I really wish there was some simple calculations that could be shown on how posts are ranked. For eg post A has x upvotes, y comments, is z minutes old and therefore rank 2. Post B has these values, while C is here. Hence this post went down the front page quickly.
It's not that I don't trust the mods explicitly, it's just that showing such numbers (if they exist) would be helpful for transparency.
I really don't care about the "algorithm" here. I think this place is distinguished nicely by the fact that I almost never know how much karma a post or user has. If it was in fact a total dictatorship of a few, posing as some democratic reddit thing, who cares? I'm OK as it is, and these things don't last forever anyway.
All you can really do on the internet is ride the waves of synchronicity where the community and moderation is at harmony, and jump ship when it isnt! Any other conceit that some algorithm or innovation or particular transparency will be this cure all to <whatever it is we want> feels like it never pans out, the boring truth is that we are all soft squishy people.
Show me a message board that is ultimately more harmonious and diverse and big as this one!
>I think this place is distinguished nicely by the fact that I almost never know how much karma a post or user has.
Did you know that people who have been involved with Y Combinator who make an account on HN can see everyone else who has been a part of Y Combinator? Their usernames are highlighted a different color.
It's a literal secret club that they rarely acknowledge.
The innovation on detecting patterns would be incredible, and in reality I think would be best to evolve into allowing user-decided algorithms that they personally subscribe to.
Thanks for linking. I suppose my base argument would be why not let each individual decide for themselves - whether HN is a "low trust" or "high trust" source to them? Over enough time with enough data, certain macro patterns may emerge also that otherwise aren't easily observed by any individual - no matter how present they are, as I'm sure you've probably said countless times you're unable to see every link or thread posted to moderate, as there's just far too much activity.
I would also suggest such conversation would need to be corralled into some sort of secondary HN forum branch, discussion on observations, insights, etc. In general it could be useful for people to also learn about observing patterns for their own sites they own or manage.
I do understand it can facilitate a bit of a "weapons" race, in that if there are bad actors seeking to have many human looking bot accounts (or a single person orchestrating many accounts), then they now too would see how their fingerprints look compared to others as well.
Ultimately I think Elon Musk is right though that to help dissuade spam and organizations-ideologues from shaping narratives and controlling what's allowed to be seen and discussed, that an actual $ cost is required.
Perhaps HN could implement a $5/month (or even higher tiers)? For most on HN, if they are in the tech field, even $50/month for arguably a higher curated-"more moderated" forum, isn't much for the individual - and if a filter to only show posts and/or comments by those paying AND/OR better yet, filtering based on including only votes by those at different tiers - then that is affordable compared to say someone who maybe somehow is running 1,000 users; although unfortunately $50,000/month isn't much for organizations or nations with an agenda, if that's all it takes to keep certain truths suppressed as much and as quickly as possible.
People always interested and fascinated by the algorithm whenever it comes up. Dang makes the (correct) assertion that people will much more easily game it if they know the intricacies. PG always churlishly jumps in to say there’s nothing interesting about it and any discussion of it is boring.
Pretty asinine response but I work in Hollywood and each studio lot has public tours giving anyone that wants a glimpse behind the curtain. On my shows, we’ve even allowed those people to get off the studio golf cart to peek inside at our active set. Even answering questions they have about what they see which sometimes explains Hollywood trickery.
I’m sure there’s tons of young programmers that would love to see and understand how such a long-lasting great community like this one persists.
I dunno. This is standard practice for things like SEO algos to try to slow down spammers, or risk algos to slow down scammers.
HN drives a boatload of traffic, so getting on the front page has economic value. That means there are 100% people out there who will abuse a published ranking system to spam us.
wait long enough and the other product will be able to expose the secrets.
future gpt prompt : "Take 200000 random comments and threads from hacker news, look at how they rank over time and make assumptions about how the moderation staff may be affecting what you consume. Precisely consider the threads or comments which have risque topics regarding politics or society or projects that are closely related to Hacker News moderation staff or Y Combinator affiliates."
It's not sacrilege, it's just that people rarely have any basis for saying this beyond just it kind of feels that way based on one or maybe two datapoints, and feeliness really doesn't count. We take real abuse seriously and I've personally put hundreds (feels like thousands) of hours into that problem over many years - but there has to be some sort of data to go on.
It's not that I don't trust the mods explicitly, it's just that showing such numbers (if they exist) would be helpful for transparency.