How does this submission drop from top 10 to 3rd page in about 20-30 minutes? Not allowed to mention anything negative about YC co's?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
It doesn't mean that we don't moderate such threads at all, though. We penalized this one the same way we've been penalizing almost every coronavirus story, because if we didn't, HN would have consisted of nothing but coronavirus for the past week. I don't see this story as significant or interesting enough to rise above the threshold. "$Company is losing money" is a dog-bites-man story right now, especially in that industry. No?
> we've been penalizing almost every coronavirus story
Only you know the actual volume of coronavirus-related stories, and whether leaving them as-is would cover the entire top 10, entire first page, or entire first 3 pages.
However IMO the adjustment, or "penalization," being applied seems too severe. CV is obviously the most important news topic in the world right now, the situation changes extremely rapidly, making the comments section, with contributors from around the globe, highly relevant and informative. My opinion is that up-to-date CV-related content on HN has been difficult to find, and the lack of such, in favor of random, often whimsical topics, trivializes HN.
As I write this, the only CV-connected stories on page 1 are at #19: "Chloroquine, past and present" and at #28: "State projections for Covid-19." While its understandable not wanting HN to be totally dominated by CV, I think there is a better balance to be had.
The principles we try to apply are the "significant new information" test for major ongoing stories [3], and optimizing for intellectual curiosity [4]. One thing we don't do routinely is moderate by which stories are most important in the world. There are always many things going on that are far more important than the topics that appear on HN. If importance were a leading factor, HN would become a regular news site and cease to exist as HN. Important stories tend to drown out the quieter, odder, or deeper ones that gratify curiosity. HN is mostly a site for the latter. That's how a biography of George Gershwin can be at the top of the front page in the middle of a global pandemic.
In practice, a crisis like this is inevitably going to show up on HN a lot. But it will show up in unpredictable ways (because predictability is the enemy of curiosity), not like it does on a regular news site.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22527396, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
because they don't gain traction among the HN audience. CV has, and to a very large degree, according to dang's comment above.
That's a bit of a misperception. They do gain traction. If we didn't moderate them, HN's front page would consist of the hottest topics of the moment and would be a different site altogether.
The strongest force on the internet is indignation—orders of magnitude stronger than curiosity—so there need to be countervailing mechanisms (like software and moderation) to contain its effects and allow HN to be HN. Upvotes alone don't do it, unfortunately.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
People are most welcome to ask further questions if there's something we haven't explained yet. I'm slowly building up a corpus of links to previous explanations, which is why my answers are so full of HN Search links. Eventually we might compile all that into some web pages.