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.
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?
HN is already perceived as an argumentative forum. Now imagine if the ratio rule wasn't there. FWIW I find it just as effective on Bluesky and Twitter for myself. Ratioed threads are usually more heat than light.
Yup, with just enough of an unmistakable ideological slant to force posts with differing views to take a Kharma nose dive. It seems that the addition of Kharma is proportional to posts that align with the overall narrative of the board post sentiment. In my case, I've noticed that some of my posts don't appear as originally created. Can't really confirm if this is inherent to the algorithm or just internal interference. The latter would be my guess. :(
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.
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.
>as that ranks pretty low on the list of potentially damaging threads, don't you think?
Yes, exactly. That's why it struck me as being so weird; something so innocuous on its face getting hammered that badly suggests some kind of outside coordinated influence.
(oh, and edit; apparently industry lobbyists had been holding private counter-op meetings with the EU Commission before said petition was even finished, so there's that. Not immediately relevant to this discussion but it does speak to what goes on behind the curtain in government topics)
The part of this I always forget is how lazily the ranking is applied. HN does not rescore the list on every page load. A story is rescored when someone upvotes it, and separately one story out of the top 50 gets picked at random every thirty seconds and rescored. Pages cache for another ninety seconds on top of that.
So the front page is never a clean rendering of the formula. A story that stops getting votes can sit at the wrong position for minutes at a time.
Which is also why the penalty figures in the post are ranges rather than numbers. Shirriff is inferring them from stories ranked lower than their raw score implies, and a story that simply has not been rescored recently looks exactly the same from outside. He lists that as one of his sources of error, along with neighboring stories carrying their own penalties.
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.
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.
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.
There may be some survivor bias here, but second-chance stories seem very front-page sticky to me. At least those I have recognized.
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...
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.
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.
Yes, exactly. That's why it struck me as being so weird; something so innocuous on its face getting hammered that badly suggests some kind of outside coordinated influence.
(oh, and edit; apparently industry lobbyists had been holding private counter-op meetings with the EU Commission before said petition was even finished, so there's that. Not immediately relevant to this discussion but it does speak to what goes on behind the curtain in government topics)
So the front page is never a clean rendering of the formula. A story that stops getting votes can sit at the wrong position for minutes at a time.
Which is also why the penalty figures in the post are ranges rather than numbers. Shirriff is inferring them from stories ranked lower than their raw score implies, and a story that simply has not been rescored recently looks exactly the same from outside. He lists that as one of his sources of error, along with neighboring stories carrying their own penalties.
Remember that thing Carl Sagan told us: “if you want to complain about AI from scratch you must first invent the universe.”
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.