Ask HN: Summary of HN logic/rules | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Summary of HN logic/rules

Hi,

I just posted a bug recently (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=887533) about votes that don't count if they happen as you login, but do count if you are already logged in. People said this was intentional.

As the same time, I noticed that I cannot reply to this thread anymore because it is 1 day old. I swear that I used to be able to come back to something I posted yesterday and contribute to the discussion.

Is there a summary anywhere of the current parameters for these kind of situations, and others that are similar?

How hard would it be to establish a config file that PG uses for this kind of stuff so that he can make tweaks easier and the rest of us can read what the current parameters are?

View on HN

That thread has been killed by the editors, that's why you can't reply to it, not because it's one day old.

HN has some underwater tricks to keep the rif-raff out, these are 'mostly effective' so people put up with some of the more heavy handed moderation.

Meta discussion (discussion about HN) is for the most part discouraged.

The rules are relatively simple:

  - behave

  - no trolling

  - no namecalling

  - no spam

  - avoid metadiscussion if you can (though, as in this
    case, if the rules were spelled out a lot of 
    metadiscussion would never happen)

  - use the 'flag' option instead of bitching about
    submissions

at the bottom of the page there is this http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html maybe there is more stuff in there that can help you.

Just speaking for myself here, there is plenty that I think that is not ok in HN, especially the way in which some threads get killed because they're off-topic (I'd prefer if those threads were simply dropped from the index so that those involved in the conversation don't have the door slammed in their faces) but the value of HN far outweighs the downsides.

For instance, I really don't think this item should have been killed:

  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=889349

Here are the the arc 3 thresholds:

  267:(= gravity* 1.8 timebase* 120 front-threshold* 1
  762:(= topcolor-threshold* 250)
  980:(= follow-threshold* 5)
  1038:(= downvote-threshold* 100 downvote-time* 1440)
  1208:(= flag-threshold* 30 flag-kill-threshold* 7   many-flags* 1)
  1326:(= legit-threshold* 0 new-age-threshold* 0 new-karma-threshold* 2)
  1670:(= poll-threshold* 20)
  1783:(= baditemreqs* (table) baditem-threshold* 1/100)
  1823:(= commentable-threshold* (* 60 24 45))
  1980:(= comment-threshold* -20)
  2267:(= leader-threshold* 1)  ; redefined later
  2317:(= active-threshold* 1500)

These have been changed in the meantime, I know that the downvote threshold is now 200, possibly others have changed as well, you could download the arc 3.1 sources and then run

    grep -n -E "\(= [^-]+-threshold" news.arc

on it, but there is no guarantee that the arc that runs HN is using the same settings.

If you want to see the site 'plain', that is, without moderation filtered content you can set 'showdead' on in your profile. You still won't be able to click the links, but at least you'll be able to see what got killed.

The stated reason why there is a 'secret sauce' to HN is to make it harder to game the system for spammers.

Perfect answer and many thanks.

Bad form to reply to myself it's past the time that I can edit, but that post that was killed was killed for a good reason that had nothing to do with the content, I should have paid more attention before using it as an example.

not to disagree with jacquesm, really, but this is my own opinion. what he calls 'heavy-handed' i call 'pretty close to perfect'.

this site is over three years old now. we have thousands of active users. can anybody name another site that's as old and/or as big that is as well-behaved as this? i certainly can't. if pg wasn't serious as a heart attack about curbing bad behavior, we would have been overrun by trolls long ago.

as for the thread jacquesm cited that shouldn't have been killed. that was far too negative. it would have led to a thread-full of mean-spirited bitching and moaning.

meta-discussion is almost never productive. it ends up being the same stuff over and over again. the news.yc way is to just observe for awhile, and see if you can come to your own conclusions.

i agree it would be better if there was a page you could view to see what the current rules and thresholds are: this many points to downvote, this many points to flag, you can't currently do thing because of condition, and so on. but pg is changing stuff so rapidly that building such a page would be a big undertaking.

people expect sites like this to behave fairly robotically, according to a fixed set of rules that rarely changes. news.yc doesn't work like that. it is closer to becoming a sentient being than any other program i've ever used (heh).

Good points, but regarding that one item that got killed, office politics is something plenty of HNers are facing on a day-to-day basis and it is not as easy for some to deal with it as it is for others.

I've seen perfectly good people end up burned out because of it, and it's a valid subject for discussion. Better to ask the community that you trust for advice on how to deal with that.

PG doesn't want you to know what the parameters are.

This is not quite correct, as jacquesm explained. Of course, pg makes the ultimate decisions, but a substantial number of parameters is available.

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