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Comment by adamjc | Hacker News Reader

Discussed here also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38514537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38515123

Not sure why it's getting pushed off the front page when, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38515123 has 41 points and 2 hours old whereas a front-page article, e.g. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/50-years-made-a... only has 57 points and is 14 hours old (as of this comment)

The inscrutability of how page ranking works in HN is increasingly a problem in my eyes. I understand it's an attempt at preventing gaming the system, but I'm not convinced it works.

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> The inscrutability of how page ranking works in HN is increasingly a problem in my eyes. I understand it's an attempt at preventing gaming the system, but I'm not convinced it works.

HN downweights threads that receive more comments than upvotes. It's a quite useful heuristic to avoid flame wars, in my opinion.

Does it take into account gross upvotes, or net?

E.g. could a controversial thread (plenty of upvotes, plenty of downvotes) get pushed off the front page because it has a low upvote:comment ratio?

I get that YC probably don't want to deal with controversy, but, well this is a community, of sorts...

I sometimes wish some stuff would stay up, but, in the aggregate, I'm pretty happy with the result.

Whenever I see some article posted, that is likely to generate a storm of bickering (many platforms elicit this; not just politics), I'm usually happy to see it take a nosedive.

I had something that I submitted, fairly recently, get plonked. It was actually fairly sensible and relevant, but one of the commenters posted something that was "sort of" a "dox," and I understood why it disappeared.

> E.g. could a controversial thread (plenty of upvotes, plenty of downvotes) get pushed off the front page because it has a low upvote:comment ratio?

You can't downvote submissions, just flag them. As for comments, I'm not sure how the sorting works there (but it seems like net upvotes, with comments younger than an hour being pushed to the top).

> gross upvotes, or net

these two are the same since you can't downvote submissions.

Where's the data to support that opinion

Where’s the data to support the opinion that opinions should be supported by data

All the data is available at https://news.ycombinator.com/.

As a suggested experiment, randomly select 25 stories with comments>votes, and 25 stories with votes>comments. Go through the comments on those 50 stories and score them for flamewarishness. It's probably a half day's work. 50 stories * 3 minutes each for scoring, plus some time for the random sampling and stats.

You could present the data as a plot of your subjective flamewar score vs. log(votes/comments)

What opinion? It's a statement of fact, not an opinion. The flameware detector is a well-documented and old HN feature:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

The first submission got flagged because people can't follow simple rules and not make everything about Joe Rogan.

I checked the hard copy of the rules dang sent me when I got recruited to post here and can’t find anything about Joe Rogan.

Y’all got printouts of the rules when you joined? :O

Mine was handwritten and bound in leather. The rest of you must be new.

And mine on stone tablets.

Mine was issued from a burning bush by the voice of dang himself, whereupon it inscribed itself permanently into my brain in letter of fire.

I checked your profile date, you're definitely vellum.

Most problematic is when articles critical of OpenAI or Altman get off, despite seeing a lot of activity.

Very hard to prove

I use this unofficial alternative interface because it lets me scroll through everything that has hit the front page.

https://hckrnews.com/

I don't find this revelation particularly interesting, or this particular source to be very good, so the ranking algorithm is working exactly as intended for me.

This is news, but it's not curiosity-sparking news, its boring tech news. Give me more physics and LL(V)M, please.

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