How Hacker News ranking works: scoring, controversy, and penalties (2013)

https://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-works.html

48•theanonymousone•1h ago

Comments

VCFundedGenYer•56m ago

This falls apart completely if you’re like me and only see the list presented on brutalist.report which is strictly chronological and with zero algorithms.

perching_aix•50m ago

Indeed, if you go out of your way to circumvent automatic story ranking, the particularities of automatic story ranking no longer affect you...

A capability available without visiting any third party sites, by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

I just hope you don't believe that somehow this magically allows you to escape bias. A (reverse) chronological sort is still a sort.

Retr0id•36m ago

Looks algorithmic to me. Reverse-chronological with upvote threshold(?), where upvotes are correlated with sort rank on vanilla HN.

VCFundedGenYer•33m ago

Again, not a thing if you are on the site I mentioned.

tptacek•31m ago

If there's a vote threshold, it's still profoundly influenced by the HN algorithm, because front page exposure is the principal component in how many votes a story gets.

Waterluvian•30m ago

There’s clearly decision-making going on because it’s not listing most HN posts. How is it deciding what not to show?

LastTrain•10m ago

Not to mention HN posts don’t spontaneously emerge out of the randomness of the cosmos.

Waterluvian•42s ago

Sure they do. Just with extra steps.

Retr0id•26m ago

Saying it a second time doesn't make it any more true.

oblio•28m ago

That site's interesting, but it would be super helpful with some summaries of the stories and maybe of the comments. Though I imagine that would make it a LOT more expensive to host.

tptacek•31m ago

Presumably this has gotten way, way more complicated in the last 13 years.

onesandofgrain•11m ago

+ if (this.moneyPaid > 10000USD) = instaPostToFrontPage.

Liftyee•17m ago

The penalties are interesting. It shows that the design goal is not to maximise interactions otherwise "controversial" posts should stay up. Still though, I wonder what's the point of deranking said posts. Minimise the potential for a flame war to hit critical mass? Stop people from perceiving HN as an argument-filled forum?

firesteelrain•16m ago

Controlled narratives

Barbing•1m ago

Officially, should be protecting the site by keeping things interesting. (Just saying officially.)

Thanks to dang, links:

curiosity and repetition: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

downweighting follow-ups: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

anon_cow1111•15m ago

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•9m 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.

compiler-guy•11m ago

Not sure when it started, but the second chance pool has moderators putting stories that didn’t get much attention when they were submitted directly on the front page.

There may be some survivor bias here, but second-chance stories seem very front-page sticky to me. At least those I have recognized.

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How Hacker News ranking works: scoring, controversy, and penalties (2013)

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