
Ask HN: What Happened to DHH's Uber Post? - cmmn_nighthawk
DHH wrote a blog post on Medium that is critical of Uber and YCombinator.  The link was posted to Hacker News and received enough upvotes to get to the #2 spot.<p>The article sharply dropped in position (off the front page) at around the time west coast work day began.<p>As far as I can tell, nothing in the article violates the &#x27;Hacker News Guidelines&#x27;.<p>Is there an technical explanation of why this would happen related to the algorithm?  Has YCombinator offered an explanation of why something like this would happen in the past?<p>links--<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@dhh&#x2F;deleting-uber-is-the-least-you-can-do-30c0601103ea<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;dhh&#x2F;status&#x2F;833701507585437700<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;steveklabnik&#x2F;status&#x2F;833697426846396416
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dang
Users flagged it and a mod applied two kinds of standard penalty to it: one
because it was a copycat post that added no information to the two major
articles/threads already on the front page, and two because it was an
unsubstantive rant.

Those penalties are standard because follow-up posts (e.g. that try to
capitalize on hot stories to get cheap attention) and informationless rants
routinely get tons of upvotes—many more than the substantive stories that HN
is supposed to be for. That's a well-known weakness of the upvoting system. HN
can't live by upvotes alone. If we didn't have countervailing mechanisms such
as moderation, the site would not survive. I've written about this lots of
times, e.g.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10292239](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10292239).

It had nothing to do with San Francisco (the moderator was elsewhere), nor
with the rant being about Silicon Valley, etc.; anyone familiar with HN knows
that critiques of all those things appear here all the time, and that's fine.
We're hoping for thoughtful critique, though, not rage trolling.

~~~
tptacek
Can I agree with and appreciate the actual moderation step you took here while
calling out a concern about the justification you just wrote?

Twice in this comment you managed --- I think unintentionally --- to suggest
that DHH wrote an unsubstantive rage-trolling post. I think it's very easy for
people on HN to forget that all writing on the Internet is not in fact
intended for HN. For DHH's own audience, an angry post about Uber might be
totally appropriate.

It's not just possible but likely that a lot of Internet writing is toxic to
HN, but valid and important in its own intended context. I think it's
important that we work to avoid confusing these concepts.

~~~
dang
Yes, that's a fair distinction and I will try to keep it in mind for the
future.

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temp-dude-87844
There is a feature of HN that is sometimes called "flamewar detector" that
tends to apply various countermeasures to threads that are getting a lot of
replies and/or upvote/downvote churn. One of the observed effects is that the
thread drops off the front page. For example, see this post from moderator
dang:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7508443#7509979](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7508443#7509979)

You can see more discussion about these behaviors when you search HN:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flamewar%20detector&type=comme...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flamewar%20detector&type=comment)

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detaro
The answer nearly always is "because users flagged it", which adds a high
penalty to the ranking (which the mods sometimes override if they feel like a
story shouldn't be punished this way). (Other cases are articles with more
comments than upvotes, which afaik get penalized as potential flamewars, but
that doesn't apply to this example with as of now ~300 points and ~100
comments).

If you want an official answer by HN, please contact them via e-mail.

------
carlmcqueen
You mean this?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13687493](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13687493)

~~~
karussell
Probably. Strange that it disappeared from the frontpage.

~~~
carlmcqueen
There are other 'views' of hackernews where you can see it:

[http://hckrnews.com/](http://hckrnews.com/)

