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Comment by elpocko | Hacker News Reader

This HN post is seven days old but displayed and ranked as if it was posted 9 hours ago, with all timestamps falsified. The déjà vu effect is disconcerting and an absolute mind fuck. Please stop doing this, ffs. The person who thought this would be a good idea is a madman.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Silicon%20Valley%20crosswalk%2...

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Wild! I definitely remember commenting on this last week and sure enough my comment shows below as “8 hours ago” (while I was asleep). What kind of sorcery is going on?

HN has a "second chance queue" for posts that the powers-that-be believe could've/should've gotten more attention but didn't. Happened to one of my posts once, which was confusing as all hell at first but made sense once I learned about it.

Feature in search of a problem

Not really. Interesting posts can get buried easily just because they were posted at a bad time and people don't delve that far into the second or further pages. It's been going for almost 9 years now. I think it's a good idea.

Ok but why do they falsify all the comment timestamps?

Probably a limitation of the hotness/sorting algo.

To complete the illusion of freshness I guess. I don't see a big issue with doing that as part of the feature.

The big issue is you reply to a comment from an hour ago but never get a reply, because that comment was actually made two weeks ago and the original commenter is not reviewing those old posts for new replies. This leads to a silencing of discussion in the worst way where one party has no idea they aren’t getting heard and the other party has no idea they are being spoken to.

Without changing the timestamp, you couldn’t reply at all, and the upvotes/recency ranking wouldn’t work appropriately for old comments vs. new ones.

I was wondering about that not knowing exactly how age affected the ranking of comments. Does seem like it'd be way easier to just fake the whole thing. I wonder if they show up as newer in the individual users' comment views too?

Deliberately putting bogus timestamps on user actions seems fraudulent. I do not want this website to say I did something minutes/hours ago even though I wasn't even here in a week's time. I think this should be illegal, and it probably is in parts of the world according to some GDPR statute. You can't display made-up facts about a user. It's insane in any case and it triggers unpleasant psychological effects when it happens.

Everyone here is obsessed with putting the correct year in post titles for some reason, but falsifying the timestamps of entire comment threads is okay and defensible?

The fact that previously undiscovered posts sometimes get upvoted and make it to the front page after getting their "second chance" demonstrates the feature's utility.

You see that all the time with social media and reposts though. Sometimes the reposts hit sometimes not. In either case falsifying the record and making it seem like there is active discussion when most of the original comments have moved on already is a bit of a stupid feature.

Second chance queue is basically dang getting unilateral authority to be an empowered reposter and probably looking at internal data when the site is most active to drop the stale post back in.

But this should not change the time when the thing (comment, link) has been posted, should it?

Yea that’s what I found surprising: the re-timestamping of the article and the comments.

The system is described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25061616

I agree that it shouldn't, but for whatever reason (possibly a limitation of HN's underlying software, or for algorithmic/engagement reasons) it does.

It does so that the ranking algorithm still works appropriately, and so that you can still reply, which otherwise you can’t for a day-old comment.

How is it technically possible?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380

https://news.ycombinator.com/pool (specifically, this post can be found on page 8: https://news.ycombinator.com/pool?next=43673425)

Can confirm. Once dang pinged me directly by email saying that my story was re-upped. The story went again to the frontpage and the date was adapted (IIRC), but the comments were kept:

---

Hi denysvitali,

The submission "PostmarketOS-Powered Kubernetes Cluster" that you posted to Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42352075) looks good, but hasn't had much attention so far. We put it in the second-chance pool, so it will get a random placement on the front page some time in the next day or so.

This is a way of giving good HN submissions multiple chances at the front page. If you're curious, you can read about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 and other links there. And if you don't want these emails, sorry! Let us know and we won't do it again.

Thanks for posting good things to HN!

Daniel (moderator)

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