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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

Ranking by upvotes/comments seems highly problematic, even with HN's antibrigade features.

A) There are many external factors that can implicitly cap the number of upvotes/comments. (time submitted, amount of competition, etc.) HN has repost rules to alleviate this problem: would Apply HN posts be able to repost too?

B) Not to mention that it encourages sockpuppet voting/commenting, especially since there is a high reward for doing so.

Product Hunt, for example, thrives on "how can I get exposure for my startup submission outside of the intrinsic quality of the startup itself?" and it would be an improper fit for HN.

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I think we're on the same page to some extent. What I meant by 'ranking by comments' is that we want the ranking to depend on the quality of the discussion. That's the one thing that can't be faked.

That's how the ranking of HN stories works now. It's a combination of upvotes and human curation by users (e.g. flagging) and moderators.

So there's going to be some combination of technical and non-technical factors. How exactly will that work? We don't know yet. Let's see what happens and figure it out together. That's part of the experiment: we'll figure it out in the open and adapt to feedback. But let's wait until we have some data to look at.

FWIW, my experience with HN is that genuine community interest is relatively easy to recognize.

Would it be appropriate to ask our users of our startup to and vote for us on here? If they are invested enough in our service and community to do so, it seems like that would be a very positive and useful signal in it's own right. Or would that be considered gaming the votes?

No, that would be gaming the votes, just as asking them to upvote for a blog post would be.

B is tough. Would be interesting to see the sum of the karma of all users who upvote a single one.

Another thing to watch would be the mean user karma of all votes. A bunch of low-karma vote stuffing would actually bring a post down.

If you can get a ton of massive karma users to upvote and game this, maybe you should just get in by default?

"Apply HN: Apply HN voting bots as a service"

Everyone seems very worried about entrepreneurs ‘gaming’ the system and it somehow not being fair. Ability to game the system might however be correlated with success at building a company. I don’t know if this is true or not but top quality investors are probably open to the possibility: I know all other things being equal I’d rather invest in someone able to mobilize upvotes/their community than someone who can’t do that as that's correlated with ability to generate inbound traffic/attention.

More interesting to me though with all this is what it say’s about the future of scaling YC. YC’s mission is to enable innovation, and funding more startups hopefully leads to more innovation. The full YC program, already spread across two demo days, is probably close to the limits of how many startups can be funded in one go. The Fellowship, by being virtual, is much more scalable but one of the key bottlenecks is always going to be reviewing applications – this experiment could help remove that bottleneck. (another bottleneck I see is office hours, but getting sci-fi for a moment maybe YC research can develop a chatbot for that one day!).

There's a lot of uncertainty here. Maybe upvote/comments ranking will be a good thing, maybe it will be a bad ting.

High uncertainty is actually good. That's what makes experiments valuable - they reduce the uncertainty and thereby help us better understand something. In this case that "something" is the HN application process.

So even if this process has potential problems, the experiment is still worth it.

Maybe using upvotes divided by age as a metric would help with the first problem... although I suspect the distribution of upvotes over time is some kind of exponential decay... hrm.

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