Hacker News Rankings. Graphs of HN posts rank on timeline

Ask yourself: what do you think Dan’s team does all day, every day, if not make decisions that influence the site? His comments are all that are publicly visible, so most people assume he just writes comments — an assumption as far from the truth as can be. And most people have no idea that there are even other members of the team, let alone know what they do.

This is by design. HN works best when people are focused on the content, not the site. It’s one of the most influential newspapers in the world, precisely because it focuses on the content. And you’d be kidding yourself if you feel they don’t decide which stories should stay on the front page, every day, a dozen times. Again, it’s their whole job.

Note that them seeing a story and allowing it to stay is also a choice, even though it’s implicit. So them doing nothing because they chose to let a story stay is not the same thing as them doing nothing because the community chose to put it there. Frankly, you wouldn’t want to visit HN if it was community run, because the community is terrible about choosing which stories should be on the front page. This has been proven true for over a decade, and the main reason Dan doesn’t come out and say so is because it’s one of those things that shouldn’t be said out loud. There’s no reason to call attention to how utterly awful the majority of users’ decisions are about what should be on the front page.

Remember, millions of people visit the site now. You wouldn’t want that many people to try to decide. The voting system is an indicator to the mods of potential community interest, but it’s ultimately up to the editors what stays and what goes.

People call this favoritism or censorship or other frankly silly terms, but there’s nothing sinister about it. The way onto the front page is simple: make something that someone bookish would find interesting or surprising. The "surprising" criteria is the trickiest part, because it covers what most people mean by "newsworthy" (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39778999). But HN has a particular kind of newsworthiness that filters out the majority of stories that the majority of users want to put on the front page.

It’s a tricky subject, and it’s long past time someone should write an essay to explain it all. I’m not quite sure how to do that without angering the community xor mods, but it would be interesting if it were possible. One reason this idea appeals to me is because I’d like to at least thank all of the dozens of people who help run HN behind the scenes; they rarely get any kind of recognition, because they don’t need it, let alone want it. But that makes them worth thanking all the more.