Comment by listenallyall | Hacker News Reader

Comment by listenallyall | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for explaining.

> 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.

There's an eternal tug of war about which stories belong on HN's front page. No one is ever pleased; frontpage space is the scarcest resource HN has [1], so there's never enough for the topics one is interested in [2].

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...

On any given day, most of the world's most important news topics aren't on the HN front page, and don't belong there. There are plenty of other sites that do a better job of reporting on the entire world.

> most of the world's most important news topics aren't on the HN front page

because they don't gain traction among the HN audience. CV has, and to a very large degree, according to dang's comment above.

It's mostly because they're not what HN is for. Sometimes things that are mostly not what HN is for gain traction on HN while still being mostly not what HN is for.

> because they don't gain traction among the HN audience

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...

I appreciate your thoughts in this thread, and more importantly, your willingness to explain your decisions. Your diligent moderation throughout the site ensures it remains a terrific, unique and much-needed resource. Thank you!

Thank you too! It's important feedback to hear that the explanations are helpful, because otherwise I need to recalibrate how I do it, or just (if it's not working) do less.

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.

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