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Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

I would favour that HN investigate in this. HN puts a lot of energy to mobilise its employees/whatever to take over a HN thread like this.

Their minions write a lot of blub comments so that the comment count is higher than the voting count of a story which equals to flagging a news!!

Another very visible behaviour is that they very quickly push positive news out as soon as there is a negative news.

If you track HN stories about Microsoft with a third party HN tracking service, you clearly see evidence that unfavourable HN stories about MS vanish very quickly by flagging or overflowing the story with a lot of blurb comments to hide them. And on the same day another often minor but positive news surface and sits on HN frontpage for several hours - and of course flagging all comments that even try to hint the privacy issues with Win10 or anything remotely normal comment that isn't overly hyping their software/service.

View on HN

We always take users' concerns about astroturfing or possible manipulation of HN's front page very seriously, and I'll look at the data on this post as soon as I have time. I've addressed your concerns thoroughly in the past, though, and we've seen no evidence since to change our minds:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844253

I suggest to create an internal view that lists the top 50% (story vote count) per day ordered by date descending. Mark all stories that are currently on the HN frontpage in a certain color. Also include all stories that got flagged, deleted in another color.

I have created such a view and see correlation with stories from MS. But not from Google, Apple or Amazon, nor any other company.

The usual tactics one can see is that a negative story about MS is getting flooded (after x min after they started to react) with many comments. As soon as the story has more comments than upvotes the HN sorting algorithms acts like the story was flagged and puts it of the HN frontpage to page 100+, and put a few flags to the mix and the story vanish pretty quickly. One can also see that MS seem to have a backlog of prepared positive stories. As everytime a negative story hits HN, the negative story is threaded as mentioned plus a new positive story is submitted and upvoted as replacement.

Edit: everyone else can do this too, and can watch these behaviours.

I come to HN to read news and the comments. So I sincerly don't understand why a story with eg 400 upvotes and 500 comments is hidden from me, but being the number one story on HN of that day. I suggest to change the threshold on HN so that either a comment count higher than upvote count don't alter the story position at all or change the threshold to make the site experience more transparent and fair.

Please share the code to generate your view.

Thank you for the linked comment. I have rarely seen moderators address users' concerns in more depth – especially if they think such worries are unfounded.

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