Ask HN: Erratic HN front page algorithm

7•7777777phil•3w ago

Last week I had two submissions reach the HN front page. Before that, I assumed the ranking followed a roughly monotonic time-decay curve once a post peaked. While watching these two posts, I noticed something different: their rank would sometimes improve after declining, and occasionally oscillate back and forth (Here is a graph showing this behavior: https://imgur.com/a/AQnSh6I). what mechanisms in the HN ranking algorithm cause this kind of non-monotonic movement. Is it due to vote weighting, comment activity, re-ranking batches, or something else?

The graph is from: https://track-hacker-news.com/

EDIT: This is the post referenced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46512881

Comments

r721•3w ago

1) Flags ("enough flags will strongly reduce the rank of the submission")

2) Flame-War Detector ("A good rule of thumb for this effect is when the number of comments on a submission exceeds its score.")

Quotes from here: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

7777777phil•3w ago

1) But then why would it come back again. 2) Maybe that yes, but then same question as with (1)

gus_massa•3w ago

The main idea is that they are sorted by "upvotes^2/time" or something like that, but there are a lot of automatic and manual penalties, that can be added or removed by the mods.

(Probably upvotes^1.6/(time+1) , but it may have change from time to time, or not, who knows.)

journal•3w ago

I bet if you saw the source code for how the algorithm really worked and what options admins have behind the scenes, will make you vomit.

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