nobody making editorial decisions about what goes on the front page, beyond extreme cases. HN is more actively moderated than this, you can find piles of moderator comments about it.
- dsr_ 5y agoYC companies can put in an submission; it goes to the front page but sinks fairly rapidly and can't be commented on. I think that these are usually employment ads. I also think that's the only direct placement, but I can't be certain.
- arp242 5y agoThere's more than that. Actually, this story mentions it: > Moderators and a small number of reviewer users comb the depths of /newest looking for stories that got overlooked but which the community might find interesting. Those go into a second-chance pool from which stories are randomly selected and lobbed onto the bottom part of the front page. This guarantees them a few minutes of attention. If they don’t interest the community they soon fall off, but if they do, they get upvoted and stay on the front page.
- kergonath 5y agoThere is the second chance, but stories that don’t resonate disappear quickly even after that. I included this in the tweaking the mods can do. I guess I went a bit far about editorialising, but it’s still a minor effect.
- weinzierl 5y agoMany good points. I'd like to add a common open secret that I believe is wrong: 1 upvote = 1 karma point. This might be true internally and initially, before any ant-spam, anti-upvote-ring detection takes place. Effectively, from a user point of view it is not - at least for me. When I look at the points one of my submissions get and compare my increase in overall karma it is very roughly 50% most of the time. Needless to say that I never participated in things that would be considered unethically (voting-ring etc.). Also not a complaint at all, just an observation that goes against what is often written in "about HN" type posts (but not OP). EDIT: 1. My observation is from more than a year ago, so things might well have changed. 2. As lordnacho points out below this seems to be true only for stories. Regardless why it happens, awarding stories with less points than comments makes a lot of sense to me. After all posting a suitable story is much less effort than writing a decent comment.
- lordnacho 5y agoDo you mean on stories? I've noticed upvotes on stories don't give you 1 karma each, it's less. Not sure if it's a linear 0.5. But upvotes on comments seem to be 1 each.
- weinzierl 5y agoYes, I observed it on stories. I don't remember if I ever looked into comments. Also my observation is from more than a year ago, so things might well have changed.
- metafunctor 5y agoI think the karma from a story is more or less capped to the number of comments on the story. At the same time, a story which gets more comments than upvotes quickly vanishes from the front page. Both modulo moderation, of course.
- weinzierl 5y agoThis is an interesting idea and another rabbit hole to fall into. There are this uninteresting posts that never get any attention (no upvotes, no comments) and there are the popular posts that get a ton of upvotes and comments. That much is understood. Occasionally, though, I have this post that gets a decent amount of upvotes but not a single comment. I never understood why. I post for the comments and not for the upvotes. It is very frustrating, especially since it is a miracle to me what distinguishes these posts from the popular ones. Capping the points on these makes a lot of sense though. In the end they don't contribute much.
- capableweb 5y agoA collaborative resource with more information about undocumented/norms on HN: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented > Personally, I’d stay at 3. I’d also wait at least a day between re-posts (and try re-posting at different time slots). Wow, that's not how I parsed the very same reposting rules. If I'm about to submit something and I found an older submission with the same URL, my personal rule is that it should be older than a year ago before I'd submit it again. Three posts with the same URL for three consecutive days seems a bit too much. > Hacker News is moderated mainly by dang aka Dan Gackle (pronounced ‘Gackley’). He’s not of asian descent ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
- asicsp 5y ago>Three posts with the same URL for three consecutive days seems a bit too much. The article is talking about stories that haven't got much attention. You can infer it from the quoted text mentioned just before the 3 rule: >If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.
- ketzu 5y ago> ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include... Not just that, but for some time you could observe subthreads accusing him of being a chinese subversion of HN in china related discussions.
- newbamboo 5y agoI just assumed he had some intense business interests involving trade with China. He has had a heavy moderation hand when people are critical of the CCP or for example what was formerly thought of as the conspiracy theory about COVIDs likely lab leak origin. He seems to have come around a little bit on this maybe he read about the Uighurs or who knows.
- dang 5y ago
- PaulKeeble 5y ago> In other words, the story must persuade 13.3% or more of readers to up-vote. That’s a pretty high conversion rate. This I feel is a very good thing. Up-votes to readership is a good correlation and is better than Reddit's hotness algorithm for finding good content which seems to be just up-votes over time. The main contribution to article goodness seems only to be the choice of those that read and up-vote however and there is no system that can replace that yet.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago>That’s a pretty high conversion rate Hence the constant stream of articles confirming tropes that play to the HN demographics. It's basically impossible to have a reliable 10+% conversion rate without targeting the lowest common denominator.
- pansa2 5y ago> A story needs to accumulate 5 points to appear in the Live List. I don’t think this is right. During quiet times, I’ve definitely seen stories in the “live list”, and even on the front page, with only 3 points.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- etskinner 5y agoWas it on the bottom half of the front page? If so, it might fall under the moderator-curated group that the author mentions. Or, if it was lower, it might have been there earlier.
- pansa2 5y agoThis story is currently at position 5 with only 3 points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024572
- freddyym 5y agoFrom my experience, its the speed that a post gets points/comments that matters. If you get three quick enough you should get on the front page.
- dang 5y agoYou're correct. It's 3, not 5.
- detritus 5y ago> He’s not of asian descent. What?
- lordnacho 5y agoI thought he was a Chinese guy until I read an article about him. I'm sure a lot of people thought similarly, that it was one syllable "dang!" rather than Dan-G.
- sdflhasjd 5y ago"Dang" is still a common word in English though. It sounds like the article implies it's a common name or something, but Asia is a pretty big place
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago>"Dang" is still a common word in English though Dang is a common euphemism for the swear word damn, https://mashable.com/article/origin-of-swear-words https://mashable.com/article/origin-of-swear-words - the euphemism "dang" was first used around 1780. I believe it is also regional and somewhat archaic in use now unless you are real religious and probably also rural. >but Asia is a pretty big place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dang_(surname) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dang_(surname) surname in China, Vietnam, Korea, and India. Also apparently in Germany.
- PostThisTooFast 5y agoLame. There's nothing here about Hacker News's disrespect for users, and their disgraceful "You're posting too fast" bullshit. They let people waste their time composing questions or answers, and THEN tell them they can't post when they press the "add comment" button. And we're talking two or three posts in a matter of HOURS being flagged as "too fast." ASSHOLES.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- supperburg 5y agoReddit is that way ->
- anigbrowl 5y agoImpressive how this has managed to get to #1 right in the middle of the temporal 'dead zone.'
- lordnacho 5y agoIt's quite possible meta stories are the most upvoted category of all. I posted an article about how HN was moderated and it netted more karma than anything else I've ever done on this site, by a wide margin.
- dang 5y agoMeta is the crack of internet forums, so mostly* a bad thing. We downweight it pretty proactively. There would be a lot more of it if we didn't. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpxuvOs0NkM#t=210s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpxuvOs0NkM#t=210s
- infogulch 5y agoExactly, the "self analysis" bias is very strong and probably has its roots in psychology. HN's psychologically mature audience and mods (comparatively) probably tones down that tendency a bit, but many platforms need a separate meta category to prevent the community from spiraling around itself.
- actually_a_dog 5y agoEurope's been awake for several hours already.
- cheeaun 5y agoActually, I would be interested to know how the comments are sorted.
- saagarjha 5y agoIt's upvotes with some sort of recency bias so that newly posted comments get a few minutes near the top of the thread to be seen.
- polote 5y agoThe sum of upvotes of the comments which replied to you are probably also into the score
- HNSucksAss 5y agoYou might be interested to know that sometimes they show YOU that your comment is posted, but it isn't. No one else can see it. So you're really just farting into the wind, because Hacker News thinks your time is free. Assholes.
- HNSucksAss 5y agoLAME. There's nothing here about Hacker News's disrespect for users, expressed in its disgraceful "you're posting too fast" bullshit. They let you waste your time composing a question or answer, and THEN tell you that you can't post AFTER you press the button to submit it. NO EXCUSE, ASSHOLES.
- HunchedOver 5y agoWith your case it's perhaps a relief to the rest of us.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dannyw 5y agoSimilar article from 2013 but with much more numbers and analysis / reverse-engineering: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799854 Fun fact: there are manual keyword penalties, such as for bitcoin, and back around 2013 there used to be a penalty for "NSA". Explanation by dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9097596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9097596
- zahma 5y agoOne thing I’ve never understood is I can only upvote, but some comments are greyed out as if they’ve been downvoted. How does this work?
- IAmGraydon 5y agoYou need a higher level of karma to downvote.
- mkl 5y agoSpecifically > 500: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
- C19is20 5y agoWhy would you downvote something? 'You weren't invited, just move along', exists. Happy to say, I only ever upvote.
- onion2k 5y agoWhy would you downvote something? Sometimes people are mean about React and they must be punished.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoAnd sometimes people say things that are unsubstantial, deliberately obtuse, and don't really contribute to a useful discussion.
- zahma 5y agoWhen I disagree as a matter of opinion, I don’t have an urge to downvote. Sometimes I respond when I’m moved to, otherwise, like you, I just keep perusing. Fortunately I don’t see many comments that are so wrong that I can say they are in fact false, but it does happen. In those cases, I think a downvote is valuable.
- 5y ago
- locusofself 5y agoand I thought dang was a bot!
- peter_retief 5y agoSometimes my rank/points go up or down without any vote change?
- blauditore 5y agoI'm really curious about voting ring detection. Oftentimes I've seen posts from the same company hitting the front page over and over again, and none of them was particularly interesting, nor was the company any of HN's "love children" such as Stripe. I can't recall any specific example, but when looking a bit closer it was usually some small- to medium-sized startup with maybe 10-100 people, which would technically be enough to make a big dent into a post's score. On the one hand I'd love to know more about the detection algorithm, on the other hand that information would be inevitably abused by those shitposters to game it.
- detaro 5y agoYou can email dang and ask that he looks into a specific case in more detail (although usually the answer is "looks natural")
- polote 5y agoRing detection works for people who don't know it exists. And thus works well a lot of times. But is very easy to bypass, and I won't tell you how. And if I recall well, dang has already said several times that he will not disclose the algorithm https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=dang%20upvote%20ring&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- blauditore 5y ago> But is very easy to bypass, and I won't tell you how. That really depends on how it works, and whether you know how it works. Simple signals such as IP location and temporal distribution of votes are easy to use for detection, but also easy to manipulate. On the other hand, if you employ a graph of user associations based on votes and comments in the past, you can detect clusters among them, voting collaboratively. This is way harder to circumvent in the long run, but also extremely difficult to implement accurately.
- asdff 5y agoIt's pretty easy to generate new accounts here
- nikkinana 5y agoWhere's the source code assholes?
- kuu 5y agoIf pool is curated by moderators and dang is the only moderator, does it mean that pool is actually dang selection? :)
- dang 5y agoI'm not the only moderator, and there are a few non-moderators who also contribute to pool selection. I'd really like to open that mechanism up to the community but it's still not obvious how to make that work well. Most ways of doing it would just recreate the voting system, and we already have one of those.
- kuu 5y ago> I'm not the only moderator I misunderstood the article and translated "main" to "only". Thanks for the clarification!
- dredmorbius 5y agoIt's possible for HN readers to make suggestions for the pool, and I'll do this periodically. Usually it's for a story which simply died in queue, which as TFA notes, is the default. Occasionally it's to see if a discussion might get "re-railed" after it's gone off on some tangent --- people responding to a title or an early comment, most often. I don't nominate my own posts, of course. It may be a matter of how many such nominations occur, but I'd say my success rate is >50% in having those accepted. TL;DR: it's not just dang, and normal HN'ers can participate.
- geoduck14 5y agoBRB. Going to go learn about gut hub branching
- graycat 5y agoAnomaly: How can a thread quickly get a lot of points, many more points than posts? So, who is voting up points but not posting?
- HunchedOver 5y agoI'd reckon the majority of users, you see this all over the internet where there's ability to vote or 'like' something; Twitter, Youtube, Facebook etc - the vote will usually outweigh the comment count. On HN the culture of 'nothing good to say?; say nothing' is fairly baked in so will create this effect even more so. Voting allows lurkers a voice, who often are the majority of users (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurker citation 11).
- streamofdigits 5y ago> Most stories ‘fail’ and have only one or two points Stories are like startups it seems :-)
- onion2k 5y agoFar too many of them are all about JavaScript?
- xwdv 5y agoOne of the things about Hackernews karma system is that a lot of downvotes get filtered out as fraudulent. However, once you are “targeted” that filter is removed and downvotes against you become more powerful. I used to have a very high karma nearing 1000, and then one day it’s like a switch got flipped and my karma began a decline that never stopped, a year later I’ve been completely drained of karma. I might never really recover. It’s a bad feedback loop because when you know nothing you say or do can make things better there is less incentive to be cordial in your messages.
- dang 5y agoYou're talking about the mechanism that sama wrote about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605973. We recently restored the code to mostly work the way it did before that, so this effect should be less strong than it was. On the other hand, if you were to do a slightly better job of using HN in the intended spirit (and sticking to the site guidelines - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), we'd be happy to take the penalty off your account. The problem is that you're still posting comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026954. It's really hard to devise software protections to help HN stay within its mandate that don't at the same time end up penalizing a certain amount of benign activity. It's a bit like how white blood cells also kill some things that aren't a threat. But the solution is not to turn off the white blood cells - that would be really bad.
- xwdv 5y agoIt must be no coincidence that my karma lately has seen a modest boost, rising out from the negatives. Personally I think downvotes should also be calibrated by user, a person who rarely downvotes should carry more weight in a downvote than someone who downvotes everything, and perhaps even have user-to-user calibration where your downvotes against someone become weaker the more you target them. It would help nerf people who scour a post history looking for more comments to downvotes, and help prevent downvote gangs of people who consistently downvote the same person no matter what they post. A certain amount of dissenting opinion is necessary to keep discussions novel and break up echo chambers, but you don’t want to allow so much that you become poisoned by it.
- dougmwne 5y ago> he is the best moderator in the world Yes he is. Dang, you are amazing. Thank you for tending this beautiful garden in the middle of a sad and boggy Internet.
- arp242 5y agoYou could almost say he's a dang good moderator. Okay, I'll get my coat.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- CalChris 5y agoHaving been dinged by dang I'd agree.
- vincent_s 5y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25048415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25048415
- croutonwagon 5y agoThanks for this. The article was a nice read, and one I hadnt seen, though I'm relatively new to participating here. Interestingly I noticed this comment [1], which was basically what happened to me when i emigrated to reddit back in 2006 from Digg. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25049415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25049415
- DonHopkins 5y agoReposting my tribute to Dang (with archive.org links when possible) from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18513120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18513120 : As a tribute to Dang, whose name you say when you make a mistake, here are some of my favorite Far Side cartoons: Some Weirdo: https://web.archive.org/web/20190901100845/https://i.pinimg.com/564x/f8/74/40/f8744035e15d69eb8fd4c70dea17c2e0.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20190901100845/https://i.pinimg.... Monster Jobs: https://web.archive.org/web/20211028134713/https://i.pinimg.com/564x/21/81/3e/21813e975f2aa35259246eecad69aee6.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20211028134713/https://i.pinimg.... Vultures: https://web.archive.org/web/20211028134854/https://i.pinimg.com/564x/e4/d2/f3/e4d2f3b47c3de90e1a084d94ab24daa4.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20211028134854/https://i.pinimg.... Construction Birds at Lunch: [missing] https://i.pinimg.com/564x/3b/c5/fd/3bc5fd323e791b6879529e6a5ab12dac.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/564x/3b/c5/fd/3bc5fd323e791b6879529e6a5... Blizard's A-Comin': https://web.archive.org/web/20200509234955/https://i.pinimg.com/736x/61/f9/bb/61f9bb66cc0e79f06246876ba2f4f512--christmas-humor-merry-christmas.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20200509234955/https://i.pinimg.... The Creeps: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5a/1c/5e/5a1c5ef2e9ab19d279704fc620b74d7f.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5a/1c/5e/5a1c5ef2e9ab19d27970... Superman In His Later Years: https://web.archive.org/web/20211028134903/https://i.pinimg.com/564x/86/95/a7/8695a7c1cfffb69bc3b92c980ad7b185.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20211028134903/https://i.pinimg.... Before Paper and Scissors: https://web.archive.org/web/20211028134904/https://i.pinimg.com/564x/a4/cf/ab/a4cfabe6847546e52343d4d1595ae69b.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20211028134904/https://i.pinimg.... Sorry, Buddy: [missing] https://i.pinimg.com/564x/49/6b/3a/496b3a234ddeca894887b249e6f2cadd.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/564x/49/6b/3a/496b3a234ddeca894887b249e... Nerd! ...: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/c9/08/a0/c908a02a8dfa42db9973f743b761777f.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/564x/c9/08/a0/c908a02a8dfa42db9973f743b... The Thanksgiving themed one that I googled and googled and googled for but couldn't find, which was taped to my mom's refrigerator, was the disappointed bird standing in front of the open refrigerator, lamenting: "Dang, somebody ate the middle out of the daddy longlegs!"
- oauea 5y agoAdd to the list, users can also be shitlisted instead of shadowbanned. If dang doesn't like your account, you will start getting rate limited with extreme prejudice with the message "You are posting too much".
- devilduck 5y agoI love the content posted on HN, but I deeply loathe the comments section. As well, HN is extremely bad at accepting criticism and is completely humorless.
- the_only_law 5y agoSomething I've never seen anyone mention: You can use the "hide" link to hide a thread, so that you wont see it and comments will not show up under the "comments" link. However this appears broken for Ask HN links.
- gwbas1c 5y agoI wish some of this information was in the FAQ.
- dang 5y agoWhat specifically?
- gwbas1c 5y agoHonestly, everything! I just think that, if it's on your site, it should be in your voice. I've always wanted to know a bit about the algorithms putting, and then keeping, stories on the front page. I also understand if there are certain details you don't want to call attention to because you don't want others gaming the system.
- gneray 5y agoWhere did you sort all this stuff out?
- FridayoLeary 5y agoi don't get it. This looks like seo spam and is well below the usual high standards of hn. I agree about dang though, this place would fall to pieces without him. I would add that the guidelines are incredibly well written. Dang gave me the link once and i read it 5 times to understand what he wanted from me
- lelelelelel1el 5y agoOpen secret: dang encourages using archive links to bypass paywalls on a site where people complain that content creators should get their fair share
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- leephillips 5y agoThis story makes no sense to me. For example, he says “Chance of escaping sandbox = upvote conversion rate x views” “Chance” must be a probability. But this formula will yield a chance > 1 most of the time. That makes no sense. His example is 30 page views and an upvote conversion rate of 13.3%, which means the “Chance of escaping sandbox” = 3.99. Reading more, I see that most of the math makes no sense. But I’d love to “triple” my chances of getting to the front page by making my probability 11.97.
- legrande 5y ago> Hacker News has software to detect vote manipulation (ie. asking friends to upvote) Putting on my conspiracy robe, I imagine it's not just about 'friends upvoting friends', but the relative ease at which new accounts are created (No SMS one-time-tokens, not even email required to register etc); and then using those accounts to artificially inflate certain stories. If there are accounts being created for the purposes of artificially inflating stories, and their 'score value' then I would hope it's about interesting content, and not some politically tainted fluff piece used to persuade and misinform/dis-inform. Largely HN seems to work in favor of interesting content, and I agree with this article when it says: "If you get past the voting ring detector, you won’t get past the readers." I mean, if you somehow developed a voting ring, you would have to jump even more hoops to get that article/link the respect it deserves. And the HN audience are very articulate in pointing out flaws in services/articles/sites in general.
- jfernandez 5y agoWithout getting to robotic: given how I also think dang is awesome, has anyone ever tried to compile of list of tactics dang employs to receive such high praise by almost everyone on the site? Meaning, like some sort of case studies that map back to higher order principles/values he's acting on.
- benlivengood 5y agoIf you read through dang's comments he is very articulate about his values and tactics. There was also this recent self-referential article linking to some particularly incisive comments between another commenter and dang, with associated discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28853335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28853335
- novaleaf 5y agoone thing not mentioned: new accounts are heavily penalized when posting.
- ddevault 5y ago>HN’s anti-voting-ring software is now so strict that the main thing we have to do is turn it off when a submission is good enough A chilling effect of this can be that moderators have a much more direct hand in choosing what kinds of content is successful if their criteria for "good enough" is not the same thing as "was not actually a vote ring". There are a few other sources of bias introduced by the human/automation moderation relationship. Another issue is that HN's flagging system is routinely abused by small groups of users to remove content which does not actually run afoul of the guidelines. It's effectively a super downvote: it removes content entirely, works for posts and comments, has a much lower minimum karma threshold, and it's very hard to rescue a flagged post, and you can't "vouch" before a post gets flagged - only after.
- theHIDninja 5y agoThere are also a ton of ongoing news stories and stories in that past which were completely censored off HN. I cannot talk about them or link them here, but please know that they exist.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoWhat if you create an article listing all of them, submit it to HN and post a link here in the comment? I routinely check dead links to see why a few people found it so controversial to censor it. I'd say 80% are true positives - spam, SEO junk, or some utter nonsense. The remaining 20% is content that is controversial to some people for some reasons. I learned quite a lot from it. There are days when this censored content is more interesting than top submissions. I also happened to submit one such article somehow. I found an article on BBC saying things that are controversial today. It was flagged very quickly. It was interesting to me because BBC is a relatively reputable source and they don't publish junk.
- dang 5y agoWhy not? I'd like to see them. I also think that if you're going to make grand claims like that, you should include links so that readers can make up their own minds.
- theHIDninja 5y agoJust in recent memory: Anything relating to the scam MMO known as Dreamworld that Y combinator funded, and how its funding was possibly due to nepotism. Anything relating to the admin of KiwiFarm's rebuttal [1] of Byuu's attacks on his forum or how her suicide was proven fake. [1] https://kiwifarms.net/threads/my-response-regarding-byuu-near.93719/post-9328687 https://kiwifarms.net/threads/my-response-regarding-byuu-nea... There are others but either I can't remember them right now or I don't have adequate sources to them.
- dang 5y agoYou're off on the first one. There was a lot of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27319457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27319457 - May 2021 (238 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898266 - April 2021 (195 comments) Not only did we not censor that, I recall holding back on moderating it. We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC-funded startup is involved (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20%22not%20more%22%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). You're right about the second case - we moderated that as not on-topic for HN.
- irrational 5y agoIs the sandbox the same thing as "new"? I've literally never visited there and had no idea that it had any role in things moving to the front page.
- richardatlarge 5y agoMy front page metaphor: You’re taking off in a plane, down the runway If you get clicks / comments you get lift Not enough of them, you run out of time, hit the end of the runway- crash and burn If you get off the ground you may go far but only if you keep getting lift from all those click/comments