Why is Hacker News behaving in such an unfair way? | Hacker News Reader

Why is Hacker News behaving in such an unfair way?

1 pointoferzelig7 comments

Can someone please explain this?

These two items point to the same URL (with a slight user-based URL "token" difference at the end; that's why it's not detected by HN as double).

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12529981 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12534296

The first one has 6 upvotes, the second one has 204.

The first one was published to HN much earlier (2016-09-19T09:13:07.000Z) than the second one (2016-09-19T20:10:34.000Z).

The first one was published by a user with 3052 karma, the second one by a user with 1476 karma, at the time of this writing.

What is going on?

View on HN

First one was submitted at 2:13am on the US west coast; 2nd one was at 3:10pm. Obvious which would get more eyeballs.

As for dupe fairness, the 2 stories point to different domains (at least now), but even with the same domain, identifying what part of a domain to ignore for uniqueness isn't simple and dupes get through all the time.

Yes. And the reason why the vote ratio (204:6) is much higher than the ratio of eyeballs at 3pm to 2am (maybe 5:1 or so) is that most readers only look at the front page, so articles that get enough votes to make it onto the front page get a lot more votes.

Periodically looking at the /new page and upvoting worthwhile stories helps good stories not get missed, so thanks to people who do it.

I don't have a problem with the dupe itself, as it's indeed different.

With regards to timing: earth is round. It's daytime and night time in different parts of the world in any given instant. Why does it matter what's the time in US west coast (or any other geographical location for the sake of this)?

The earth is round but HN users aren't evenly distributed across the globe. The time on the US west coast matters because that's where the majority of users seem to be.

Has anybody ever studied HN demographics?

> Why does it matter what's the time in US west coast

For the same reason that stories about real estate and homelessness in San Francisco seem popular on HN.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bueZoYhUlg

It's a conspiracy.

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