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Personally 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 fir

Personally 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 15d ago
This 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 15d 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 15d 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"
    - anon_cow1111 15d ago
      I don't know all of what dang has said personally, but in most cases where I see new topics getting killed it's pretty obvious what the reasoning is; political ragebait, shady sources, plain junk articles or other low-quality threads. The SDV/SKG petition thing was none of those, and people were generally positive about it during the discussion. So it seems to me it was either an unexplained random down-voting event or something a little more malicious.
- user_7832 15d ago
  The thing is, it doesn't even have to be PG/HN doing this. Case in point, look at reddit being astroturfed by every company. And also, look how good Graphene OS posts do, and now compare that to Stop Killing Games. These both have a similar overlap (unless you work at Google, both are interests/hobbies), yet GOS almost always hits front page (and rightly so), yet SKG failed to, despite being a Stallman-ian topic.
  - Capricorn2481 15d ago
    Well I definitely think the site is heavily botted, as it's trivially easy to do so. I was speaking more to moderation.
brudgers 15d ago
I think there is a difference between what is important and what is intellectually interesting. As a rule of thumb, promoting an agenda (and that's what a petition is) tends to be toward the less intellectually interesting end of the spectrum...occasionally promoting an agenda might involve interesting arguments. A petition is not much of an argument. A petition is a call to action that requires very little action and typically minimal commitment. By which I mean, I might have flagged it if I saw it on the front page. And maybe I did.
EA-3167 15d ago
I’m guessing you got a surge of the people passionate and interested in that cause more than they cared about intellectual curiosity. Then the rest of us who don’t really want to see the same things everywhere didn’t engage and it dropped. It seems very difficult for some people to imagine that their passions aren’t universal, or that people might be tired of endless “awareness raising” campaigns shoehorned into every digital space.
- anon_cow1111 15d ago
  Yes, I'm very aware of that effect. The difference is that this was so aligned with the general attitude of HN users[*] that it stuck out as an anomaly; similar posts almost always hang around for a little while, usually several hours but sometimes over a day, (*examples include 'right-to-repair, Louis Rossman, all the John Deere and phone hackers, general "I want to own the shit I buy". You get the idea.)
  - EA-3167 15d ago
    Remember the average person doesn’t comment, they just lurk and maybe vote. Our sense of who the average HN person is comes from an incredibly skewed sample.
    - tough 15d ago
      1% Rule [1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
    - bigiain 15d ago
      Arguably, there's at least two kinds on "average HN people", which I think of as participants and spectators. For me (and I'm not claiming my opinion is any more than a probable "No true HN person" fallacy), people who never or extremely rarely comment are spectators. And while they quite likely outnumber people who comment regularly by 100 or 1000 to one or more, they are not part of "the HN community" because they do not participate in it. I think most people's (including spectators) "sense of who the average HN person is" probably aligns reasonably well with the average HN _participant_.
suzzer99 15d ago
I had a post about Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing that I was hoping would go viral because that's the only way I ever saw Amazon ever fix anyone's KDP issues. I posted, then went to bed. When I woke up, it had 250+ points, but was on page 5 with a bunch of posts that were much older and/or had single-digit points. It must have been on page 1 for a while to rack up that many points, then it sank almost immediately to page 5 where all the other posts with even 50+ points were days old. I've always wondered what happened there. Was it the algorithm, or did a mod step in?
- scamaltman2 15d ago
  Mods are heavily involved in HN rankings and automation is a tie breaker. There's no way that happened by automation.
bigiain 15d ago
It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that was purely automated based on 4chan organised Gamergater's dogpiling and looking exactly like voting rings and/or manufactured controversy.

Capricorn2481 15d ago

This 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 15d 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 15d 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"
  - anon_cow1111 15d ago
    I don't know all of what dang has said personally, but in most cases where I see new topics getting killed it's pretty obvious what the reasoning is; political ragebait, shady sources, plain junk articles or other low-quality threads. The SDV/SKG petition thing was none of those, and people were generally positive about it during the discussion. So it seems to me it was either an unexplained random down-voting event or something a little more malicious.
user_7832 15d ago
The thing is, it doesn't even have to be PG/HN doing this. Case in point, look at reddit being astroturfed by every company. And also, look how good Graphene OS posts do, and now compare that to Stop Killing Games. These both have a similar overlap (unless you work at Google, both are interests/hobbies), yet GOS almost always hits front page (and rightly so), yet SKG failed to, despite being a Stallman-ian topic.
- Capricorn2481 15d ago
  Well I definitely think the site is heavily botted, as it's trivially easy to do so. I was speaking more to moderation.

brudgers 15d ago

I think there is a difference between what is important and what is intellectually interesting. As a rule of thumb, promoting an agenda (and that's what a petition is) tends to be toward the less intellectually interesting end of the spectrum...occasionally promoting an agenda might involve interesting arguments. A petition is not much of an argument. A petition is a call to action that requires very little action and typically minimal commitment. By which I mean, I might have flagged it if I saw it on the front page. And maybe I did.

EA-3167 15d ago

I’m guessing you got a surge of the people passionate and interested in that cause more than they cared about intellectual curiosity. Then the rest of us who don’t really want to see the same things everywhere didn’t engage and it dropped. It seems very difficult for some people to imagine that their passions aren’t universal, or that people might be tired of endless “awareness raising” campaigns shoehorned into every digital space.

anon_cow1111 15d ago
Yes, I'm very aware of that effect. The difference is that this was so aligned with the general attitude of HN users[*] that it stuck out as an anomaly; similar posts almost always hang around for a little while, usually several hours but sometimes over a day, (*examples include 'right-to-repair, Louis Rossman, all the John Deere and phone hackers, general "I want to own the shit I buy". You get the idea.)
- EA-3167 15d ago
  Remember the average person doesn’t comment, they just lurk and maybe vote. Our sense of who the average HN person is comes from an incredibly skewed sample.
  - tough 15d ago
    1% Rule [1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
  - bigiain 15d ago
    Arguably, there's at least two kinds on "average HN people", which I think of as participants and spectators. For me (and I'm not claiming my opinion is any more than a probable "No true HN person" fallacy), people who never or extremely rarely comment are spectators. And while they quite likely outnumber people who comment regularly by 100 or 1000 to one or more, they are not part of "the HN community" because they do not participate in it. I think most people's (including spectators) "sense of who the average HN person is" probably aligns reasonably well with the average HN _participant_.

suzzer99 15d ago

I had a post about Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing that I was hoping would go viral because that's the only way I ever saw Amazon ever fix anyone's KDP issues. I posted, then went to bed. When I woke up, it had 250+ points, but was on page 5 with a bunch of posts that were much older and/or had single-digit points. It must have been on page 1 for a while to rack up that many points, then it sank almost immediately to page 5 where all the other posts with even 50+ points were days old. I've always wondered what happened there. Was it the algorithm, or did a mod step in?

scamaltman2 15d ago
Mods are heavily involved in HN rankings and automation is a tie breaker. There's no way that happened by automation.

bigiain 15d ago

It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that was purely automated based on 4chan organised Gamergater's dogpiling and looking exactly like voting rings and/or manufactured controversy.