The front page has never been the raw "community intent". It's not just upvotes and time that control ranking. Other factors are sites that get automatically pe

The front page has never been the raw "community intent". It's not just upvotes and time that control ranking. Other factors are sites that get automatically penalized, title words that get penalized, flagged articles, controversy penalty (which is likely to hit this article soon), articles that get marked as "fluff", and probably other factors. From my measurements (in 2013 before the latest changes), at least 20% of front-page articles and 38% of second-page articles were penalized, so there have always been a lot of invisible ranking changes. I wrote up details at http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-works.html http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...