Comment by mcherm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcherm | Hacker News Reader

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> also, how come the news of this change only came from a non-american news source?

Well, did you read the first two sentences of the article?

> Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg says users will be able to turn off political adverts on the social network in the run-up to the 2020 US election. In a piece written for USA Today newspaper, he also says he hopes to help four million Americans sign up as new voters.

The USA Today article is easily located: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/06/17/facebook-v...

My conclusion is that Hacker News has a bias in favor of a news source like the BBC over a news source like USA Today which is strong enough to overcome USA Today having the original story yet have the BBC article be the one voted up.

I’m not a statistician, but I know my internet memes, and the one that comes to mind is, “n=1.”

Especially considering that there are a LOT of factors driving why one of many articles describing the same thing would get upvoted. Choice of headline and time of day come to mind as factors that sometimes outweigh “original source.”

My own n=handful experience is that I can sometimes post one of my own essays, get crickets, and then it will get a second chance, and BOOM, front page.

At least one of those times, the essay has gotten traction elsewhere, like Twitter and Reddit, so one possible explanation is that sometimes people upvote articles about a subject they have seen elsewhere.

If that were the case, it would favour secondary articles over the original.

The overwhelming reason for things like that is randomness. If you answered 'randomness' every time such a question arises, you'd probably have a better mental model of HN than maybe anybody (us included). But of course that's deeply unsatisfying, so we invent stories instead. Randomness plus cognitive bias equals narrative. I'm not putting you down—we all do this.

I think a moderator took a look at the two articles and felt like the BBC one was a bit more neutral, while the USA Today one was a bit more press-releasey, so didn't change the URL. I haven't looked at either article; I'm just reporting how we tend to consider these things.

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