Ask HN: How to see the top HN stories ranked without flags? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to see the top HN stories ranked without flags?

19 pointsddlatham12 comments

Does anyone know if there is a way on HN itself or a third party site to see what the top stories on HN would be if flags were excluded? I.e. purely a function of upvotes and time?

I've noticed that almost all the stories that mention the invasion of Ukraine seem to be quickly dropped from the front page even though they have a great many votes, and I'd like to still be able to see them. I'm not sure if it is people trying to avoid politics somehow, or people with ties to Russia who are trying to avoid the war being so visible.

I really value the unique perspective of the HN community and am sad to see it so easily stifled when it seems clear that this is subject of great interest to many hackers with many topics where the war overlaps with technology and business.

View on HN

Stories about politics and the war in Ukraine are off-topic[0], so being sad that off-topic conversations are being "stifled" by flags is like complaining that your book club refuses to discuss wrestling, or your gym not allowing you to use a weight bench for knitting[1].

There are lots of forums for discussing politics and world affairs. HN is not one of them.

[0] From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

[1] You may really admire the physique of the people who work out there, but that doesn't give you the right to use the space differently than intended.

I don't think there is such a thing. The closest I know of is https://hckrnews.com, which shows a chronological list of everything that hits the front page. In some ways, this is the best that you can do, because once a story drops off the front page it (mostly) stops getting votes. The truly flag-killed stories appear as "Dead undefined" but you can click to view them.

Separately, I think you may be confusing "flagging" with a plethora of other things that cause stories to be demoted. A high ratio of comments to upvotes invokes the "flamewar detector", which causes stories to instantly drop in ranking. You can observe this with https://hnrankings.info. Vertical drops are usually flamewar, while the line stops for flag killed stories.

For the particular case of Ukraine stories, Dan may well have instituted some sort of penalty against them. I don't think they are banned for being political, rather the goal (I think reasonable) is to prevent the front page from being dominated by too many of them. You can write him email (hn@ycombinator.com) and he'll probably tell you.

Edit: The "active list" of most commented stories (https://news.ycombinator.com/active) can be another useful window.

I find there's been a least 2-3 high quality articles on HN each day which for me is enough.

Just skip the front page altogether and use the RSS feed [1] instead, that way you're not influenced so much by either the group think or the moderator's choice. You'll get all stories which made it to HN, some of them without comments because they were pushed off the front page for some reason, others with a few comments but no link since they were flagged - but you still have that link in your feed so you get to decide for yourself whether the story was killed for a good reason or a not so good reason.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

I made and use https://hackerer.news which does show IMO, far too much Russia content. Maybe that's useful for you.

As for me, I should look into that 'flag' ranking and see if I can reign in the posts that show there.

HN downweight political stories, what you need is this:

https://github.com/hidroh/materialistic

Particularly the 'Catch up' section.

Worth noting it's no longer available on Google Play. Not sure why.

I've found to be a good view, all front page stories in the last 24h

https://orangesite.sneak.cloud/

Maybe https://news.ycombinator.com/active?

They're being flagged because they're mostly off-topic for HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). And anything about the war is mostly just attracting whataboutisms, so not much great discussion regardless.

You can vouch for flagged stories if you don’t think they deserved the flag. Still, they’re not likely to succeed if they were flagged in the first place.

P sure you can only vouch for dead stories. Even a single flag by a user begins to downrank a post (in a nontransparent way) even before it gets enough to be greyed out

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