Ask PG: Is something staving off the decline of HN?

The quality of the stories, or the comments?

The only changes recently are a better voting ring detector, and the hiding of comment scores. The former has definitely kept stuff off the frontpage that otherwise would have made it.

It's harder to say if the hiding of comment scores has made comments better. It has definitely made the site more pleasant for me to use, but I may be in a unique position because people love to pick fights with me.

Both, but the increased quality of the stories is what led me to ask. Will the changes to the voting ring detector show up in the Arc source, or is that kept secret in order to preserve the effectiveness of the detector?

I know many disagree with hiding comment scores, but in my view, the quality of discussions has notably improved since scores are hidden.

I would be interested in knowing how pg estimates the effect of this tweak.

Here's a public repo, if nothing else it's a mirror https://github.com/nex3/arc/