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Comment by gtrubetskoy | Hacker News Reader

I once submitted a blog post [1] and later received an email from someone at HN saying that it was a great article but didn't do so well and if I re-submit it, they will make sure it does better, so I did and it went to the top.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16862077

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Would be interesting to see the correspondence, but don't feel obligated.

They do it frequently. I've had it happen several times. The specific text isn't particularly exciting. They just give you a link to resubmit if you're interested. You also get an extra upvote upon submission (and I imagine there is more of a bump behind the scenes).

What does HN feel about this? Is it curation from the staff or is it selective manipulation? On first blush, I'm for it... but I'd be interested to see what others think.

>Is it curation from the staff or is it selective manipulation?

Curation is selective manipulation. Whether it's positive or negative correlates to whether you personally agree with it.

Yes. I generally find HN works ie surfaces interesting stuff. I judge HN by what not how. The how moan is often “they don’t like my stuff” sniff sniff

I like it. Hn is still worth checking a few times every day. Whatever the staff is doing, it feels like they keep the quality relatively stable.

at first thought I'd be against it. Because they essentially bump what they think is good, and it does not (necessarily) reflect the community. Sometimes things slip through at HN though so giving a nudge to resubmit sounds like a good idea.

Tbh, I don't really mind either way, I've enjoyed most content on here.

We bump what we think the community might like and is aligned with the site guidelines. And only to the lower half of the front page, whence it soon falls away if we guessed wrong. The posts aren't necessarily what we ourselves like or think is good; mostly we don't have time to decide on that.

Fair enough. As I mentioned I am pretty happy with the content on here. Also happy with the moderations so thank you for that! :)

You have time to decide what to bump, but not to decide what you like? Makes no sense.

They explicitly said they bump what they think the community might like. It doesn’t take a thorough reading of every submission to make that guess.

It does, unless you want to create an echo chamber (which HN somewhat is)

What would make HN less of an echo chamber?

I don't think it can be solved by moderation, if that makes you feel better

It makes me feel worse. But I'd like to hear why you say that HN somewhat is an echo chamber, and what you think would make it less of one, or where you might look for examples of non-echo-chambers on the internet. You're welcome to reply here, or email hn@ycombinator.com.

It's possible that you've observed something that's not on our radar, and such information is important for us to be aware of, even if we can't solve it by moderation.

Do you have any answer to the question?

Im aware. I’m skeptical of what Dang said that it should take more time to decide what they like.

I’ve upvoted opinion pieces that I disagree with, but I wanted to see what the community thought.

You have time to decide if the community might like it but not if yourselves do? Bit weird.

If you do something hundreds of times a day for years, you get fast at it. Also, don't forget I said "might". These are quick, approximate guesses.

I guess a good community needs constant upkeep, like anything else in life. The community was created over what a few people thought was good content, and if left alone will probably get dissolved in some "large reddit" effect.

Interesting thing to know would be - whether HN staff does not allow the stories that they disagree with, to get popular.

I've had that happen a couple of times. The email is fairly bland - it looked like the sort of copy you'd write for an automated system. It includes a link to this comment by way of explanation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380

the way it works is described in this HN post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 I've had about a dozen of them, I think probably because I'm in a time zone that gets buried more than others?

on edit: maybe it's not exactly the same thing because I don't have to resubmit when I get these, they are just put in the second chance pool.

The same happened to me just a couple of days ago. I thought it was a very nice thing for the quality of the content that goes to the top (not just because it was my submission, of course).

that has happened to me too

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