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Let me start by saying that the outcome I'd like to see from this discussion is an agreement that there's still room for improvement regarding moderation and th

Let me start by saying that the outcome I'd like to see from this discussion is an agreement that there's still room for improvement regarding moderation and the underlying HN algorithm. Specifically, the case of two URLs being submitted with and without a forward slash shouldn't be allowed. The follow up submission should have attributed points to the initial submission and the post shouldn't have been flagged. 1) The story was removed shortly after time of post. Specifically, the story was submitted to HN the day the blog post came out. It's irrelevant that I decided to discuss this issue a month later and not conducive to the discussion; I just thought it was worthy to bring up that the post was removed where others e-book sale posts have continuously risen to the top of HN rankings. 2) The original post mentioned wasn't submitted in all caps as per danso's link to hnsearch. If you visit the blog, it's likely all caps titled due to text-transform:uppercase, not because the author chose to uppercase the title. 3) Several posts never made it to the front page. There was one post with 16 upvotes at time of removal which would've been the only post on the main page. The fact that users submitted posts with and without a trailing slash is very important here; it indicates there may have been a broader issue with HN's spam prevention system.

brudgers 13y ago
Let me be clear, the fact that this particular complaint emphasizes what happened to other "e-book sale posts" reinforces my suspicion that the underlying reason for the complaint is that HN squashed a social media effort to promote a particular e-book. My reason for making this clarification is that I don't think the HN ranking algorithm is in particular need of improvement, so we are unlikely to reach agreement. However, for completeness, the reason I do not think it is broken is exactly because it squashed the sort of post about which those with an interest cry "unfair" and reference other "e-book sale posts" as a point of comparison. I will add, that if I were trying to design a system intended to foil the use of HN for social media promotion, I would consider a honey-pot strategy which would allow a comparison of two streams of submissions.

brudgers 13y ago

Let me be clear, the fact that this particular complaint emphasizes what happened to other "e-book sale posts" reinforces my suspicion that the underlying reason for the complaint is that HN squashed a social media effort to promote a particular e-book. My reason for making this clarification is that I don't think the HN ranking algorithm is in particular need of improvement, so we are unlikely to reach agreement. However, for completeness, the reason I do not think it is broken is exactly because it squashed the sort of post about which those with an interest cry "unfair" and reference other "e-book sale posts" as a point of comparison. I will add, that if I were trying to design a system intended to foil the use of HN for social media promotion, I would consider a honey-pot strategy which would allow a comparison of two streams of submissions.