7 ms·

I must've pissed someone off at HN

6 points by oblib 3y ago

I posted a link to an article about [1]Ford trucks a few hours ago and made a comment on that post basically saying I thought Ford was out of touch with farmers who live near me. The post was bumped to the front page before I submitted my comment. I checked the comments about an hour later and the post was still there and had 27 points and my comment got 8 points. The odd part is when I check it about an hour later my HN "Karma" fell from 4997 to 4811, and the post got buried down to #650 and the points were unchanged. I don't know how "Karma" or rankings works here, but that seems a bit odd. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36762673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36762673

ClassyJacket 3y ago
That's how it works dude. Did you expect it to stay on the front page forever?
- oblib 3y ago
  No, but I did not expect to go from 28 to 650 in about an hour.
  - simonblack 3y ago
    Karma is weird. You spend an hour agonising over the composition of a well-written comment and get down-voted. Or maybe, you write a quick throwaway one-line comment, and upvotes instantly increase your karma by 50.
    - tedmiston 3y ago
      I have also found this to be surprisingly true.
version_five 3y ago
The submission has a lot more comments than points which makes it automatically get "buried" (removed from the top posts) because it indicates potential fighting in the comments. Re the karma, I don't belive it's possible for it to go down like that, you may want to email HN to ask them what's going on.
- oblib 3y ago
  I took your advice and did that. Thank you for the suggestion.
- dang 3y ago
  That's right. The post set off the flamewar detector.
  - tedmiston 3y ago
    Dan - Would you mind sharing a rough threshold for what "sets off the flamewar detector" means? In [1] (unofficial), a rough 1:1 ratio is mentioned. I see that, now, that submission has 31 points and 91 comments, say ~3x comments:points. Flipping through Active, I see plenty of submissions with a ~2x ratio, and the min around ~0.5x and the max around ~2.5x (on hollywood strike, so potentially heated thoughts). [1]: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#flame-war-detector https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#flame-...
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      40+ comments && comments > votes, according to lore: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25871251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25871251>
necovek 3y ago
Perhaps your post getting flagged counts as negative karma too? Anyway, karma discussions are generally off topic here so you may experience similar effect with this post.
- oblib 3y ago
  If it was flagged I wasn't notified. No idea why it would be though.
  - necovek 3y ago
    Anyone can flag a post or comment (look for that "flag" on the top line), and it does not result in any notification.
    - oblib 3y ago
      No, I have an old post that's marked as "flagged" but not that one.
      - necovek 3y ago
        Posts don't get marked as "flagged" or "dead" on the first "flag" by someone: I ain't sure of the threshold, and I am merely guessing, but trying to tell you not to bother with this — it doesn't really matter, HN has some non-transparent rules and we all accept to live by them believing they are right in spirit most of the time.
BMc2020 3y ago
I went through this anguish at a site many years ago. The sooner you stop caring about invisible internet points the better.
- oblib 3y ago
  I don't worry about getting down voted for comments I make, but this is odd. I've sent an email asking for clarification so we'll see how it goes.
- tedmiston 3y ago
  This happens often when I post a spicy contrarian opinion on reddit. Perhaps ironically (perhaps not), similar comments tend to get the opposite reaction here.
devonnull 3y ago
What's the big deal? I'm sure this happens a lot. You're not the first, you won't be the last. Move on. As another commenter pointed out the sooner you stop caring about invisible internet points the better.
- oblib 3y ago
  It's not "big deal". It didn't cost me any money and I won't lose any sleep over it. As I've already said, I'm curious about how/why this happened because it doesn't make sense. I've sent an email asking about it and maybe I'll learn something if I get a response. I've never done that before so I don't know what to expect.
oblib 3y ago
Ok, this is too funny... Dang contacted me and told me my karma was 4797, not 4997. My eyes are getting old is my excuse :D
dang 3y ago
You didn't piss anyone off at HN. The post set off the flamewar detector, which is a software penalty that causes a thread to fall in rank when the discussion is overheated. That's the only thing that happened, and it wouldn't have affected your karma in any way. The only thing that makes karma go down is downvoting on comments. (Submissions don't have downvoting, only flags, and flags don't affect karma.) I checked the logs and your karma has never been 4997. The most it has ever been is 4812. It went to 4811 after someone downvoted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36762833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36762833. Your karma was 4797 when you submitted the post, though—most likely you misremembered 4797 as 4997, which is an easy enough mistake to make.
- oblib 3y ago
  Thank you dang! There was certainly some heated opinions being shared there. Fair to say I may have set the tone with my initial comment. I grew up around cars and car builders and spent quite a few years working with them so I am opinionated in that field.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  As I've commented on HN over the past month or so and shared with dang via email, I've been running some analyses on the HN front page based on a full history[1]. One aspect I've looked at is the "flamewar detector", or as dang's described it elsewhere, and "overheated discussion" metric[3] --- not necessarily bad, but a sign that things might be getting tendentious. I've taken to calling it "spiciness". In particular, it seems to me that this might penalise stories in which there is a genuine level of disagreement or contentiousness, or which are socially, politically, and/or culturally contested.[4] As I understand, it kicks in where a post has >= 40 comments and comments > votes.[2] Given that I have ~188k front page stories with vote and comment counts, it's pretty straightforward to calculate the comments:votes ratio, and look at patterns that emerge. Looking at means, we can get, first, the overall ratio and its percentile distribution, and the overall story position (not surprisingly, 14, which is close to 15, the midpoint of the 1--30 range): Overall ratio n: 115908, sum: 73618, min: 0.25, max: 21.00, mean: 0.635141, median: 0.52, sd: 0.419485 %-ile: 5: 0.28, 10: 0.3, 15: 0.33, 20: 0.35, 25: 0.38, 30: 0.4, 35: 0.43, 40: 0.46, 45: 0.49, 55: 0.56, 60: 0.6, 65: 0.64, 70: 0.69, 75: 0.75, 80: 0.83, 85: 0.92, 90: 1.07, 95: 1.34 Note that both the mean and median ratios are well below the detector threshold of 1.0. By standard deviation (percentage of values included with a normal distribution in parentheses): 1σ: 1.055 (68%) 2σ: 1.474 (95%) 3σ: 1.894 (99.73%) Note that the normal distribution values seem to agree with the calculated percentiles. And that HN's flamewar detector kicks off for stories roughly 1σ > mean spiciness. I pulled up the list of the 40 most "ratioed" (or "spiciest") HN threads of all time: rank ratio date-pos year pos DoW user vote com site 1 21.00 2007-4-18.18 2007 18 Wed juwo 5 105 juwo.com 2 10.83 2008-2-4.26 2008 26 Mon eusman 6 65 n/a 3 9.33 2007-4-26.26 2007 26 Thu juwo 3 28 juwo.com 4 9.14 2007-7-31.13 2007 13 Tue rokhayakebe 7 64 n/a 5 9.00 2007-7-22.21 2007 21 Sun gibsonf1 3 27 streamfocus.com 6 7.50 2007-4-20.25 2007 25 Fri jkush 6 45 n/a 7 7.50 2007-6-1.10 2007 10 Fri keiretsu 6 45 n/a 8 7.33 2007-3-26.20 2007 20 Mon BitGeek 3 22 n/a 9 7.29 2008-1-27.13 2008 13 Sun wumi 14 102 n/a 10 7.27 2008-7-22.29 2008 29 Tue BenS 15 109 n/a 11 7.22 2008-9-25.17 2008 17 Thu DanielBMarkham 23 166 n/a 12 6.79 2008-11-14.19 2008 19 Fri bbuderi 24 163 xconomy.com 13 6.77 2008-3-28.17 2008 17 Fri btw0 13 88 n/a 14 6.57 2007-10-9.20 2007 20 Tue _h4xr 7 46 f2s.com 15 6.50 2007-10-13.15 2007 15 Sat robmnl 6 39 n/a 16 6.50 2007-11-3.16 2007 16 Sat breck 4 26 qcrunch.com 17 6.50 2008-1-18.13 2008 13 Fri german 14 91 n/a 18 6.33 2007-12-10.24 2007 24 Mon kf 6 38 independent.ie 19 6.29 2007-9-5.10 2007 10 Wed rokhayakebe 14 88 n/a 20 6.25 2007-7-1.13 2007 13 Sun danw 4 25 n/a 21 6.20 2007-5-24.15 2007 15 Thu bootload 5 31 n/a 22 6.20 2007-6-11.9 2007 9 Mon danw 5 31 n/a 23 6.07 2007-2-21.1 2007 1 Wed pg 262 1590 n/a 24 6.00 2007-11-13.30 2007 30 Tue trekker7 5 30 n/a 25 5.99 2022-5-26.8 2022 8 Thu LoveGracePeace 280 1678 nih.gov 26 5.91 2008-5-5.30 2008 30 Mon rrival 11 65 n/a 27 5.85 2008-4-1.15 2008 15 Tue robmnl 27 158 n/a 28 5.82 2007-8-19.11 2007 11 Sun kf 11 64 n/a 29 5.80 2007-8-21.4 2007 4 Tue zenobo 20 116 n/a 30 5.78 2007-4-6.1 2007 1 Fri kkim 77 445 paulgraham.com 31 5.77 2008-4-18.10 2008 10 Fri Flemlord 26 150 n/a 32 5.75 2007-11-18.18 2007 18 Sun rokhayakebe 8 46 n/a 33 5.70 2008-2-12.22 2008 22 Tue theremora 10 57 n/a 34 5.64 2007-10-17.9 2007 9 Wed altay 14 79 n/a 35 5.55 2008-1-17.18 2008 18 Thu sspencer 11 61 n/a 36 5.50 2007-10-23.25 2007 25 Tue DanielBMarkham 6 33 whattofix.com 37 5.50 2007-4-18.25 2007 25 Wed yaacovtp 4 22 n/a 38 5.50 2007-4-7.17 2007 17 Sat me_jobs_r_u_woz 4 22 n/a 39 5.42 2008-3-4.29 2008 29 Tue kulkarnic 12 65 n/a 40 5.42 2008-5-24.7 2008 7 Sat _bbks 38 206 n/a "n/a" site is a post without a URL, typically an "ask" or "tell" thread. Eyeballing that list, one pattern that is suggested is that high-ratio posts seem to have relatively high story position values (that is, they appear low on the HN front page), notable exceptions being #23 (pg's 2007-2-21 request), and #30 (kf's 2007-8-21 post, a pg essay "Microsoft is Dead"). I'd done further analysis of story position by spiciness and found that in general for stories which make the front page, higher spiciness actually correlates slightly with a higher page position (lower StoryPos value). I suspect this is due to specific moderator interaction, that is, those stories which survive do so because they're deemed appropriate to HN. Another is that high-ratio posts are notably clustered in 2007-2008. Frequency analysis suggests that flamewar detection was implemented around January, 2009 as spicy front-page posts thin markedly after that month. The one item appearing after that date ... ticks numerous hot buttons (2022-5-26.8). Because of how I'm collecting and analysing data I don't have HN or article URLs directly available, though it's possible to determine the article from the front-page archive. "2008-5-24.7" corresponds to the 7th-position story on the 2008-5-24 front page archive: <https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2008-05-24 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2008-05-24> I also took a look at the highest and lowest ratioed sites, with >= 20 front-page appearances, appearing in a follow-up comment. Overall, the detector seems reasonably justified, though not infallible. It's a much better indicator than I'd thought it would be. ________________________________ Notes: 1. 20 April 2007 -- 21 June 2023 presently. I re-up the archive periodically, but haven't fully automated this. Results change little incrementally. 2. Via ColinWright 2 years ago here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25871251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25871251> 3. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089> 4. As it happens, HN tends to downrate each of these topics as dang's discussed over the years. Links ... not immediately available.

6 points by oblib 3y ago

ClassyJacket 3y ago

That's how it works dude. Did you expect it to stay on the front page forever?

oblib 3y ago
No, but I did not expect to go from 28 to 650 in about an hour.
- simonblack 3y ago
  Karma is weird. You spend an hour agonising over the composition of a well-written comment and get down-voted. Or maybe, you write a quick throwaway one-line comment, and upvotes instantly increase your karma by 50.
  - tedmiston 3y ago
    I have also found this to be surprisingly true.

version_five 3y ago

The submission has a lot more comments than points which makes it automatically get "buried" (removed from the top posts) because it indicates potential fighting in the comments. Re the karma, I don't belive it's possible for it to go down like that, you may want to email HN to ask them what's going on.

oblib 3y ago
I took your advice and did that. Thank you for the suggestion.
dang 3y ago
That's right. The post set off the flamewar detector.
- tedmiston 3y ago
  Dan - Would you mind sharing a rough threshold for what "sets off the flamewar detector" means? In [1] (unofficial), a rough 1:1 ratio is mentioned. I see that, now, that submission has 31 points and 91 comments, say ~3x comments:points. Flipping through Active, I see plenty of submissions with a ~2x ratio, and the min around ~0.5x and the max around ~2.5x (on hollywood strike, so potentially heated thoughts). [1]: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#flame-war-detector https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#flame-...
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    40+ comments && comments > votes, according to lore: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25871251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25871251>

necovek 3y ago

Perhaps your post getting flagged counts as negative karma too? Anyway, karma discussions are generally off topic here so you may experience similar effect with this post.

oblib 3y ago
If it was flagged I wasn't notified. No idea why it would be though.
- necovek 3y ago
  Anyone can flag a post or comment (look for that "flag" on the top line), and it does not result in any notification.
  - oblib 3y ago
    No, I have an old post that's marked as "flagged" but not that one.
    - necovek 3y ago
      Posts don't get marked as "flagged" or "dead" on the first "flag" by someone: I ain't sure of the threshold, and I am merely guessing, but trying to tell you not to bother with this — it doesn't really matter, HN has some non-transparent rules and we all accept to live by them believing they are right in spirit most of the time.

BMc2020 3y ago

I went through this anguish at a site many years ago. The sooner you stop caring about invisible internet points the better.

oblib 3y ago
I don't worry about getting down voted for comments I make, but this is odd. I've sent an email asking for clarification so we'll see how it goes.
tedmiston 3y ago
This happens often when I post a spicy contrarian opinion on reddit. Perhaps ironically (perhaps not), similar comments tend to get the opposite reaction here.

devonnull 3y ago

What's the big deal? I'm sure this happens a lot. You're not the first, you won't be the last. Move on. As another commenter pointed out the sooner you stop caring about invisible internet points the better.

oblib 3y ago
It's not "big deal". It didn't cost me any money and I won't lose any sleep over it. As I've already said, I'm curious about how/why this happened because it doesn't make sense. I've sent an email asking about it and maybe I'll learn something if I get a response. I've never done that before so I don't know what to expect.

oblib 3y ago

Ok, this is too funny... Dang contacted me and told me my karma was 4797, not 4997. My eyes are getting old is my excuse :D

dang 3y ago

You didn't piss anyone off at HN. The post set off the flamewar detector, which is a software penalty that causes a thread to fall in rank when the discussion is overheated. That's the only thing that happened, and it wouldn't have affected your karma in any way. The only thing that makes karma go down is downvoting on comments. (Submissions don't have downvoting, only flags, and flags don't affect karma.) I checked the logs and your karma has never been 4997. The most it has ever been is 4812. It went to 4811 after someone downvoted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36762833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36762833. Your karma was 4797 when you submitted the post, though—most likely you misremembered 4797 as 4997, which is an easy enough mistake to make.

oblib 3y ago
Thank you dang! There was certainly some heated opinions being shared there. Fair to say I may have set the tone with my initial comment. I grew up around cars and car builders and spent quite a few years working with them so I am opinionated in that field.
dredmorbius 3y ago
As I've commented on HN over the past month or so and shared with dang via email, I've been running some analyses on the HN front page based on a full history[1]. One aspect I've looked at is the "flamewar detector", or as dang's described it elsewhere, and "overheated discussion" metric[3] --- not necessarily bad, but a sign that things might be getting tendentious. I've taken to calling it "spiciness". In particular, it seems to me that this might penalise stories in which there is a genuine level of disagreement or contentiousness, or which are socially, politically, and/or culturally contested.[4] As I understand, it kicks in where a post has >= 40 comments and comments > votes.[2] Given that I have ~188k front page stories with vote and comment counts, it's pretty straightforward to calculate the comments:votes ratio, and look at patterns that emerge. Looking at means, we can get, first, the overall ratio and its percentile distribution, and the overall story position (not surprisingly, 14, which is close to 15, the midpoint of the 1--30 range): Overall ratio n: 115908, sum: 73618, min: 0.25, max: 21.00, mean: 0.635141, median: 0.52, sd: 0.419485 %-ile: 5: 0.28, 10: 0.3, 15: 0.33, 20: 0.35, 25: 0.38, 30: 0.4, 35: 0.43, 40: 0.46, 45: 0.49, 55: 0.56, 60: 0.6, 65: 0.64, 70: 0.69, 75: 0.75, 80: 0.83, 85: 0.92, 90: 1.07, 95: 1.34 Note that both the mean and median ratios are well below the detector threshold of 1.0. By standard deviation (percentage of values included with a normal distribution in parentheses): 1σ: 1.055 (68%) 2σ: 1.474 (95%) 3σ: 1.894 (99.73%) Note that the normal distribution values seem to agree with the calculated percentiles. And that HN's flamewar detector kicks off for stories roughly 1σ > mean spiciness. I pulled up the list of the 40 most "ratioed" (or "spiciest") HN threads of all time: rank ratio date-pos year pos DoW user vote com site 1 21.00 2007-4-18.18 2007 18 Wed juwo 5 105 juwo.com 2 10.83 2008-2-4.26 2008 26 Mon eusman 6 65 n/a 3 9.33 2007-4-26.26 2007 26 Thu juwo 3 28 juwo.com 4 9.14 2007-7-31.13 2007 13 Tue rokhayakebe 7 64 n/a 5 9.00 2007-7-22.21 2007 21 Sun gibsonf1 3 27 streamfocus.com 6 7.50 2007-4-20.25 2007 25 Fri jkush 6 45 n/a 7 7.50 2007-6-1.10 2007 10 Fri keiretsu 6 45 n/a 8 7.33 2007-3-26.20 2007 20 Mon BitGeek 3 22 n/a 9 7.29 2008-1-27.13 2008 13 Sun wumi 14 102 n/a 10 7.27 2008-7-22.29 2008 29 Tue BenS 15 109 n/a 11 7.22 2008-9-25.17 2008 17 Thu DanielBMarkham 23 166 n/a 12 6.79 2008-11-14.19 2008 19 Fri bbuderi 24 163 xconomy.com 13 6.77 2008-3-28.17 2008 17 Fri btw0 13 88 n/a 14 6.57 2007-10-9.20 2007 20 Tue _h4xr 7 46 f2s.com 15 6.50 2007-10-13.15 2007 15 Sat robmnl 6 39 n/a 16 6.50 2007-11-3.16 2007 16 Sat breck 4 26 qcrunch.com 17 6.50 2008-1-18.13 2008 13 Fri german 14 91 n/a 18 6.33 2007-12-10.24 2007 24 Mon kf 6 38 independent.ie 19 6.29 2007-9-5.10 2007 10 Wed rokhayakebe 14 88 n/a 20 6.25 2007-7-1.13 2007 13 Sun danw 4 25 n/a 21 6.20 2007-5-24.15 2007 15 Thu bootload 5 31 n/a 22 6.20 2007-6-11.9 2007 9 Mon danw 5 31 n/a 23 6.07 2007-2-21.1 2007 1 Wed pg 262 1590 n/a 24 6.00 2007-11-13.30 2007 30 Tue trekker7 5 30 n/a 25 5.99 2022-5-26.8 2022 8 Thu LoveGracePeace 280 1678 nih.gov 26 5.91 2008-5-5.30 2008 30 Mon rrival 11 65 n/a 27 5.85 2008-4-1.15 2008 15 Tue robmnl 27 158 n/a 28 5.82 2007-8-19.11 2007 11 Sun kf 11 64 n/a 29 5.80 2007-8-21.4 2007 4 Tue zenobo 20 116 n/a 30 5.78 2007-4-6.1 2007 1 Fri kkim 77 445 paulgraham.com 31 5.77 2008-4-18.10 2008 10 Fri Flemlord 26 150 n/a 32 5.75 2007-11-18.18 2007 18 Sun rokhayakebe 8 46 n/a 33 5.70 2008-2-12.22 2008 22 Tue theremora 10 57 n/a 34 5.64 2007-10-17.9 2007 9 Wed altay 14 79 n/a 35 5.55 2008-1-17.18 2008 18 Thu sspencer 11 61 n/a 36 5.50 2007-10-23.25 2007 25 Tue DanielBMarkham 6 33 whattofix.com 37 5.50 2007-4-18.25 2007 25 Wed yaacovtp 4 22 n/a 38 5.50 2007-4-7.17 2007 17 Sat me_jobs_r_u_woz 4 22 n/a 39 5.42 2008-3-4.29 2008 29 Tue kulkarnic 12 65 n/a 40 5.42 2008-5-24.7 2008 7 Sat _bbks 38 206 n/a "n/a" site is a post without a URL, typically an "ask" or "tell" thread. Eyeballing that list, one pattern that is suggested is that high-ratio posts seem to have relatively high story position values (that is, they appear low on the HN front page), notable exceptions being #23 (pg's 2007-2-21 request), and #30 (kf's 2007-8-21 post, a pg essay "Microsoft is Dead"). I'd done further analysis of story position by spiciness and found that in general for stories which make the front page, higher spiciness actually correlates slightly with a higher page position (lower StoryPos value). I suspect this is due to specific moderator interaction, that is, those stories which survive do so because they're deemed appropriate to HN. Another is that high-ratio posts are notably clustered in 2007-2008. Frequency analysis suggests that flamewar detection was implemented around January, 2009 as spicy front-page posts thin markedly after that month. The one item appearing after that date ... ticks numerous hot buttons (2022-5-26.8). Because of how I'm collecting and analysing data I don't have HN or article URLs directly available, though it's possible to determine the article from the front-page archive. "2008-5-24.7" corresponds to the 7th-position story on the 2008-5-24 front page archive: <https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2008-05-24 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2008-05-24> I also took a look at the highest and lowest ratioed sites, with >= 20 front-page appearances, appearing in a follow-up comment. Overall, the detector seems reasonably justified, though not infallible. It's a much better indicator than I'd thought it would be. ________________________________ Notes: 1. 20 April 2007 -- 21 June 2023 presently. I re-up the archive periodically, but haven't fully automated this. Results change little incrementally. 2. Via ColinWright 2 years ago here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25871251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25871251> 3. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089> 4. As it happens, HN tends to downrate each of these topics as dang's discussed over the years. Links ... not immediately available.