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Ask HN: Erratic HN front page algorithm
Last week I had two submissions reach the HN front page. Before that, I assumed the ranking followed a roughly monotonic time-decay curve once a post peaked. While watching these two posts, I noticed something different: their rank would sometimes improve after declining, and occasionally oscillate back and forth (Here is a graph showing this behavior: https://imgur.com/a/AQnSh6I). what mechanisms in the HN ranking algorithm cause this kind of non-monotonic movement. Is it due to vote weighting, comment activity, re-ranking batches, or something else?
The graph is from: https://track-hacker-news.com/
EDIT: This is the post referenced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46512881
- r721 10mo ago1) Flags ("enough flags will strongly reduce the rank of the submission") 2) Flame-War Detector ("A good rule of thumb for this effect is when the number of comments on a submission exceeds its score.") Quotes from here: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
- 7777777phil 10mo ago1) But then why would it come back again. 2) Maybe that yes, but then same question as with (1)
- gus_massa 10mo agoThe main idea is that they are sorted by "upvotes^2/time" or something like that, but there are a lot of automatic and manual penalties, that can be added or removed by the mods. (Probably upvotes^1.6/(time+1) , but it may have change from time to time, or not, who knows.)
- journal 10mo agoI bet if you saw the source code for how the algorithm really worked and what options admins have behind the scenes, will make you vomit.