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17 points in 1 hour and on third page. The HN ranking system is broken.
by alecco 4y ago
17 points in 1 hour and on third page. The HN ranking system is broken.
- Gigachad 4y agoIt’s not broken, it’s just heavily manipulated to filter for technical interest topics rather than popular news. The words “Elon musk” in the title probably auto filtered this down.
- dang 4y agoreuters.com is downweighted the same way most major media sites are, and Elon Musk stories are downweighted the way most celebrity names are. You're correct that those downweights prevented this submission from making the front page, but that's the system working as it is supposed to. Front page space is the scarcest resource on HN. The default pressure is all towards sensationalism and copycat filler, so we have to do things to keep it more interesting than that. This includes software penalties, manual moderation, and community moderation (e.g. flags). The system is far from perfect, but I wouldn't single out this case as an example of brokenness.