Hacker News Reader

Comment by Natsu | Hacker News Reader

In this case, the algorithm is open, so there's no guesswork:

http://www.righto.com/2009/06/how-does-newsyc-ranking-work.h...

HN has normally been transparent whenever they modify something manually.

I've been noticing a pattern lately where anything that touches on a few different hot-button issues gets blasted away with flags the second it creeps onto the front page. I don't think its the mods having anything to do with it, but it feels a little broken.

It's usually that users flag these stories, presumably because of HN's (really the public internet's) inability to discuss them civilly and substantively.

It's a tough problem. Those stories often relate to important issues which hold intellectual interest, if not necessarily gratifying intellectual curiosity (the mandate of this site). In that sense they're not all off-topic. But it damages this site and community for it to host ideological flamewars, much as it damages a neighborhood to host rubbish fires.

My reading of the user flags is that they're partly trying to protect the neighborhood, and there's value in that.

It's a difficult balance to be sure, and I have to say that I respect your work in keeping HN a pleasant place to be. I mean, there's stuff like this which is pretty important: http://imgur.com/gallery/ebUd5

But... if you look at that, you can see 'flamewar' written all over it, even though it's getting very little coverage. So I wouldn't submit it to HN as a story, even though probably quite a few people here care about it.

So what it achieves is silences any discussion and pretends that no controversial topics exist. I don't think there's much value in this HN's "fear of controversy". Fact is, almost ALL things that are "gratifying intellectual curiosity" have some controversy in it, so the system doesn't deliver what it's made to do. After this too aggressive filter on topics, what's left is some very niche topics without controversy, since they are too niche for the majority to have any opinion or prior knowledge on it, or so uninteresting nobody even bothers to comment.

Just open HN at any given moment and tell me honestly - how many articles do you actually read and think they are genuinely interesting?

I can tell you this - a couple years back, when HN was just starting to get popular, the algorithm was different, and I found almost 90% of top stories so interesting it was worth to read them, and the remaining 10% I usually read anyway because it was something I just didn't knew about yet, but could be safely said they were interesting to people who knows what it's about based on the way stories were ranked.

Now I open NH and AT BEST I read 1-2 articles, often 0, because it is full of either some obscure stuff, often without even upvotes, but new, or it is something everyone agree on, which is often an article about common sense. Sad.

It's hard to have this discussion on the terms that you're presenting. For one thing, people disagree strongly about what's interesting. For another, this perception tends to be skewed by nostalgia: most of us think that HN is worse than it was when we first got into it, but that's because we mostly think that about everything. (Things have always been getting worse, as some wit once said.) There are other biases too: if HN doesn't interest you (i.e. any of us) for a few days in a row, you're likely to think that it's going to seed, but in fact regular fluctuation is bound to yield such stretches from time to time.

If you'd care to find an example or two of a front page from when you think HN was better, that expresses what was better about it, I'd be happy to take a look. You can do that either using the Internet Archive, or by using HN's front page archive like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2016-07-23, for any day since 2014-11-11.

For fun and a small bias check, if you do look at frontpage history, keep track of the number of days you looked at before finding suitable examples. e.g. if you come up with two good examples, it would be interesting to know if they were the first two you looked at, vs. 2/10 or whatever.

Btw, the above offer goes to any HN reader who wants to spend time finding examples of how HN was better in the past. Just make sure to give us specific links. Otherwise it's too hard to say anything meaningful.

That's a functionality I didn't know exists. So ok, I randomly selected two dates, 2016-07-23 and 2015-01-23.

2016-07-23

Articles i would check out (2):

> Show HN: Chalkbot

> Space Emerging from Quantum Mechanics

2015-01-23

Articles i would check out (8):

> Google discloses three severe vulnerabilities in Apple OS X

> Scientists have shown that young blood rejuvenates old tissues

> Day in the Life of a Google Manager

> Telomere extension turns back aging clock in cultured human cells, study finds

> $1.6B in funding and $7B in exits: Chicago tech just had its best year ever

> Hipster Logo Generator

> Why I Am Not a Maker

> Lars Andersen: a new level of archery [video]

Now this may be biased because I somehow knew which page was the old one, so I could choose more articles just to prove my point. So someone should do a blind test to verify it. Also it may have been a "good day", so more samples should be tested to verify it's not an exception.

But the fact is, I remember even now reading half of these articles I listed from old page. Especially telomere one. If this article would be posted today, it would attract comments and would be penalized, and who knows, maybe even flagged by some nutjob who thinks that "society obsession over youth" is bad and at the same time upvotes post about scientific study how being fat is actually not causing diabetes.

Another fact is that once community gets large enough, content gets objectively worse. Not because of nostalgia or some other psychological effect, but measurably worse.

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