
Ask HN: How does comment weighting work - hammock
Does the algorithm only consider the upvotes on a particular comment, or does it also account for any highly rated child comments?<p>I.e. if a parent comment is not high-scoring but someone made a valuable reply to it, that valuable reply would nevertheless get buried.
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gus_massa
I think it's considered "secret sauce". I think it mixes the upvotes and time
with other factors (user karma?, average?, manual weights?, ???) (I think they
dropped "average" a few years ago.) The source code that is available is very
old and don't have a lot of the small details. I think you will have to wait
until kens does a black box analysis.

Related: "How Hacker News ranking really works: scoring, controversy, and
penalties" (2013) [http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-
really...](http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-
works.html)

