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Comment by mandelbrotwurst | Hacker News Reader

That's helpful, thanks for the reply!

Are all sites deemed political down-weighted equally? Is this a manually curated list or also algorithmically determined somehow?

Are there other categories / topics that sites might be placed in that affect their ranking?

The problem of trying to apply weights to domains and/or specific submissions based on some idea of how well they fit the ethos of the site seems like an interesting one!

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Yes, primarily-political sites are downweighted equally. And yes, there are other kinds of site that get penalized. For example, most major media sites produce more lightweight articles than substantive ones, so are marked that way in our system. I should mention, though, that there are plenty of ways for such penalties to be overridden, besides moderators turning them off manually. For example, they don't apply to submissions by users who have a track record of submitting solid stories.

Some of this is algorithmically determined and some of it is manually curated. The more complicated a decision is (e.g. is site X primarily political), the less likely it is to be algorithmic.

Thank you for this enlightening addition. I certainly was not complaining about the article's presence here, but rather instead warning against the rest of a particularlyedangerously truthy political site. Your context really helps us in general not worry too much, knowing that you have your human eye on submissions. Nonetheless, since people often look around a site after reading a first article, i think such a warning is warranted most times such a particularly egregious site posts a rarely decent article.

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