

Ask HN: How does HN ranking of submits work? Could it be improved? - cfontes

Just curious, points x time ? what's the ratio ? could we improve it using page views ? or something else ?
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JacobAldridge
Essentially, it's a combination of time and votes. The older something is, the
less it is promoted; the more upvotes a submission has, the more it is
promoted. The original calculations (I believe) can be found in the Arc source
code.

Having said that, pg (et al) have tweaked the calculation over the years. Some
changes are reasonably well-known or clear (eg, longer comments fall slower
than short comments; Ask HN submissions fall faster than links); others are,
I'm sure, hidden away to prevent gaming the system.

Could it be improved? Constantly, I'm sure, in subtle ways. The better
question is 'Is it being improved?', to which I think the answer is yes.

I'd be interested in hearing more about what you mean by 'page views'. My
immediate intepretation is that page views aren't important - a page (link or
discussion) that has 10x as many views but fewer upvotes is being measured on
quality (upvotes) not quantity (which, if nothing else, can be gamed by a
linkbait heading). But I may have misunderstood your suggestion?

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cfontes
What I mean is I usually forget about adding points for nice posts that have
big text to read, because I spend a lot of time reading and simply forget to
get back and point it.

So I think posted links could use this to stay on top a little bit more, a lot
of clicks on it should mean people are actually interested in it, It should
not grant new points just a little tweak to give it more time for a review.

But that's my opinion and I am absolutely open about it

