HN: Vote weighting is already in place - silly stories sink faster | Hacker News Reader

HN: Vote weighting is already in place - silly stories sink faster

5 pointsgaika6 comments

Looks like Hacker News has votes weighted (but not by authority as I suspected). Right now on the from page you can find stories that are older, have fewer points yet way above stupid "about:internets" link. Very nice!

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Not quite. There are certain sites and filetypes that are considered "lightweight" and whose scores are (currently) multiplied by .3. These include tweets, images, Onion stories, Xkcd cartoons, and so on.

The new code has been running for a while, probably over a month. I was wondering how long it would take users to notice.

This seemed the best solution to the problem of easy-to-upvote stuff like tweets and cartoons floating to the top of the frontpage. I didn't want to ban them, but I didn't want to end up like reddit either, so I added a multiplier to compensate for lightness.

Edit: The initial "Not quite" no longer makes sense because the post has been changed based on my answer. Originally it was asking if per-user vote weighting had been turned on.

I noticed it about a week ago, was looking for a way to confirm it before posting my suspicions :) And by the way, who decides that it is a lightweight story?

Lightweightness isn't decided per story. Whole sites and filetypes are. At the moment it's just me, because the code is simply a list of each: there's no mechanism for adding new ones except editing the source.

For adding new sites to the list, how would you favor incorporating a small positive weight for sites which are not on a "positive weight" list but that have a history of generating votes (or comments/comment points/comment word count) above some threshold. The weight could be very small at first, but be additive until it meets a value which could include it in the positive list (or flag for a review queue). In the same way, sites which fall out of popularity can be slowly and moderately down-weighted.

Could you add a .5 weight to stories from techcrunch, nyt, alleyinsider, and some of the other aggregate sites? Thanks.

This raises an interesting alternative feature request: allow users to set their own weights on filetypes or domain patterns - but they would only apply to themselves. They could be > 1.

This might be more computationally intensive, and would likely increase page load times. The people using the feature probably wouldn't mind.

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