How Hacker News ranking works: scoring, controversy, and penalties (2013) | Hacker News Reader

How Hacker News ranking works: scoring, controversy, and penalties (2013)

righto.com

205 pointstheanonymousone110 comments

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Author here. I don't know why this popped up 13 years later, but hi :-)

Still relevant! Very interesting topic.

Just so they could penalize it, obviously.

was very interesting :)

> I don't know why this popped up 13 years later

Maybe we the HN nerds are recomputing your proposed formula and quirks, and seeing it in real time, which may have worked since it's #1 now and I can prophetically reassure everyone it's gonna disappear in a few hours, per the article. Self fulfilling prophecy as they used to call it.

#2 now

Performing well https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49770293

I look when I comment on something that suddenly disappears from the front page.

Would you say it is still roughly the same?

> It's unclear if these penalties result from HN administrators or from flagged articles.

Any answers or insights on this within the last 13 years?

The mods are much more sensitive now to anything they consider flame-bait, flame-baiting, or controversial. Much quicker to intimidate/threaten, de-emphasize posts, flag-kill, etc. I presume because HN may be influencing/affecting some billion dollar bottom lines now and they can't afford a bad look

> intimidate/threaten

Links to examples?

I see “please stop fulminating” “we’ve asked you not to do this [guideline violating behavior] and we’ll have to ban you if you keep it up”, which is gentler than [shadow]banning even with the ‘threat’ of punitive action. Assuming you’ve seen mod comments I’ve missed.

why would you think they would make that publicly visible?

>The mods are much … quicker to intimidate/threaten

They’re doing this privately? Normally you shouldn’t screenshot emails/DMs/texts sure, but please do in this case. I have showdead on in Settings, so I should see it if you’re worried about censorship. If someone’s posted this before and it was deleted and not just killed, raise your hand and I’ll add my email to my profile.

Offer open to all. Obviously I’m doubting these guys are threatening people…

I've never heard anybody claim that they got a threatening email from dang before though. The moderators could easily block any such story from appearing on HN, but there are plenty of other sites where they could post it, and I suspect that a credible claim would become popular quickly.

So I'm not saying that it's impossible, just that if it did happen, we probably would have all heard about it by now.

Ding ding, right!

Obviously, the move is to continuously put your finger on the scale rather than doing something blatantly potentially illegal (depending on the threat).

There would have to be some meat on the bone, some unilateral NDA kind of thing…

We all should’ve heard of it by now. From Lobsters, Mastodon, blogs…

they aren't gonna send a threatening email, they just ghostban you.

We were responding to your insinuation that they would do the intimidation nonpublicly. Perhaps it was misinterpreted.

Yes that is what I mean. It's an intimidation couched in gentle language ("don't say things like that or else") and the threat is banning. Examples are in my past comment threads and some to my email years ago. I've gotten it for comments that weren't even controversial, it seemed the mods just disagreed with the opinion and decided to come down hard just because. I've seen it on others' comments too and had to defend them.

Of course there are some crazy extremist comments, but I'm talking about both comments about programming, and content has been echoed by the UN general assembly or human rights organizations. Those comments are now apparently out of line. This forum has crossed into the realm of censorship normally reserved for generic corporations who remove anything that might affect ad sales.

In my experience, if someone is going to be contrarian or pivot the topic to something else or move a conversation from primarily non-political into political, they have the burden of explaining the connection to the main topic and to be exceedingly diplomatic. One-liners that go against the grain or that will generate a lot of adversarial back-and-forth get warned.

Which is a bit crazy, isn't it? Like a micromanager gone mad. They claim it's a community but it feels more like one person's plaything

I really think it's a good thing. I think it balances the ability to allow dissent and debate while helping ensure the comment isn't flamebait. Without slashdot-style metamoderation it's the only way to keep trolls at bay. I've crossed the mods here once or twice in heated arguments, and it's almost always been a reasonable request from them to clean up my argument. Though I was unreasonably banned on my original account about 14 years ago (hence the username created in angry haste).

Affecting some billion dollar bottom lines was always the explicit goal of HN.

Do you have showdead enabled?

There is a firehose of the dead submissions and this is a good day today - just about 1 per minute and only 30% are dead. Somedays it's much, much worse.

HN attracts every wannabe out there and there is always a banal spam. So no wonder people don't want^W have time to hand hold anyone.

I've always had showdead on but don't often actually see a ton of dead comments. Occasionally I see one that's dead and seems odd (and sometimes interesting). Lot of the time it is stuff I'm not surprised is dead.

And rarely I see something that seems very very odd it's dead - although in those cases I usually assume it's just a bunch of bots or people downvoting (vs some kind kf moderator conspiracy)

> but don't often actually see a ton of dead comments. Occasionally I see one that's dead and seems odd (and sometimes interesting).

> Lot of the time it is stuff I'm not surprised is dead.

You can't see something doesn't exist [anymore].

How do you see the firehose ?

By going to new?

Just now it's 10 dead of 30, #30 is just '48 minutes ago'.

Do you think that the math is irrelevant now that the audience itself has become so woke that it’s basically an echochamber?

I think HN became the CNN of tech news (not journalism but “journalism”).

> Do you think that the math is irrelevant now that the audience itself has become so woke that it’s basically an echochamber?

I do very much believe that that is your own cognitive biases at work. While it certainly feels like there is a slant in a certain direction to me, I do see plenty of dissenting opinions from that perceived slant that get pretty much as much visbility. Most discourse here IS civil, too, which permits those dissents.

If you do believe that there is bad faith discourse going on, you can always email the mod team to get that sorted out.

Eager for the update! I assume there's already a couple of early hypotheses on the system.

Even more interesting to know when X.com, famously published its algorithm. Perhaps someday we'll find the fairest of them all

Not sure when it started, but the second chance pool has moderators putting stories that didn’t get much attention when they were submitted directly on the front page.

There may be some survivor bias here, but second-chance stories seem very front-page sticky to me. At least those I have recognized.

I think I started getting Second Chance emails about ten years ago...give or take a couple of years.

It was started in late 2014 and dang explains how it works here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

The penalties are interesting. It shows that the design goal is not to maximise interactions otherwise "controversial" posts should stay up. Still though, I wonder what's the point of deranking said posts. Minimise the potential for a flame war to hit critical mass? Stop people from perceiving HN as an argument-filled forum?

Controlled narratives

Yup, with just enough of an unmistakable ideological slant to force posts with differing views to take a Kharma nose dive. It seems that the addition of Kharma is proportional to posts that align with the overall narrative of the board post sentiment. In my case, I've noticed that some of my posts don't appear as originally created. Can't really confirm if this is inherent to the algorithm or just internal interference. The latter would be my guess. :(

Point proven for the world to see :)

Yep. Particularly obvious with comment ranking too.

Don't forget showdead.

Officially, should be protecting the site by keeping things interesting. (Just saying officially.)

Thanks to dang, links:

curiosity and repetition: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

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

HN is already perceived as an argumentative forum. Now imagine if the ratio rule wasn't there. FWIW I find it just as effective on Bluesky and Twitter for myself. Ratioed threads are usually more heat than light.

Interesting I didn’t perceive it that way (I see the irony lol)

I’ve always seen it as a place that is quick to tell people to back off/treat each other with respect

Yes I second this, HN is one of the least argumentative places I’ve encountered on the internet. Now people disagree with each other a lot, but it’s usually quite respectful compared to most of the internet.

Actually HN is a great place if you have different opinions than the majority.

As long as you make a good argument that's not flippant or rude, people will engage with it.

I hold very controversial points of views and never really experienced personal attacks (perhaps sometimes downvotes but that's not a deal breaker for me) when I express them here.

More to it, I tend to upvote comments I disagree with it.

> It shows that the design goal is not to maximise interactions otherwise "controversial" posts should stay up.

What I believe to be a less human-moderated version of the front page still exists on HN. It is interesting to compare it to the default. Both have their benefits.

https://news.ycombinator.com/active

> the design goal is not to maximise interactions

The design (not sure about its goal) maximizes incentive for medium-complexity ideas being expressed in comments with at most a handful of replies.

The “comments on a submission with ranking based on votes” model is fundamentally unsuited for in-depth, thoughtful discussions. Everything we write in this comment section will be mostly forgotten by tomorrow because there is no notification system for when someone replies to your comments.

Zero people are going back through old submissions more than a day or two old and looking for insightful comments to reply to.

For those of us scanning Hacker News by RSS, this additional feed is helpful

https://hnrss.github.io/#reply-feeds

> It shows that the design goal is not to maximise interactions otherwise "controversial" posts should stay up.

It seems like there is a direct explanation, HN doesn't show ads.

I concluded long ago that voting rings are active here, along with paid/inauthentic upvote farms.

What led to that conclusion? Genuinely curious.

I independently came to that conclusion after noticing that my comments on some controversial subjects will slowly acquire upvotes, then nose dive 2 or 4 votes very quickly. At first I thought that some mods might have double-value votes (Hi Cowboy Neal!) but then I realized it's sometimes 4 successive downvotes, not only 2.

I've frequently encountered this same thing. Often the downvotes come a day later, but quickly.

Same, but there are other explanations than voting rings

I assume it's just the mods, not voting rings. It's usually comments that run counter to the HN-approved ideology.

I've seen this, I tend to attribute it to a different part of the world waking up.

He runs a voting ring.

I'd assume the algorithm has changed over the last 13 years. And they're probably better off not sharing exactly how ranking (and penalties) work.

It's clearly easy to mobilize armies of users (or, these days, agents) to upvote submissions or warm up an account. I receive emails all the time offering this kind of service across virtually every website I have any presence.

But without explicitly published rules, it's harder to figure out what works through trial and error, especially if account history plays a role. Agents will clearly optimize around the rules, so I it's probably more important than ever that they're vague. X "open sourced" its algorithm (sort of...), and the bot problem there is as bad as its ever been.

I wonder how many of the companies sending you those sort of emails are YC backed?

(and how many of them are disgruntled founders who were rejected by YC?)

Do they want to buy your account or do they want you to perform some activity for an incentive? Possible to share some of those emails?

Presumably this has gotten way, way more complicated in the last 13 years.

+ if (this.moneyPaid > 10000USD) = instaPostToFrontPage.

Have you come across a quantitative analysis of this?

you gotta be kidding right?

Has anyone asked their favorite model to compare YC funding with HN rankings just kidding wild and zany thinking ;)

Why?

More powerful bots and more incentives to game the system.

maybe dang and team can use the new system 1 classifier hotness like jev now ;)

I don’t think it’s much more complicated, they just tweaked it a little. I think the underlying system is still very simple

There have certainly been huge changes regarding the handling of political topics. Such topics used to be an anathema in general, and then three years ago, there were four posts about the Palestine conflict on the front page for many hours in a single week, and IIRC, the mods even explicitly stated that this represented an “experiment” of sorts.

I haven't seen overly political links in a while; I would assume the experiment failed.

I wouldn't be too surprised if the ranking system worked pretty much exactly as the article describes still.

But I also assume the automated (and manual) penalty system has evolved significantly. I'll bet it's evolving rapidly right now, in response to attacks trying to game ranking by people deploying agents. I'd be a little surprised if YC/HN are not right up there with state of the art bot detection tech.

Does anyone have an explanation of when you get a lot of karma why there isn't a 1:1 relationship between the votes a post gets and how much the account?

Somewhere around 100k karma (I know, "on the leaderboard" problems...) the amount of points I got for posts (but not comments) reduced considerably compared to the number of upvotes a post gets.

I thought it was a fixed ratio (1/3rd?) for posts and 1/1 for comments? Can't tell you for sure about posts as I mostly just comment, but someone else can surely jump in

Personally the first HN algorithm anecdote I really noticed was when the "stop destroying videogames' petition hit the front page a couple years ago. In the first hour it got a modest ~100 votes and comments with some organic discussion, so pretty typical for a good HN post. In the next hour it was dead and buried several hundred posts down.

I don't want to be a tinfoil hatter here, but I think certain industries have a lot more influence over this site than most people realize.

This isn't very satisfying to me, as that ranks pretty low on the list of potentially damaging threads, don't you think? The genesis period of a petition? I see way more alarming stuff on here every day that further disillusions me to the biggest players.

I don't like Paul Graham, but I don't know if he really gives a shit what's happening on here. HN is not a super influential forum.

>as that ranks pretty low on the list of potentially damaging threads, don't you think?

Yes, exactly. That's why it struck me as being so weird; something so innocuous on its face getting hammered that badly suggests some kind of outside coordinated influence.

(oh, and edit; apparently industry lobbyists had been holding private counter-op meetings with the EU Commission before said petition was even finished, so there's that. Not immediately relevant to this discussion but it does speak to what goes on behind the curtain in government topics)

> That's why it struck me as being so weird; something so innocuous on its face getting hammered that badly suggests some kind of outside coordinated influence.

That seems like circular logic? Hasn't dang offered many reasons why a post might be suddenly down rated?

There's just got to be more than "I think I saw a post get down rated, so it must be a bot army"

I don't know all of what dang has said personally, but in most cases where I see new topics getting killed it's pretty obvious what the reasoning is; political ragebait, shady sources, plain junk articles or other low-quality threads.

The SDV/SKG petition thing was none of those, and people were generally positive about it during the discussion. So it seems to me it was either an unexplained random down-voting event or something a little more malicious.

The thing is, it doesn't even have to be PG/HN doing this. Case in point, look at reddit being astroturfed by every company.

And also, look how good Graphene OS posts do, and now compare that to Stop Killing Games. These both have a similar overlap (unless you work at Google, both are interests/hobbies), yet GOS almost always hits front page (and rightly so), yet SKG failed to, despite being a Stallman-ian topic.

Well I definitely think the site is heavily botted, as it's trivially easy to do so. I was speaking more to moderation.

I think there is a difference between what is important and what is intellectually interesting.

As a rule of thumb, promoting an agenda (and that's what a petition is) tends to be toward the less intellectually interesting end of the spectrum...occasionally promoting an agenda might involve interesting arguments.

A petition is not much of an argument. A petition is a call to action that requires very little action and typically minimal commitment.

By which I mean, I might have flagged it if I saw it on the front page. And maybe I did.

I’m guessing you got a surge of the people passionate and interested in that cause more than they cared about intellectual curiosity. Then the rest of us who don’t really want to see the same things everywhere didn’t engage and it dropped.

It seems very difficult for some people to imagine that their passions aren’t universal, or that people might be tired of endless “awareness raising” campaigns shoehorned into every digital space.

Yes, I'm very aware of that effect. The difference is that this was so aligned with the general attitude of HN users[*] that it stuck out as an anomaly; similar posts almost always hang around for a little while, usually several hours but sometimes over a day,

(*examples include 'right-to-repair, Louis Rossman, all the John Deere and phone hackers, general "I want to own the shit I buy". You get the idea.)

Remember the average person doesn’t comment, they just lurk and maybe vote. Our sense of who the average HN person is comes from an incredibly skewed sample.

1% Rule [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

Arguably, there's at least two kinds on "average HN people", which I think of as participants and spectators.

For me (and I'm not claiming my opinion is any more than a probable "No true HN person" fallacy), people who never or extremely rarely comment are spectators. And while they quite likely outnumber people who comment regularly by 100 or 1000 to one or more, they are not part of "the HN community" because they do not participate in it.

I think most people's (including spectators) "sense of who the average HN person is" probably aligns reasonably well with the average HN _participant_.

I had a post about Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing that I was hoping would go viral because that's the only way I ever saw Amazon ever fix anyone's KDP issues. I posted, then went to bed. When I woke up, it had 250+ points, but was on page 5 with a bunch of posts that were much older and/or had single-digit points.

It must have been on page 1 for a while to rack up that many points, then it sank almost immediately to page 5 where all the other posts with even 50+ points were days old. I've always wondered what happened there. Was it the algorithm, or did a mod step in?

Mods are heavily involved in HN rankings and automation is a tie breaker. There's no way that happened by automation.

It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that was purely automated based on 4chan organised Gamergater's dogpiling and looking exactly like voting rings and/or manufactured controversy.

Great analysis. I think there must be even more going on in the comments section. There are a lot of shenanigans especially on “controversial” topics.

> I observed that many websites appear to automatically get a penalty of .25 to .8: arstechnica.com, businessinsider.com, easypost.com…

Easypost is a YC company, for those who claim hacker news moderation favoritism

weird that posts with lots of comments are also penalized though, the `controversy` reasoning is not solid enough for me.

It's not just "lots of comments" though. It's more comments than upvotes. You may disagree, and it may not be a perfect metric, but in reality I think it's works very well. 90+% of the time when I look at a post with tons of comments and a relatively small number of upvotes, it's flamewar central.

True, but there's that 10% posts where there's (eg) a good cancer breakthrough, and it's two guys going back and forth on the methodology adding a lot of comments. Not always, but not never either.

I really wish there was a way to "mark" such posts as "high quality, ignore comment to vote ratio" just like how you can vouch a comment. Enough such marks and it gets auto turned off the flamewar parameter.

Back-and-forth conversation isn't high quality by definition, it's just the baseline for not being bad enough to downvote. I think Hacker News wants the baseline to be some degree of exceptional.

Or just not boring. The guidelines state, among other things:

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity

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

Reading yet another thread where commenters go back and forth on, eg how Elon Musk sucks/is awesome doesn't make for interesting reading because it's the same conversation that's been had before, and neither side is getting convinced by the other side's argument.

Note the trajectory of any stories about the IDScan drivers' license leak. They don't stay up long, after US East Coast SoB time.

Check out this thread I made. It quickly moved to the top of the front page but then somehow moved down to like page 3, even though it had more upvotes and discussion than all or most of the other threads posted that day.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171656

The part of this I always forget is how lazily the ranking is applied. HN does not rescore the list on every page load. A story is rescored when someone upvotes it, and separately one story out of the top 50 gets picked at random every thirty seconds and rescored. Pages cache for another ninety seconds on top of that.

So the front page is never a clean rendering of the formula. A story that stops getting votes can sit at the wrong position for minutes at a time.

Which is also why the penalty figures in the post are ranges rather than numbers. Shirriff is inferring them from stories ranked lower than their raw score implies, and a story that simply has not been rescored recently looks exactly the same from outside. He lists that as one of his sources of error, along with neighboring stories carrying their own penalties.

This falls apart completely if you’re like me and only see the list presented on brutalist.report which is strictly chronological and with zero algorithms.

Indeed, if you go out of your way to circumvent automatic story ranking, the particularities of automatic story ranking no longer affect you...

A capability available without visiting any third party sites, by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

I just hope you don't believe that somehow this magically allows you to escape bias. A (reverse) chronological sort is still a sort.

Looks algorithmic to me. Reverse-chronological with upvote threshold(?), where upvotes are correlated with sort rank on vanilla HN.

Again, not a thing if you are on the site I mentioned.

If there's a vote threshold, it's still profoundly influenced by the HN algorithm, because front page exposure is the principal component in how many votes a story gets.

There’s clearly decision-making going on because it’s not listing most HN posts. How is it deciding what not to show?

Not to mention HN posts don’t spontaneously emerge out of the randomness of the cosmos.

Sure they do. Just with extra steps.

Remember that thing Carl Sagan told us: “if you want to complain about AI from scratch you must first invent the universe.”

Saying it a second time doesn't make it any more true.

That site's interesting, but it would be super helpful with some summaries of the stories and maybe of the comments. Though I imagine that would make it a LOT more expensive to host.

How does that differ from turning on showdead and going to /newest ?

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