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Comment by kelvin0 | Hacker News Reader

>>" It's content that's king. That's good news for Hacker News because it indicates that what matters there is content and not game playing". <<

If that were the case I should have much more Karma. The fact is many times I posted a submission, only to see it slip off the headline in 0.2ms. Then a few days later, someone else (with more Karma) posts the same thing and it stays on for 2 days ... I'm not complaining, simply stating that it is not as cut and dry as the author mentions.

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The frontpage algorithm weighs more heavily for those who have previously made frontpage, right?

I assume so. Last few weeks I've been able to get frontpage repeatedly with very few upvotes.

Somewhere I remember dang saying so to my account.

In theory, that shouldn't happen. HN should detect duplicates and just add an upvote to the existing submission when it is resubmitted.

In practice, it happens quite a lot. The duplicate detector is easily fooled, and often the same underlying "story" is reported in a bunch of places.

Getting traction on an HN submission is very random. Unless it's about discrimination in tech work, at which point it will be flagged off the front page almost immediately.

Also, duplicates are only detected for (I think) 8 hours. After that you can resubmit.

The duplicate detector is a bit odd. Not sure what its rules are, but it doesn't always seem to work. One example (only noticed this because I wrote the linked blog post.)

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8860103 : http://reactionwheel.net/2015/01/80s-vc.html
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8908463 : http://reactionwheel.net/2015/01/80s-vc.html?newpost
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8927285 : http://reactionwheel.net/2015/01/80s-vc.html
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9129911 : http://reactionwheel.net/2015/01/80s-vc.html

Something that shouldn't be overlooked is the fact the author is John Graham-Cumming and you are kelvin0. Almost every one in the top 10 leaderboard posts under their real name. They have more respect and credibility than an anonymous poster. It's one of those annoying and readily exploitable flaws of human nature.

Also, I clicked on kelvin0 and the only thing the profile says is YCOMT which appears to be You Came On My Tits (at least according to Google).

That being said, we can clearly not conclude that 'content is king', right? If 'Meta' profile information biases submissions negatively? As mentionned earlier, I am not complaining simply stating a fact. As for YCOMT, it's from a funny episode of a comedy Show I used to watch ... live and learn I guess.

> That being said, we can clearly not conclude that 'content is king', right?

In my humble opinion, yes, content is not king. But, it's more than just allowing people to put a face to the name. You have to fit in. You have to agree with the political views of the majority. You have to agree with the taboos of the majority. There's a reason Michael O'Church and Zed Shaw aren't on that leaderboard, despite the quality of the content they posted.

> You have to fit in. You have to agree with the political views of the majority.

No, you don't; the people with lots of karma don't have homogenous expressed political views, so they can't all agree with the majority, either. How you post about your views is a lot more important than what your views are.

One of Zed Shaw's comments got over 1,000 points.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6805807

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