4 ms·

Hacker News doesn't have an algorithm to decides what's the best posts and should appear in a person's feed. It has editors/moderators.

• shadowgovt 5y ago
  The contents of the main page aren't decided by editors and moderators. It's an algorithm... granted, a simple one, but an algorithm nonetheless. Weighted factor of upvotes and age. It's even game-able, if a person has a large enough posse to dump upvotes on a topic after creating it.
  • bb88 5y ago
    So I think there's two big differences. 1. Most people use facebook to keep track of their friends and family rather than email these days. Part of it is that you can announce the new baby in the family and it goes to everyone. But the FB algorithm decides what you view. So the most engaging a post is, the more likely it will show up in your feed. The problem is that not all posts go to everyone, and if you actually want to see what's happening with Uncle Ed's cancer treatment, you have to physically go to his facebook page. Why? See point #2: 2. There was a time before Twitter/FB where ads paid for the server the forum was on. Social media realized that "targeted engagement" could be profitable. So by tweaking their algorithms to keep people on the platform, they would make more in ad revenue as they can sell more ads. Of course this led to stories where good friends had died a year ago, and the facebook algorithm "neglected" to prioritize it on feeds, because it wasn't as engaging as the Bills/Jets game the day before.