4 ms·

The upvotes on the current post are fine - the reason you saw the submission rise in rank is that startup launch posts by YC startups get special placement on t

by dang 8mo ago

The upvotes on the current post are fine - the reason you saw the submission rise in rank is that startup launch posts by YC startups get special placement on the front page (this is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). Not every such post does, but some do. In other words, your perception wasn't wrong, but the interpretation was off. I've put "Launch HN" and "YC W26" back in the title to make that clearer - I edited them out earlier, which was my mistake. As for the booster comments, those are pretty common on launch threads and often pretty innocent - most people who aren't active HN users have no idea that it's against the rules. We do our best to communicate about that, but it's not a cardinal sin—there are far worse offenses.

Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
Thanks dang but can you please explain there being two accounts who wrote something very small comment and one account being completely new and the other being 7 months old only being invoked in this case. Clearly I am not the only one here as john_strinlai here seems to have had somewhat of the same conclusion as me. Dang I know you care about this community so can you please talk more what you think about this in particular as well. I understand that YC companies get preferential treatment, Fine by me. But this feels something larger to me I have written everything that I could find in this thread from the same post being shown here 3 days ago in anywhere.ai link to now changing to github to skirt off HN rule that same link can't be posted in short period of time and everything. This feels somewhat intentional just like the spam issue, I hope you understand what I mean. (If you also feel suspicious, Can you then do a basic analysis/investigiation with all of these suspicious points in mind and everything please as well and upload the results in an anonymous way if possible?) I wish you to have a nice day and waiting for your thoughts on all of this.
- dang 8mo ago
  I'm happy to answer as best I can! but I'm having trouble understanding what you're specifically asking. If https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47327129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47327129 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47328465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47328465 don't answer your questions, can you maybe try picking the most important question and making it as specific as you can? Then I can take a crack at that and we can go from there.
  - Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
    Sure let me better explain what I'd like if possible. https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=47326101 https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=47326101 I'd like to have some information within 1) time frame of this from 0-80 upvotes which feels the most upward of this curve and 2) time frame of the whole article and I would like three datapoints in all of this: So imagine we take every people who upvoted this thread and then we find three data points and average (median not mean for better representation) them together for anonymity purposes: 1. The date of the accounts 2. The karma of the accounts 3. The words written by those accounts (optional) [But I have done some work on that and I have found this to be a good factor on if someone is truly a bot or not] Because, Although you mention that the upvotes are fine. I'd still really appreciate it if we can find any form of data backing that statement up and hopefully knowing that nothing fishy is going on as you may understand that this company has done a lot of fishy stuff in its past and all the fishy stuff which I have talked about in this thread too makes me feel like just a minor bit more deeper look into it/transparency would personally be really appreciated and the community would like it too! Have a nice day dang and looking forward to your next comment!
    - dang 8mo ago
      Sorry, but this is much too complicated for me to follow, and I believe I've already answered the main points: what happened to the thread and what was going on with the upvotes and comments.
      - Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
        That's fair dang. Sorry if it got too complicated. I trust ya in that case that the comments are fine from your one of comments to me here. Any case of botting must have been spotted by you guys if there was a case. It was just that they raised quite a large number of red alerts for me personally with the whole thing. Just to be on the same page, Is there anything suspicious about the upvotes in this page in sense of being upvoted by bot accounts in general from your observation especially during the start of this thread? Can you please just talk more about this as in confirmation because I still have some disbelief about it given its shady history and the whole way this thread unfolded. I feel as if there feels some likelihood to me that this post got (bot-upvoted?) at some point or the other. Or did all of the upvotes came from genuine account and it was just that this got to front page due to hackernews preferential treatment? Can you just talk more about it because if anything, I might still learn something new either way. Dang, Has there ever been any YC startup which employed in shady practice like using bots to upvote their HN posts or use bot accounts which got caught in the history of this website?
john_strinlai 8mo ago
hi dang. while you are here -- are comments artificially ordered on this post? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326953 is grey (i.e <=0 karma). my top-level comment is at 14 karma. we posted within 15 minutes of each other. their comment is higher up the page. ive never seen something like that before. the two posts calling out unethical behavior have been living at the bottom of this post the entire time, until a couple of actually [flagged] comments ended up under them. i do not care about the karma itself, at all. but i do care to know if launch/show posts have comment sections with cherry-picked ordering or organic ordering. edit 2: i am at 19 points, and now below two grey (<=0 karma) comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326455). whats up dang? edit 3 (~1 hour later): you've responded to a handful of other comments and ignored this one as it becomes more and more evident that someone has artificially ordered the comments to ensure that critical comments are at the bottom of the page. it has shattered my perception of show/launch posts to know that you manually curate the comments to form a specific narrative. i really (naively) thought you guys were much more neutral about that sort of thing.
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
  Adding onto it, My comments are also ranked low. This comment on which dang replied has 4 upvotes which I think that this is at the 4th last of this post and the other comment that I made on your comment where I responded to ya has 3 upvotes.
- dang 8mo ago
  > you've responded to a handful of other comments and ignored this one I hadn't seen this until 30 seconds ago. The assumption of moderator omniscience leads to a lot of mistaken conclusions! We marked offtopic comments offtopic, which lowers them on the page. This is standard HN moderation. If we didn't do this, nearly every thread would be choked with something offtopic at the top. At the same time, we haven't killed the posts or put them in a "stub for offtopicness" [1] like we otherwise would. They're still here for people who want to read them, while at the same time the main discussion can be about the main topic, which is the startup launch. HN is actively moderated and always has been. Downweighting offtopic/generic comments is one of the biggest things we've ever discovered for improving the quality of the threads. For us it's about the quality of the site as a whole, not specific narratives, but of course everyone can (and will) make up their own mind about this. What I can tell you is (a) the way we do these things has been stable for a long time (HN time is measured in decades, not years), and (b) we're always willing to answer questions about it. Oh, and (3) - when YC or a YC-funded startup is part of a story, then we moderate less than we otherwise would [2]. We do still moderate, though—we just do it less. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22stub%20for%20offtopicness%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

by dang 8mo ago

Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago

Thanks dang but can you please explain there being two accounts who wrote something very small comment and one account being completely new and the other being 7 months old only being invoked in this case. Clearly I am not the only one here as john_strinlai here seems to have had somewhat of the same conclusion as me. Dang I know you care about this community so can you please talk more what you think about this in particular as well. I understand that YC companies get preferential treatment, Fine by me. But this feels something larger to me I have written everything that I could find in this thread from the same post being shown here 3 days ago in anywhere.ai link to now changing to github to skirt off HN rule that same link can't be posted in short period of time and everything. This feels somewhat intentional just like the spam issue, I hope you understand what I mean. (If you also feel suspicious, Can you then do a basic analysis/investigiation with all of these suspicious points in mind and everything please as well and upload the results in an anonymous way if possible?) I wish you to have a nice day and waiting for your thoughts on all of this.

dang 8mo ago
I'm happy to answer as best I can! but I'm having trouble understanding what you're specifically asking. If https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47327129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47327129 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47328465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47328465 don't answer your questions, can you maybe try picking the most important question and making it as specific as you can? Then I can take a crack at that and we can go from there.
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
  Sure let me better explain what I'd like if possible. https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=47326101 https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=47326101 I'd like to have some information within 1) time frame of this from 0-80 upvotes which feels the most upward of this curve and 2) time frame of the whole article and I would like three datapoints in all of this: So imagine we take every people who upvoted this thread and then we find three data points and average (median not mean for better representation) them together for anonymity purposes: 1. The date of the accounts 2. The karma of the accounts 3. The words written by those accounts (optional) [But I have done some work on that and I have found this to be a good factor on if someone is truly a bot or not] Because, Although you mention that the upvotes are fine. I'd still really appreciate it if we can find any form of data backing that statement up and hopefully knowing that nothing fishy is going on as you may understand that this company has done a lot of fishy stuff in its past and all the fishy stuff which I have talked about in this thread too makes me feel like just a minor bit more deeper look into it/transparency would personally be really appreciated and the community would like it too! Have a nice day dang and looking forward to your next comment!
  - dang 8mo ago
    Sorry, but this is much too complicated for me to follow, and I believe I've already answered the main points: what happened to the thread and what was going on with the upvotes and comments.
    - Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
      That's fair dang. Sorry if it got too complicated. I trust ya in that case that the comments are fine from your one of comments to me here. Any case of botting must have been spotted by you guys if there was a case. It was just that they raised quite a large number of red alerts for me personally with the whole thing. Just to be on the same page, Is there anything suspicious about the upvotes in this page in sense of being upvoted by bot accounts in general from your observation especially during the start of this thread? Can you please just talk more about this as in confirmation because I still have some disbelief about it given its shady history and the whole way this thread unfolded. I feel as if there feels some likelihood to me that this post got (bot-upvoted?) at some point or the other. Or did all of the upvotes came from genuine account and it was just that this got to front page due to hackernews preferential treatment? Can you just talk more about it because if anything, I might still learn something new either way. Dang, Has there ever been any YC startup which employed in shady practice like using bots to upvote their HN posts or use bot accounts which got caught in the history of this website?

john_strinlai 8mo ago

hi dang. while you are here -- are comments artificially ordered on this post? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326953 is grey (i.e <=0 karma). my top-level comment is at 14 karma. we posted within 15 minutes of each other. their comment is higher up the page. ive never seen something like that before. the two posts calling out unethical behavior have been living at the bottom of this post the entire time, until a couple of actually [flagged] comments ended up under them. i do not care about the karma itself, at all. but i do care to know if launch/show posts have comment sections with cherry-picked ordering or organic ordering. edit 2: i am at 19 points, and now below two grey (<=0 karma) comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326455). whats up dang? edit 3 (~1 hour later): you've responded to a handful of other comments and ignored this one as it becomes more and more evident that someone has artificially ordered the comments to ensure that critical comments are at the bottom of the page. it has shattered my perception of show/launch posts to know that you manually curate the comments to form a specific narrative. i really (naively) thought you guys were much more neutral about that sort of thing.

Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
Adding onto it, My comments are also ranked low. This comment on which dang replied has 4 upvotes which I think that this is at the 4th last of this post and the other comment that I made on your comment where I responded to ya has 3 upvotes.
dang 8mo ago
> you've responded to a handful of other comments and ignored this one I hadn't seen this until 30 seconds ago. The assumption of moderator omniscience leads to a lot of mistaken conclusions! We marked offtopic comments offtopic, which lowers them on the page. This is standard HN moderation. If we didn't do this, nearly every thread would be choked with something offtopic at the top. At the same time, we haven't killed the posts or put them in a "stub for offtopicness" [1] like we otherwise would. They're still here for people who want to read them, while at the same time the main discussion can be about the main topic, which is the startup launch. HN is actively moderated and always has been. Downweighting offtopic/generic comments is one of the biggest things we've ever discovered for improving the quality of the threads. For us it's about the quality of the site as a whole, not specific narratives, but of course everyone can (and will) make up their own mind about this. What I can tell you is (a) the way we do these things has been stable for a long time (HN time is measured in decades, not years), and (b) we're always willing to answer questions about it. Oh, and (3) - when YC or a YC-funded startup is part of a story, then we moderate less than we otherwise would [2]. We do still moderate, though—we just do it less. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22stub%20for%20offtopicness%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...