Comment by ColinWright | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ColinWright | Hacker News Reader

The sudden drop is a clear indication of down-votes. I've not looked at your specific case(s) in detail, but from the descriptions here it sounds like some few people here have taken exception to you or your material and decided to flag your posts, possibly without even reading them.

So if some of your upvotes come from what the software thinks is a voting ring, and/or if a few people flag your posts, they will drop to #80 or below very quickly.

Several technical solutions have been suggested in the past, but personally, I think it's a mistake for flags to count so heavily in the ranking. I think flags should not affect the ranking, but that sufficient flags compared with upvotes should result in deletion.

Consider. At the moment if a few people take exception to your posts then they will disappear from the front page and get very few views. Vigilant vigilantes can bury items quickly. Worse, spam gets buried, but not deleted.

If an item truly is spam, let it remain visible so that more people will flag it and thus cause its deletion. Simply burying it runs the risk it will never get deleted.

Thanks for trying to help shed light on this.

If this is the case, it would do HN a great deal of good for this system to be made more transparent. I understand that it might not make sense to publish the exact formula or algoritm which could expose "exploits" to those wishing to game the system, but I think it would be useful to at least show how many flags and down-votes a post has received. It would, for one thing, put an end to this speculation.

If it is the case that these extraordinarily fast demotions (#2 to #88 in one step) come from "normal" flagging and down-voting, I would ask: Why the hate? :-) I can say categorically that people LOVE Des' posts—not one gets less that 50k uniques in a week or so. Including the ones that are ripped off the HN home page. If it's simply because Des posts all of his hard work here, I would then ask: Does HN not want good content? And Des simply submitting it does not ever cause it to hit the home page—it takes a lot of votes to get it there. (Which is more than can be said for YC hiring posts…)

I love(d) HN, and it's totally within the rights of YC to do what they wish with it. But situations like this are doing a lot of long-term damage to the trust one can have in it as a source of quality, relavent content.

Disclaimer: I work for Intercom.

It's pretty clear to those who watch and take notice. I'm not the only one to have written about this several times in the past, a quick search will turn up several discussions about flags and rankings.

With the continuing popularity of HN the audience has become much more diverse, so it may be that the majority of people here quite simply don't agree with you. On top of that it only takes a few active dissenters to cause items to drop, as said earlier.

So you say "categorically that people LOVE Des' posts." Well, clearly not everyone. And with the range of interests, that's only to be expected.

For what it's worth, I agree that things aren't optimal, but it won't change. So live with it, or build something better.

OK. It's sad if "that's that" and that a simple fault will be allowed to prevail and damage an otherwise great resource. If it really is the case that a couple of flags can rip the post of the home page, that's a really dumb system IMO—i.e. that many people like the post and upvote it but two people don't agree and overpower them. Doesn't make any sense to me and I'm still skeptical that this is how it works. Thanks again for helping.

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