Ask HN: Why number of upvotes is much higher these days? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why number of upvotes is much higher these days?

6 pointssmusamashah18 comments

Has anyone else noticed relatively much higher number of votes on popular posts for past 2-3 weeks. Many posts on front page easily get ~100+ votes or 200-300. Has something changed?

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I’m not sure if there are publicly available stats but my first guess is that there are more users migrating from Reddit, probably because they’re not happy with the demographic shift.

Interestingly, in my country, people seem to be also migrating from Facebook et al to Reddit. Our main local, country-specific subreddit is clearly gaining users these days. (FB has been heavily used by the entire society here.)

I haven't followed this -- what's the demographic shift of Reddit about?

Aside of that, I think somebody on HN also pointed out that it is now easier to get downvotes here, because of an emerging trend to use downvote as an indicator of disagreeing with the OP or GP. Maybe the rise in upvotes is also part of the same "paradigm shift" (which I personally wouldn't like).

It would actually be great to have a HN user-level option that hides all vote/point counts, including the ones given to your own posts. Can probably be easily done with some browser addon, though, but a HN option would be nicer.

Reddit is going for an IPO soonish and they're trying to bump up their user numbers, so they're trying to get a different audience to their core 18-35 Anglosphere white male tech workers that were probably 90% of the userbase 10-15 years ago. To do that they're boosting subs for things like celebrity gossip, the royals, things focused on regions like India or the Philippines. Have a look at the top growing subreddits and there'll be a lot of those topics, and compare what the front page looked like a year or two ago to now, it's probably 25% now vs nothing at all back then.

I shudder at that revelation. HN is one of the few remaining web communities I appreciate. I'd be sad if it devolved because Redditors are deciding that HN is a form of "Reddit Lite."

Anecdotally I think you also see:

1. An increase is Ask HN posts that a short time ago wouldve only been on Stack Overflow

2. An increase in low quality meme comments that a short time ago wouldve only been on Reddit

That leads me to believe that HN is one of the last the safe harbours for tech minded folks as SO and Reddit continue to decline in quality.

reddit I can agree. SO I can't agree because they gate keep so damn hard that I never had much of a chance to actually join or feel part of the community since I started programming 2 years ago. I feel like they've alienated a generation of potential younger participants due to its culture.

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fair rule, but I think in context here, it's a valid point.

If HN wants to show some data on comment quality overtime that refutes it I'd been keen to eat my words.

I have noticed that HN is much slower during the day than in the past; higher traffic would correspond to more voting activity and articles getting significantly more upvotes than, say, a year or two ago.

observational data points aren't a great measure, In any average within a large set of data, there's always a chance to see extreme highs and extreme lows. Unless you have something more than based on perception or observation, you're making a large assumption that it's actually occurring.

Not writing this to attack you so please don't take it personal. Just sharing my thoughts.

I agree with you. And in attempt to respond with data, i summed, averaged and weighted averaged votes of first 4 days of each month till october but did not find any change in Nov or Dec. I still think my observation has some merit though, i don't know how to verify it.

i respect that. Definitely noteworthy enough to start digging and asking questions like what you're doing. I'd say keep it up (with also keeping our conversation in mind as well)!

I think that points have a correlation with votes but other things probably contribute to points in addition to votes.

What other things do you think contribute to points?

Editorial decisions?

They only do so indirectly by influencing what people see and vote on.

What do you think would be the simplest way to put something on the front page, algorithmically?

Change the timestamp to make it look like it was posted just now, but already has a bunch of upvotes and comments. (This is what the mods to when they give something a second chance.)

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