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Comment by fao_ | Hacker News Reader

The algorithms were changed at some point, that could be what you're referring to.

You can use news.ycombinator.com/classic to view the front page curated using the older algorithm(s) (For me this is actually a more relevant front page compared to the default one)

View on HN

Can also just use hckrnews.com which is much better in my opinion (and also retains flagged stories, which I am often interested in because I don't share the HN community's news-worthiness ideology).

+1 to hckrnews.com - I've not used the "real front page" for, well, many months (how long has hckrnews.com been around? seems like forever...!).

I assume this made changes to karma points as well? I remember when 1 upvote roughly equalled one karma point. It seems about half that now.

I've noticed:

- For a post or show/ask hn| 4 upvotes = 1 karma point

- For a comment | 1 upvote = 1 karma point

Not sure if this is typical or varies by account based on post history/vote history/above or below 500 karma/etc.

They made some changes to how upvoted stories get turned into karma points. There is some threshold of votes (I don't know what it is) that a story needs before upvotes count toward karma. I noticed this a week or two ago and inquired with the moderators.

Is that why sometimes I'll see the "vote number" for a comment jump by 5 all at once?

I don't think that is related. My assumption is that might have to do with caching and when the old value gets evicted from the cache the new value just happens to be different by that much.

I didn't know about the classic view. Thanks for sharing this!

Thanks for clearing this up!

Are there any information or formulas about the new algorithms?

Information about algorithms is generally kept secret to prevent people from gaming the system. (there are some unwritten heuristics that I wish were written though, such as the inherent penalty for self-posts)

Can you elaborate on the self-posts bit?

I found this discussion about the self-post penalty from 2010:

Tell HN: Why you should submit your stuff as a blog posting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1076633

E.g. Ask HNs.

As minimaxir said the algos are kept someone secret. The higher level concepts are shared in a manner to prevent people from exploiting and taking advantage of them (and I agree that they should be kept that way).

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