Ask HN: Are user's Karma Points taken into account in ranking a submission? - seanharr11
======
mattbgates
I don't think they are at all. I believe everything, from getting a "stuck"
thread in "Ask HN" and "Show HN" all depend on votes. If people aren't voting,
it means that whatever you posted is just "average" and not something that is
unique or stands out.

Users can "flag" your post and then it seems to drops faster out of sight and
out of mind, and it loses it ability to acquire any comments.

Upvoting tends to bring your post up top and I've heard of posts going "viral
for 24 hours on the front page of HN" which means it must all have to do with
voting and comments. I haven't seen too many people claim anymore than 24
hours though. It makes sense, specifically to gain attraction from users, and
of course, the more comments there are on a post, the higher it is likely to
be ranked in search engines.

As far as the 24 hour period, that too makes sense, as they probably don't
want the same thing being up top for too many days, weeks or months at a time,
which encourages new materials all the time.

~~~
gus_massa
The post are ordered approximately by

points / time^2 * penalties

So after some time the article needs a gazillion of upvotes to be in the front
page.

The mods add some penalties for many reasons. For example when the article is
borderline off-topic, or it's too similar to a previous article. Some
penalties are automatic and some are manual.

If too many users flag the article, then the article gets a penalty. Also, if
the post has much more comments than points, the article gets a penalty (this
prevents flamewars).

And there are a lot of tweaks to the order.

There was a blackbox analysis done a few years ago by kens:
[http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-
really...](http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-
works.html) HN discussion
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799854](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799854)
(920 points, 1319 days ago, 190 comments) It has more details, and some
details may have changed, so use it only as an orientation an to solve your
initial curiosity, but it's not set in stone.

Anyway, for an official answer you can try to contact the mods
hn@ycombinator.com but some parts of the algorithm are "secret sauce", some
are temporal tweaks, ...

