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How Hacker News ranking works: scoring, controversy, and penalties (2013)
- VCFundedGenYer 6d agoThis falls apart completely if you’re like me and only see the list presented on brutalist.report which is strictly chronological and with zero algorithms.
- perching_aix 6d agoIndeed, if you go out of your way to circumvent automatic story ranking, the particularities of automatic story ranking no longer affect you... A capability available without visiting any third party sites, by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest I just hope you don't believe that somehow this magically allows you to escape bias. A (reverse) chronological sort is still a sort.
- gong_hits 6d ago[dead]
- Retr0id 6d agoLooks algorithmic to me. Reverse-chronological with upvote threshold(?), where upvotes are correlated with sort rank on vanilla HN.
- VCFundedGenYer 6d agoAgain, not a thing if you are on the site I mentioned.
- tptacek 6d agoIf there's a vote threshold, it's still profoundly influenced by the HN algorithm, because front page exposure is the principal component in how many votes a story gets.
- Waterluvian 6d agoThere’s clearly decision-making going on because it’s not listing most HN posts. How is it deciding what not to show?
- LastTrain 6d agoNot to mention HN posts don’t spontaneously emerge out of the randomness of the cosmos.
- Waterluvian 6d agoSure they do. Just with extra steps. Remember that thing Carl Sagan told us: “if you want to complain about AI from scratch you must first invent the universe.”
- Retr0id 6d agoSaying it a second time doesn't make it any more true.
- oblio 6d agoThat site's interesting, but it would be super helpful with some summaries of the stories and maybe of the comments. Though I imagine that would make it a LOT more expensive to host.
- zahlman 6d agoHow does that differ from turning on showdead and going to /newest ?
- tptacek 6d agoPresumably this has gotten way, way more complicated in the last 13 years.
- onesandofgrain 6d ago+ if (this.moneyPaid > 10000USD) = instaPostToFrontPage.
- Barbing 6d agoHave you come across a quantitative analysis of this?
- onesandofgrain 6d agoyou gotta be kidding right?
- Barbing 6d agoHas anyone asked their favorite model to compare YC funding with HN rankings just kidding wild and zany thinking ;)
- huflungdung 6d ago[dead]
- tclancy 6d agoWhy?
- hn_throwaway_99 6d agoMore powerful bots and more incentives to game the system.
- bfung 6d agomaybe dang and team can use the new system 1 classifier hotness like jev now ;)
- Liftyee 6d agoThe penalties are interesting. It shows that the design goal is not to maximise interactions otherwise "controversial" posts should stay up. Still though, I wonder what's the point of deranking said posts. Minimise the potential for a flame war to hit critical mass? Stop people from perceiving HN as an argument-filled forum?
- firesteelrain 6d agoControlled narratives
- SilentM68 6d agoYup, with just enough of an unmistakable ideological slant to force posts with differing views to take a Kharma nose dive. It seems that the addition of Kharma is proportional to posts that align with the overall narrative of the board post sentiment. In my case, I've noticed that some of my posts don't appear as originally created. Can't really confirm if this is inherent to the algorithm or just internal interference. The latter would be my guess. :(
- SilentM68 6d agoPoint proven for the world to see :)
- skew-aberration 6d agoYep. Particularly obvious with comment ranking too.
- scamaltman2 6d agoDon't forget showdead.
- Barbing 6d agoOfficially, should be protecting the site by keeping things interesting. (Just saying officially.) Thanks to dang, links: curiosity and repetition: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... downweighting follow-ups: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=follow-up%20downweight&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- anon_cow1111 6d agoPersonally the first HN algorithm anecdote I really noticed was when the "stop destroying videogames' petition hit the front page a couple years ago. In the first hour it got a modest ~100 votes and comments with some organic discussion, so pretty typical for a good HN post. In the next hour it was dead and buried several hundred posts down. I don't want to be a tinfoil hatter here, but I think certain industries have a lot more influence over this site than most people realize.
- Capricorn2481 6d agoThis isn't very satisfying to me, as that ranks pretty low on the list of potentially damaging threads, don't you think? The genesis period of a petition? I see way more alarming stuff on here every day that further disillusions me to the biggest players. I don't like Paul Graham, but I don't know if he really gives a shit what's happening on here. HN is not a super influential forum.
- anon_cow1111 6d ago>as that ranks pretty low on the list of potentially damaging threads, don't you think? Yes, exactly. That's why it struck me as being so weird; something so innocuous on its face getting hammered that badly suggests some kind of outside coordinated influence. (oh, and edit; apparently industry lobbyists had been holding private counter-op meetings with the EU Commission before said petition was even finished, so there's that. Not immediately relevant to this discussion but it does speak to what goes on behind the curtain in government topics)
- Capricorn2481 6d ago> That's why it struck me as being so weird; something so innocuous on its face getting hammered that badly suggests some kind of outside coordinated influence. That seems like circular logic? Hasn't dang offered many reasons why a post might be suddenly down rated? There's just got to be more than "I think I saw a post get down rated, so it must be a bot army"
- NiklasKoehler 6d agoThe part of this I always forget is how lazily the ranking is applied. HN does not rescore the list on every page load. A story is rescored when someone upvotes it, and separately one story out of the top 50 gets picked at random every thirty seconds and rescored. Pages cache for another ninety seconds on top of that. So the front page is never a clean rendering of the formula. A story that stops getting votes can sit at the wrong position for minutes at a time. Which is also why the penalty figures in the post are ranges rather than numbers. Shirriff is inferring them from stories ranked lower than their raw score implies, and a story that simply has not been rescored recently looks exactly the same from outside. He lists that as one of his sources of error, along with neighboring stories carrying their own penalties.
- compiler-guy 6d agoNot sure when it started, but the second chance pool has moderators putting stories that didn’t get much attention when they were submitted directly on the front page. There may be some survivor bias here, but second-chance stories seem very front-page sticky to me. At least those I have recognized.
- kens 6d agoAuthor here. I don't know why this popped up 13 years later, but hi :-)
- Barbing 6d agoStill relevant! Very interesting topic.
- tclancy 6d agoJust so they could penalize it, obviously.
- deleted 6d ago[deleted]
- iercan 6d agowas very interesting :)
- qsbuilder 6d ago[flagged]
- caaqil 6d ago> I don't know why this popped up 13 years later Maybe we the HN nerds are recomputing your proposed formula and quirks, and seeing it in real time, which may have worked since it's #1 now and I can prophetically reassure everyone it's gonna disappear in a few hours, per the article. Self fulfilling prophecy as they used to call it.
- PreciousH 6d agoweird that posts with lots of comments are also penalized though, the `controversy` reasoning is not solid enough for me.
- hn_throwaway_99 6d agoIt's not just "lots of comments" though. It's more comments than upvotes. You may disagree, and it may not be a perfect metric, but in reality I think it's works very well. 90+% of the time when I look at a post with tons of comments and a relatively small number of upvotes, it's flamewar central.
- user_7832 6d agoTrue, but there's that 10% posts where there's (eg) a good cancer breakthrough, and it's two guys going back and forth on the methodology adding a lot of comments. Not always, but not never either. I really wish there was a way to "mark" such posts as "high quality, ignore comment to vote ratio" just like how you can vouch a comment. Enough such marks and it gets auto turned off the flamewar parameter.
- krapp 6d agoBack-and-forth conversation isn't high quality by definition, it's just the baseline for not being bad enough to downvote. I think Hacker News wants the baseline to be some degree of exceptional.
- fragmede 6d agoOr just not boring. The guidelines state, among other things: > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Reading yet another thread where commenters go back and forth on, eg how Elon Musk sucks/is awesome doesn't make for interesting reading because it's the same conversation that's been had before, and neither side is getting convinced by the other side's argument.
- syngrog66 6d agoI concluded long ago that voting rings are active here, along with paid/inauthentic upvote farms.
- vforgione 6d agoWhat led to that conclusion? Genuinely curious.
- dotancohen 6d agoI independently came to that conclusion after noticing that my comments on some controversial subjects will slowly acquire upvotes, then nose dive 2 or 4 votes very quickly. At first I thought that some mods might have double-value votes (Hi Cowboy Neal!) but then I realized it's sometimes 4 successive downvotes, not only 2.
- greekrich92 6d agoI've frequently encountered this same thing. Often the downvotes come a day later, but quickly.
- redlimetea 6d ago[dead]
- efilife 6d agoSame, but there are other explanations than voting rings
- greekrich92 6d agoI assume it's just the mods, not voting rings. It's usually comments that run counter to the HN-approved ideology.
- doginasuit 6d agoI've seen this, I tend to attribute it to a different part of the world waking up.
- deleted 6d ago[deleted]
- seizethecheese 6d ago> I observed that many websites appear to automatically get a penalty of .25 to .8: arstechnica.com, businessinsider.com, easypost.com… Easypost is a YC company, for those who claim hacker news moderation favoritism
- mberning 6d agoGreat analysis. I think there must be even more going on in the comments section. There are a lot of shenanigans especially on “controversial” topics.
- zdw 6d agoDoes anyone have an explanation of when you get a lot of karma why there isn't a 1:1 relationship between the votes a post gets and how much the account? Somewhere around 100k karma (I know, "on the leaderboard" problems...) the amount of points I got for posts (but not comments) reduced considerably compared to the number of upvotes a post gets.
- n2d4 6d agoI thought it was a fixed ratio (1/3rd?) for posts and 1/1 for comments? Can't tell you for sure about posts as I mostly just comment, but someone else can surely jump in
- at1as 6d agoI'd assume the algorithm has changed over the last 13 years. And they're probably better off not sharing exactly how ranking (and penalties) work. It's clearly easy to mobilize armies of users (or, these days, agents) to upvote submissions or warm up an account. I receive emails all the time offering this kind of service across virtually every website I have any presence. But without explicitly published rules, it's harder to figure out what works through trial and error, especially if account history plays a role. Agents will clearly optimize around the rules, so I it's probably more important than ever that they're vague. X "open sourced" its algorithm (sort of...), and the bot problem there is as bad as its ever been.
- bigiain 6d agoI wonder how many of the companies sending you those sort of emails are YC backed? (and how many of them are disgruntled founders who were rejected by YC?)
- potamic 6d agoDo they want to buy your account or do they want you to perform some activity for an incentive? Possible to share some of those emails?
- deleted 6d ago[deleted]
- deleted 6d ago[deleted]
- culi 6d agoRelated: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
- tornado134 6d ago[dead]