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AFAIU flamewars increase the discussion on a topic, so this makes a story much more likely to stay on frontpage.
by rakoo 12y ago
AFAIU flamewars increase the discussion on a topic, so this makes a story much more likely to stay on frontpage.
- hluska 12y agoThe danger of flamewars is that they rapidly devolve to personal attacks. When threads devolve this far, it keeps intelligent people from joining the conversation and actually elevating it. 10,000 monkeys with 10,000 typewriters may create a best seller, but 10,000 raving lunatics with Internet connections destroy any chance of an intellectual conversation....:)
- dubfan 12y agoI recall that the site has some flamewar detection algorithm that will penalize a story if it detects a flamewar. I don't have a source for this at the moment, though.
- r721 12y agoHere: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-works.html http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... "In order to prevent flamewars on Hacker News, articles with "too many" comments will get heavily penalized as "controversial". In the published code, the contro-factor function kicks in for any post with more than 20 comments and more comments than upvotes. Such an article is scaled by (votes/comments)^2. However, the actual formula is different - it is active for any post with more comments than upvotes and at least 40 comments. Based on empirical data, I suspect the exponent is 3, rather than 2 but haven't proven this."