Open secrets about Hacker News
bengtan.com
bengtan.com
This might be true internally and initially, before any ant-spam, anti-upvote-ring detection takes place. Effectively, from a user point of view it is not - at least for me.
When I look at the points one of my submissions get and compare my increase in overall karma it is very roughly 50% most of the time. Needless to say that I never participated in things that would be considered unethically (voting-ring etc.). Also not a complaint at all, just an observation that goes against what is often written in "about HN" type posts (but not OP).
EDIT:
1. My observation is from more than a year ago, so things might well have changed.
2. As lordnacho points out below this seems to be true only for stories. Regardless why it happens, awarding stories with less points than comments makes a lot of sense to me. After all posting a suitable story is much less effort than writing a decent comment.
Both modulo moderation, of course.
Occasionally, though, I have this post that gets a decent amount of upvotes but not a single comment. I never understood why. I post for the comments and not for the upvotes. It is very frustrating, especially since it is a miracle to me what distinguishes these posts from the popular ones.
Capping the points on these makes a lot of sense though. In the end they don't contribute much.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
>Cunningham's Law states "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."
> Personally, I’d stay at 3. I’d also wait at least a day between re-posts (and try re-posting at different time slots).
Wow, that's not how I parsed the very same reposting rules. If I'm about to submit something and I found an older submission with the same URL, my personal rule is that it should be older than a year ago before I'd submit it again. Three posts with the same URL for three consecutive days seems a bit too much.
> Hacker News is moderated mainly by dang aka Dan Gackle (pronounced ‘Gackley’). He’s not of asian descent
??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
```
So I'm guessing if you're from a country where that is a regular surname, you might assume it's like that and not DanG, so yeah I guess that happens
Roughly 40% of all Vietnamese people are called "Nguyen", which makes it one of the most common family names in the world.
Also Diane in Bojack Horseman surname! Guessing she's of Vietnamese ascent!
> ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
"Dang" is a surname in Vietnam, China, and elsewhere [1], which has led to subthreads like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643150 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25053380 in which, yes, people thought he was Asian.
What's more, since the people who wrote the code for this feature are pretty smart, it's hard to believe these two things are oversights.
Edit: In response to a now deleted comment on how this feature is intended to be annoying, because your contribution was deemed harmful, but not ban-worthy, I say this:
I disagree that this approach is correct in that case. If you want to discourage certain behavior, then, on a site such as HN, you should treat your users as adults and tell them what you don't want them to do. Simply locking them out for an unknown amount of time, for unknown reasons, is just going to drive them away. This is just basic operant conditioning. Presumably, driving the user away entirely is not the result one wants a significant portion of the time.
This leads me to believe that in most (though perhaps not all) cases people are probably posting short comments. Nothing wrong with that sometimes, but overall it's the sort of thing HN tries to discourage, which isn't a bad thing IMHO.
I don't mean that literally every comment I write is getting downvoted to below zero. Rather, I'll write something, it will accumulate a couple to several upvotes, and then, those upvotes all go away over the course of a few more hours, sometimes to be replaced by net downvotes.
The end result is that I actually have less karma now than I did a few weeks ago. And, I wouldn't particularly care about those fake internet points, if the loss of them didn't seemingly come with these weird, arbitrary-seeming restrictions like "you are posting too fast."
TBH, it's getting to the point where I'm about ready to abandon this account.
If you want the rate limit turned off, we'd be happy to do that as long as we have reason to believe that you'll use the site as intended in the future. I'm sorry for the annoyance but we have to do what we can to prevent this place from burning itself to a crisp, and if you want to post without being throttled then we need your help with that.
Rather than prostrate myself before the mod team, only to end up having this happen again, I'd honestly rather flush this account down the toilet, go grab a VPN and start again. If nothing else, I'm guessing that would get rid of the random, mass downvoting that's driving me crazy, and it would save us both some time.
Edit: Oh yeah, there has been that tiny collapse button for a while, I somehow never got into the habit of using that one and forget it is there. I wish there was a setting to use the words "up vote" "down vote" and "collapse" rather than needing to pixel hunt :/.
Call me a fool, but it's never occurred to me that he wasn't. I've always pictured him as a Chinese gentleman, a sort of Confucian scholar in 0s and 1s holding up the mortal world to ancient standards of virtue.
I might come across as reading far too much xianxia, and that would be accurate.
Not just that, but for some time you could observe subthreads accusing him of being a chinese subversion of HN in china related discussions.
Guidelines-breaking comments do frequently appear about China, but that is a function of geopolitical and media trends, not HN moderation. The way we moderate such comments has nothing to do with my/our personal views about China or any other country. If you stop and think about it and you know the HN guidelines well, this shouldn't be that hard to believe. The vast majority of these moderation calls are not borderline.
From a moderation perspective, everything in the above paragraph is obvious. From a user perspective, it's often impossible to communicate, because whenever someone has a strong feeling about $topic, their view about moderation is determined by their feeling about $topic. If they see us moderating something they agree with, they jump to the conclusion that we're secretly in cahoots with the opposing side. Of course the opposing side does the same thing.
I agree, the paragraph is strange and at best reads like a non-sequitur.
Then again I always associated the username "dang" with the word "dang", which I thought it was an amusing (and appropriate) choice of name for a moderator.
Right; it took me forever to realize that "dang" was "Dan G" and not just a word. Especially since HN usernames can have mixed case, so he could have picked "DanG" (which... I still would have probably read as a funnily-formatted word but it'd be more of a hint:]). Though for all I know he predates HN supporting uppercase in names, and stylistically I can totally see preferring lowercase.
The article is talking about stories that haven't got much attention. You can infer it from the quoted text mentioned just before the 3 rule:
>If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.
I don't see how it matters whether he's Asian or not. For all I care, he could be a sentient pineapple tree and it wouldn't matter at all to my HN user experience.
Some posts get reposted a lot see this website for example https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lihaoyi.com some were posted 7 times.
This thing is that almost any well written (and not too much technical) post can reach the frontpage it only requires 3-4 people who like the post enough to upvote it during the first 30 minutes. As a result reposting works for those kind of content. And as it is not forbidden, people do it
Perhaps the purgatory state could expire after some fixed (weeks, months) cool-down period, I don't know. Just a suggestion.
That's indeed the rule, but only when the story has had significant attention (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).
When a story hasn't had significant attention in the last year (or a bit longer), it's ok to repost a small number of times.
Past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799854
Fun fact: there are manual keyword penalties, such as for bitcoin, and back around 2013 there used to be a penalty for "NSA".
Explanation by dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9097596
Yes he is. Dang, you are amazing. Thank you for tending this beautiful garden in the middle of a sad and boggy Internet.
Okay, I'll get my coat.
As a tribute to Dang, whose name you say when you make a mistake, here are some of my favorite Far Side cartoons:
Some Weirdo: https://web.archive.org/web/20190901100845/https://i.pinimg....
Monster Jobs: https://web.archive.org/web/20211028134713/https://i.pinimg....
Vultures: https://web.archive.org/web/20211028134854/https://i.pinimg....
Construction Birds at Lunch: [missing] https://i.pinimg.com/564x/3b/c5/fd/3bc5fd323e791b6879529e6a5...
Blizard's A-Comin': https://web.archive.org/web/20200509234955/https://i.pinimg....
The Creeps: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5a/1c/5e/5a1c5ef2e9ab19d27970...
Superman In His Later Years: https://web.archive.org/web/20211028134903/https://i.pinimg....
Before Paper and Scissors: https://web.archive.org/web/20211028134904/https://i.pinimg....
Sorry, Buddy: [missing] https://i.pinimg.com/564x/49/6b/3a/496b3a234ddeca894887b249e...
Nerd! ...: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/c9/08/a0/c908a02a8dfa42db9973f743b...
The Thanksgiving themed one that I googled and googled and googled for but couldn't find, which was taped to my mom's refrigerator, was the disappointed bird standing in front of the open refrigerator, lamenting: "Dang, somebody ate the middle out of the daddy longlegs!"
i hope it all stays at work most of the time.
Compared to the strictly moderated Reddit forums that are completely useless for perspectives outside of the status quo, often to a frightening degree in all directions.
Thanks dang!
Oh, hey. This is my moment of glory, I guess!
The number of people I moderate has only increased since then. I still stand by those words.
This I feel is a very good thing. Up-votes to readership is a good correlation and is better than Reddit's hotness algorithm for finding good content which seems to be just up-votes over time.
The main contribution to article goodness seems only to be the choice of those that read and up-vote however and there is no system that can replace that yet.
Hence the constant stream of articles confirming tropes that play to the HN demographics.
It's basically impossible to have a reliable 10+% conversion rate without targeting the lowest common denominator.
I don’t think this is right. During quiet times, I’ve definitely seen stories in the “live list”, and even on the front page, with only 3 points.
On the one hand I'd love to know more about the detection algorithm, on the other hand that information would be inevitably abused by those shitposters to game it.
And if I recall well, dang has already said several times that he will not disclose the algorithm https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
That really depends on how it works, and whether you know how it works. Simple signals such as IP location and temporal distribution of votes are easy to use for detection, but also easy to manipulate. On the other hand, if you employ a graph of user associations based on votes and comments in the past, you can detect clusters among them, voting collaboratively. This is way harder to circumvent in the long run, but also extremely difficult to implement accurately.
I am curious about this as well.
When I read "voting ring" I think of accounts trading votes - a group of accounts votes for each others' stories.
But your description (possibly accurate) is that asking people to vote for a story is a "voting ring".
Once in a while my company makes an announcement of some kind and emails that announcement to some portion of our customer base. Sometimes that announcement includes a link to an HN story that I create with an invitation for discussion. We never make any mention of voting or scoring.
This makes good sense because we don't have a forum and everyone prefers the HN user interface anyway.
Is this a voting ring ?
If this is not a voting ring, per se, is it likely this still trips the voting ring detection ?
Is this poor HN etiquette ?
Sometimes people are mean about React and they must be punished.
Fortunately I don’t see many comments that are so wrong that I can say they are in fact false, but it does happen. In those cases, I think a downvote is valuable.
These posts typically have a top reply comment correcting the parent.
The downs help people reduce or avoid being influenced by even glancing at information that is no good.
A chilling effect of this can be that moderators have a much more direct hand in choosing what kinds of content is successful if their criteria for "good enough" is not the same thing as "was not actually a vote ring". There are a few other sources of bias introduced by the human/automation moderation relationship.
Another issue is that HN's flagging system is routinely abused by small groups of users to remove content which does not actually run afoul of the guidelines. It's effectively a super downvote: it removes content entirely, works for posts and comments, has a much lower minimum karma threshold, and it's very hard to rescue a flagged post, and you can't "vouch" before a post gets flagged - only after.
But they don't seem to compute the ranking exactly as HN does it. I guess they use the same formula but HN discard some upvotes from 'bots' accounts
It's really hard to devise software protections to help HN stay within its mandate that don't at the same time end up penalizing a certain amount of benign activity. It's a bit like how white blood cells also kill some things that aren't a threat. But the solution is not to turn off the white blood cells - that would be really bad.
Personally I think downvotes should also be calibrated by user, a person who rarely downvotes should carry more weight in a downvote than someone who downvotes everything, and perhaps even have user-to-user calibration where your downvotes against someone become weaker the more you target them. It would help nerf people who scour a post history looking for more comments to downvotes, and help prevent downvote gangs of people who consistently downvote the same person no matter what they post.
A certain amount of dissenting opinion is necessary to keep discussions novel and break up echo chambers, but you don’t want to allow so much that you become poisoned by it.
try to make something like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=xwdv
more like this:
[edit deln.] How can you want to be part of something when you don’t even know what it’s like on the inside?
What happens when you are given a task you do NOT want to be part of? What happens when a task has moral gray area? What happens if you suddenly decide you really want to be part of something else?
[edit deln] if you’re hiring someone you want someone with valuable skills who is ready to be of service, ready to do whatever you ask, and will remain loyal so long as they are paid. You don’t want people to be nice, you want them to be predictable. That’s true value.
Putting on my conspiracy robe, I imagine it's not just about 'friends upvoting friends', but the relative ease at which new accounts are created (No SMS one-time-tokens, not even email required to register etc); and then using those accounts to artificially inflate certain stories.
If there are accounts being created for the purposes of artificially inflating stories, and their 'score value' then I would hope it's about interesting content, and not some politically tainted fluff piece used to persuade and misinform/dis-inform.
Largely HN seems to work in favor of interesting content, and I agree with this article when it says: "If you get past the voting ring detector, you won’t get past the readers."
I mean, if you somehow developed a voting ring, you would have to jump even more hoops to get that article/link the respect it deserves. And the HN audience are very articulate in pointing out flaws in services/articles/sites in general.
I also happened to submit one such article somehow. I found an article on BBC saying things that are controversial today. It was flagged very quickly. It was interesting to me because BBC is a relatively reputable source and they don't publish junk.
Anything relating to the scam MMO known as Dreamworld that Y combinator funded, and how its funding was possibly due to nepotism.
Anything relating to the admin of KiwiFarm's rebuttal [1] of Byuu's attacks on his forum or how her suicide was proven fake.
[1] https://kiwifarms.net/threads/my-response-regarding-byuu-nea...
There are others but either I can't remember them right now or I don't have adequate sources to them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27319457 - May 2021 (238 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898266 - April 2021 (195 comments)
Not only did we not censor that, I recall holding back on moderating it. We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC-funded startup is involved (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
You're right about the second case - we moderated that as not on-topic for HN.
“Chance of escaping sandbox = upvote conversion rate x views”
“Chance” must be a probability. But this formula will yield a chance > 1 most of the time. That makes no sense.
His example is 30 page views and an upvote conversion rate of 13.3%, which means the “Chance of escaping sandbox” = 3.99.
Reading more, I see that most of the math makes no sense. But I’d love to “triple” my chances of getting to the front page by making my probability 11.97.
:)
I'd really like to open that mechanism up to the community but it's still not obvious how to make that work well. Most ways of doing it would just recreate the voting system, and we already have one of those.
I misunderstood the article and translated "main" to "only". Thanks for the clarification!
Usually it's for a story which simply died in queue, which as TFA notes, is the default. Occasionally it's to see if a discussion might get "re-railed" after it's gone off on some tangent --- people responding to a title or an early comment, most often.
I don't nominate my own posts, of course.
It may be a matter of how many such nominations occur, but I'd say my success rate is >50% in having those accepted.
TL;DR: it's not just dang, and normal HN'ers can participate.
And include the link in the post.
The story-ID is the numeric part of the post URL.
For this thread, where the post URL is
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024032
(Moderators can use the story-ID via browser extensions / bookmarklets, I just learned yesterday.)
Similarly, include the story-ID for other issues (e.g., editorialised or clickbait title, suggesting a canonical URL, vouching flagged stories, spam).
If you get clicks / comments you get lift
Not enough of them, you run out of time, hit the end of the runway- crash and burn
If you get off the ground you may go far but only if you keep getting lift from all those click/comments
What?
Dang is a common euphemism for the swear word damn, https://mashable.com/article/origin-of-swear-words - the euphemism "dang" was first used around 1780.
I believe it is also regional and somewhat archaic in use now unless you are real religious and probably also rural.
>but Asia is a pretty big place
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dang_(surname)
surname in China, Vietnam, Korea, and India.
Also apparently in Germany.
this is interesting if you only see it like once per year or less, when logging in on a new device. I'm not a daily user, but I exclusively come in via RSS and a direct link to a post.
You can use the "hide" link to hide a thread, so that you wont see it and comments will not show up under the "comments" link. However this appears broken for Ask HN links.
Stories are like startups it seems :-)
>HN users have an intense emotional relationship with the front page
If a "greatest 80s hits" radio station started broadcasting music from the 00s and people got pissed off you wouldn't say "listeners of this station have an intense emotional relationship with it". When they tune in to the "greatest 80s hits" station, that's the only thing they're looking for; they don't want to listen to random songs.
There are risks to making too many rules about who gets to be a member in your club.
And no risks in being too open about who gets to be a member of your club?
For instance I've worked for companies (at least two) where, the set of goals for the hiring process, and what was actually practiced, were pointing in somewhat different directions. In the end it really came down to "how like us is the candidate". All while sailing under a "diversity is good" flag, being convinced that we lived our values, and (in one case) increasingly experiencing the problems stemming from a hardening monoculture. What happens when you try to resolve that situation is, to put it carefully, "interesting".
Just for clarity, when I was talking about how users are emotional about the front page and react intensely when they see something they don't think belongs there, it was in the context of an experiment we'd run to randomly place stories from /newest on the front page. Users reacted disastrously, not so much because of scope but because the median article's quality is just really low. That's true about in-scope topics like programming as well as other topics. I hope that makes sense.
As for 'who gets to be a member' - we don't restrict that nor want to restrict that. Everyone with intellectual curiosity, i.e. everyone, is welcome. The only requirement is actually using the site in that spirit. This is not so easy, of course, especially when the more activating topics show up.
You can try to change my mind that I should never use GOTO, some fanatic submitted such articles and comments using the "NEVER" and I will be happy to reply because is still on topic. But don't submit something like "God says vaccine is bad but hearth pills are good" since is obvious off topic , though I am curious about such illogical believes if I want to learn more there is a better forum for that.
Just ignore/downvote/flag and move on, though. Nobody is forcing anyone else to read anything, and it’s normal that some people here are interested in things in which I’m not. None of us is the arbiter of what should or should not be on HN. Not us mere posters, anyway.
I don’t flag random projects, just ignore them (I know some people here like them, it’s not my thing but it is harmless). I downvote obnoxious comments about how something needs to be rewritten in rust in unrelated threads, though.
this is a case where i would flag the post rather than spend hours flagging comments, that would result in jail time if said IRL.
It’s handy for jumping to the bottom of a control loop if the language lacks a CONTINUE statement - the sin being outweighed by cleaner and easier to maintain code.
I love subreddits with clear rules, then you don't see articles or comments that go in tangents, memes or american or international politics. The moderators can decide the gray area after user report. So trying to post some COVID or politics stuff in one of the good moderated subreddits will be removed and it is not because we don't want to open our mind.
Anyone else wondering what a "hearth pill" is?
typo/bad spell, I meant heart
I am not attacking Trump or americans here, is a story from my country where in a very religious family the daughter failed to convince her mother to get the vaccine, the reason was soem Jesus /God does not allow it but for some reason God allows the mother to take pills/medicine for her heart ... makes no sense , if God gifted you a bad heart then WTF do you take unnatural pills, why did you vaccinated your children but for COVID you somehow found in the Bible that this vaccine is too much.
You're trying way too hard to make this about bias. There are more charitable and simpler explanations, such as signal-to-noise ratio and the expectation that submissions to HN are focused on geek-oriented science and tech topics.
The reply you are quoting is currently at -3. Voting is more about about affecting visibility than whether one agrees or not. Or ideally should be. Does this tell us something? Doesn't it kind of prove my point for me?
I'm sorry but you're just doubling down on your baseless assertion. Just because you argue everyone might have their personal bias that does not mean that everyone around you is desperately trying to not challenge their beliefs. That's a very specific and very personal interpretation that you're trying to pin on everyone around you without any basis.
Meanwhile, there are simpler and reasonable explanations that you somehow decided to ignore.
As far as I'm concerned that it's downvoted only "proves" that people tend to prefer more substantial conversation than this. If you had posted something of value I wouldn't have downvoted it, even though I probably would have disagreed with it.
HN is more actively moderated than this, you can find piles of moderator comments about it.
I also think that's the only direct placement, but I can't be certain.
> Moderators and a small number of reviewer users comb the depths of /newest looking for stories that got overlooked but which the community might find interesting. Those go into a second-chance pool from which stories are randomly selected and lobbed onto the bottom part of the front page. This guarantees them a few minutes of attention. If they don’t interest the community they soon fall off, but if they do, they get upvoted and stay on the front page.
On HN the culture of 'nothing good to say?; say nothing' is fairly baked in so will create this effect even more so.
Voting allows lurkers a voice, who often are the majority of users (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurker citation 11).
I've always wanted to know a bit about the algorithms putting, and then keeping, stories on the front page.
I also understand if there are certain details you don't want to call attention to because you don't want others gaming the system.
new accounts are heavily penalized when posting.