
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018) - billme
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/master/README.md
======
isoprophlex
To me HNs biggest feature is the lack of features and the lack of
'innovation', or rather redesigns for the sake of redesigning.

Keep up the fantastic moderation and the wonderful lack of innovation, HN
people!

~~~
VHRanger
Completely agreed. The site:

1) loads instantly

2) is mostly plaintext.

Reddit, for what it's worth, provides about the same features but on an
absolutely heavyweight site. Especially the new (redesigned) SPA reddit

~~~
jimmaswell
SPA is one of the worst things to happen to the web. There are a small number
of instances where it makes sense but it just ruins sites like Reddit,
especially on a mobile device.

~~~
travmatt
When do you think SPA’s are the best fit?

~~~
bri3d
SPAs are the best we can do for... applications. Online spreadsheet? SPA.
Document editor? SPA. Image editor? SPA. Visual programming environment? SPA.
IDE? SPA. Facebook makes sense as an SPA too - it's basically a rich widget
"dashboard" app with some content creation applications inside of it. Building
applications for the web is still not the greatest experience because you're
fundamentally building an application over hacks built to expand an
abstraction built for hypertext content (the DOM). But, honestly modern
JavaScript frameworks, TypeScript, and transpiled environments like Elm all do
an admirable job working with what they have.

On the flip side, SPAs are terrible for hypertext content, because existing
web technology was literally built for that. Why should a blog be an
application? The content creation side, sure, maybe, but viewing a blog?
That's literally what HTML was made for. A table of contents full of links
like the HN or Reddit homepage? That's pretty much hypertext 101.

------
zaroth
I’ll add one to this list, I’m sorry if it comes off as complaining, but at
least it’s topical.

There is more than one karma tracking algorithm that can be activated for a
given account. That is to say, a downvote is not always a downvote, and an
upvote is not always an upvote, and the point score of a comment is not always
exactly equal to the number of up and downvotes.

Accounts that are flagged for posting flame-baiting or ideological comments
can be switched to an alternate voting mode where votes are not counted the
same way. This may mean that any manual downvotes are given greater weight, or
upvotes are underweighted, or downvoting is automatically applied after some
time providing a type of downward gravity which must be overcome.

I don’t know the precise algorithm. It’s complicated by the fact that I’ve
been getting auto-downvoted by bots. But due to some overly combative COVID
related posts my account is in this current state. I’ve found that even
researched technical comments of mine will inevitably end up at -1 karma, or
struggle to stay above 0.

After reaching out to dang about bot-downvoting Daniel was nice enough to look
into it and confirmed my account was getting bot-downvoted but also explained
that my account had been flagged and made some suggestions on posts that
crossed the line. I’ve had a long and mostly enjoyable relationship with HN so
hopefully I’ll be out of purgatory soon.

To be clear I have no interest in debating whether the feature was misapplied
in my own personal case, but rather just it’s abstract technical merits make
for great meta-discussion of moderation techniques for social media boards.

~~~
radcon
I was going to mention the same thing. This happens on Reddit too.

If your posts are unpopular for any reason you're automatically penalized.
Doesn't matter if you're right or wrong, you're penalized for posting anything
that people disagree with or don't want to hear.

That's why sites like Reddit and HN will always be echo chambers. Dissenting
voices are automatically silenced. Not 100% of the time, but often enough that
most will probably never waste their time posting.

~~~
saagarjha
I find that Reddit is generally much worse about this kind of thing; perhaps
it is the culture or maybe it is the fact that votes are public. If you say
something people don’t like, they’ll quickly pile on you. For some reason
people there _really_ like going with the flow, and you can’t even reply to
clarify without them coming after you. I have found it much less likely that
this happens on Hacker News, and people are generally more willing to listen
to a comment regardless of how others felt about it.

~~~
catalogia
I don't think it's just reddit, I believe these systems are prone to
triggering some primitive human instincts towards group interaction. I can
think of a few plausible explanations for a discrepancy in outcomes across HN
and reddit. Perhaps hidden scores or the per-comment floor HN uses suppresses
it. Perhaps HN attracts a particular sort of personality while reddit attracts
a more representative slice of humanity. Maybe reddit is harder to moderate,
has worse moderator tools, worse mods, or just too many people. I'm not sure
what the answer is, but one way or the other I consider these sort of systems
to be failed experiments.

> _Researchers from Hebrew University, NYU, and MIT explored herd mentality in
> online spaces, specifically in the context of "digitized, aggregated
> opinions".[4] Online comments were given an initial positive or negative
> vote (up or down) on an undisclosed website over five months.[5] The control
> group comments were left alone. The researchers found that "the first person
> reading the comment was 32 percent more likely to give it an up vote if it
> had been already given a fake positive score".[5] Over the five months,
> comments artificially rated positively showed a 25% higher average score
> than the control group, with the initial negative vote ending up with no
> statistical significance in comparison to the control group.[4] The
> researchers found that "prior ratings created significant bias in individual
> rating behavior, and positive and negative social influences created
> asymmetric herding effects".[4]_

> _“That is a significant change”, Dr. Aral, one of the researchers involved
> in the experiment, stated. “We saw how these very small signals of social
> influence snowballed into behaviors like herding.”[5]_

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_mentality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_mentality)

------
Athas
I think there are some "features" missing from this list. I seem to recall
that Hacker News will transparently remove some characters from titles (such
as emoji and exclamation points), which seems like a bad feature to me, and
one that people should be aware of.

~~~
saagarjha
It will remove many emoji from comments as well, although not all of them. Not
sure what the criteria is for that, either.

~~~
Uehreka
That’s a shame, because I could see legit and serious reasons why someone
would want emoji in comments. For instance, what if someone was trying to
illustrate a point by “drawing” a diagram of a network, using different emoji
to represent different types of nodes.

~~~
drannex
As someone who despises emojis, I am more than happy that they are removed.
There are other ways we could show the hypothetical example.

~~~
cmroanirgo
Agree. It's almost as if using vocabulary is wrong. I've been watching how our
conversations deteriorate by gratuitous use of emoji. It seems that some seem
to think that emoji can cut through all language barriers, because they're
universally understood. Unfortunately, the effect I see is newspeak to the
detriment of all, as we lose the nuances of language itself, and indeed we
become more 'visual only' in our language.

------
yread
Oooh I didn't know about /invited. Few stories of very high quality, looks
like HN back in the day

~~~
saagarjha
/invited is basically the second-chance queue for things that have been
personally stamped to be interesting by the moderators, so it's generally
pretty good.

~~~
dang
It's only a small part of it, the ones that were too old to put in the queue
directly, so we emailed repost invites for them instead. It's on my list to
publish a more complete page. The _types_ of stories are much the same on the
larger list though.

------
saagarjha
>
> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822)

Hacker News has so many strange, undocumented things that even such a list is
incomplete. I’ve run into entirely new things I didn’t know existed just by
using it more, or by happening upon one of ‘dang’s comments…

~~~
billme
Here’s an example:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643177](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643177)

------
ourmandave
Don't forget about their API on github.

It's simplistic but you can still use it to write a sh*ttier version of HN.

[https://github.com/HackerNews/API](https://github.com/HackerNews/API)

I just wish they'd open source their We're-Not-Reddit behaviors library.

~~~
minimaxir
The API has no authentication, which makes it useless for anything other than
a reader.

~~~
saagarjha
You may find this interesting, and as a bonus it also includes something that
you haven't documented:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788526](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788526)

~~~
minimaxir
That is indeed interesting, but I have a feeling it'll be documented once it
launches. :P

~~~
saagarjha
Was talking more about the existence of an alpha-tester list, which has some
additional features itself :)

------
Causality1
Also needs a section on muting. If too many of your consecutive comments get
downvotes you start encountering "you are posting too fast" messages, even if
it there was over an hour between comments and several hours since your most
recent.

~~~
billme
For related prior discussion:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+are+posting+too+fast%...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+are+posting+too+fast%22+AND+\(%22hn%22+OR+%22hackernews%22\))

------
booleandilemma
I've always found it kind of ironic (or at least funny) that the code for HN
isn't open source.

~~~
remote_phone
For me I find it funny that HN doesn’t scale. Whenever there’s an unusually
active topic, the mods have to scramble to make countermeasures to keep the
site up.

~~~
dang
That's not true. I wonder where you got that idea.

It is true that the app server runs on a single core and we don't have a lot
of performance to spare. But it handles the current levels of active threads
reasonably well. The main concern is that if average load goes up
significantly we'll be in trouble at some point.

We've got an ongoing major project that will hopefully flatten that curve, but
unfortunately it's hard to find time to work on it.

------
simonw
This is amazingly useful. I've been on HN for nearly 13 years and I only knew
about a fraction of this stuff.

~~~
billme
Agree, not sure why after X amount of rep is earned something like this is not
featured for just for new users, users who haven’t viewed it, etc.

------
itchyjunk
Ah, there is nothing past 501? I was hoping something else would unlock for
user whose karma points are over 9000.

~~~
billme
PG’s phone number used to appear if your rep got high enough, not sure if
that’s still a feature.

~~~
lucb1e
On his profile page (/user?id=pg) you mean? I don't see it there with 11k rep.
It might require higher rep nowadays or indeed be removed.

~~~
nostrademons
65K karma (and #22 on /leaders) and I don't see it. I think that was a joke.

~~~
kogir
It happens somewhere between ten and eleven digits of karma :)

~~~
maxbond
Relevantish short film:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae2ghhGkY-s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae2ghhGkY-s)

------
dccoolgai
I agree with most of those policies, but "downranking of tutorials" seems
kinda dumb. I could see it making sense for "how to React" drivel that people
use for self-promotion, but I've learned a lot from 1-off tutorials I saw on
HN first.

~~~
billme
Reasoning is HN’s goal, per dang, is to promote substantially new information
— unless the tutorial fits this meaning, it’s less of a priority to feature
than those posts that do meet it.

Worth noting there’s nothing stopping you from building custom HN searches
like this to find tutorials posts, though this would not solve the likelihood
of the community posting related comments:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=tutorial&sort=byDate&type=story)

~~~
floatingatoll
Citation?

~~~
billme
Sure, read all the comments by dang (aka HN’s main mod) here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23239164](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23239164)

------
yesenadam
I'd love if I could choose on my user page not to see my HN points total
always there next to my name in the top bar. Seeing that often turns me into
someone I don't like.

~~~
dang
We might implement that as a profile option. One question is where such a
feature should fall between minimal (don't show karma next to usernames in top
bar) vs. maximal (don't show any point totals or karma about anything). I feel
like it might be better to go the whole hog and just have the maximal option.
'nokarma'.

~~~
yesenadam
Oh great. Yes, I guess not seeing the voting on one's own comments would be
good too. (Looking at the score on my comments is a very small percentage of
my HN time, but my HN total score is there every time I return to the main
page. Have to learn to ignore it I guess.)

As long as it doesn't mess with the voting system too much! Maybe there'd be
many more bad comments if people couldn't see their points total/comment
scores.

~~~
dang
The maximal version would hide story points as well.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> If a user has 251 Karma, they can set the color of the top bar in their
profile settings. The default is #ff6600. Here's the complete set of colors
users have set.

Happy to see that the most #bada55 colour of all is in that list.

~~~
airstrike
Would be nice to see a sorted list and the count for each color. Could even
bucket very similar colors so we get a sense for the general HN taste for
colors, though I don't know the first thing about bucketing colors.

I use #93a1a1, personally (i.e. $base1 from solarized
[https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/](https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/))

~~~
acheron
I use the Dark Reader extension [0], and the standard HN topcolor stood out
too much, so I darkened it to #fff0e6.

[0] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/darkreader/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/darkreader/)

------
Havoc
Neat. Been here nearly a decade & didn't know that downvotes are capped to -4
for example.

~~~
blattimwind
Is that a recent change? I'm pretty sure some of my less popular remarks
earned double digit negative points.

~~~
minimaxir
No, that's been around forever.

Back when comment scores were public via the API, I retrieved the lowest-
rating comments for each month. which was always -4:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IfbSDYVBXiHZCuMdHXgp...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IfbSDYVBXiHZCuMdHXgprhmeCVc4XDtOGizF9CSGyUo/edit?usp=sharing)

Bonus histogram of comment scores calculated in 2014:
[https://minimaxir.com/img/hn-
comments/distribution_comment_p...](https://minimaxir.com/img/hn-
comments/distribution_comment_points.png)

------
United857
I've wondered why we can't comment on YC jobs postings on HN. I imagine
commenting would be beneficial for questions/answers about the company or
position.

~~~
billme
Because they are officially sponsored YC related ADs.

~~~
ryandrake
Although it is a fact, that doesn't really answer why you can't comment on
them.

~~~
billme
Generally speaking ADs don’t allow comments. Have an example or reasoning why
this would make sense?

~~~
hirundo
for users: How about "I tried it, I like it" or "this product gave me warts",
both things it could be useful to know.

for makers of products HN people like: Comments could draw more attention to
the product, more clicks, more sales.

for makers of products HN people don't like: No, can't think of a reason why
allowing comments on ads would make sense.

~~~
kick
The ads are job ads, not product ads. All of your criticisms don't really
apply here. I say this as a person who doesn't like them and rather wishes
they weren't here.

------
lsllc
Comment "markdown" syntax with some examples would be a nice addition to this.

~~~
ainar-g
While we're on the topic of HN syntax, I _really_ wish they would add proper
blockquotes. Quotes in monospace look ugly, especially on mobile, and quotes
that simply start with a “>” aren't visually distinct enough, imo. Just
indenting a paragraph when it starts with a “>” would probably be enough.

~~~
johannes1234321
Not allowing quotes drives users to limit their quoting to a relevant part. I
observed other places that users have a hard time to limit themselves and
context is always there.

------
d0m
[https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors](https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors)

~~~
billme
Are these the only supported “custom colors” ?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7432201](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7432201)

~~~
Stratoscope
No, you can set any CSS color if you have the minimum karma required. The
linked page is just a list of colors that users have actually set.

I really wish any user could set a custom topcolor. I found the default orange
hard on my eyes, and I was glad when I could change it.

Mine is #d0c8b5, which is simply a darker version of the page background
color. Plain and unobtrusive, and the bit of orange in the "Y" logo sits
nicely in the corner.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
And you can always use user.css to adjust per site CSS to your preference. I
use it for a few sites; there are addons that facilitate it, but I've never
bothered.

------
buboard
Not mentioned, but you can be "rate limited", where you can post up to ~ 3
comments per hour (?not sure), else you get a "posting too fast, please slow
down" message. It's keeping us trolls at bay

~~~
ccmcarey
Didn't know that was a thing. Is it a function of your karma?

~~~
buboard
No, manually flagged

------
dfabulich
"Posts without URLs get penalized." That's strange. Does that include "Ask HN"
posts? I would have thought that submissions with no link would be good
discussion starters.

~~~
TwelveNights
Could this be why most Ask HN posts are desaturated? I always wondered why
that was the case.

~~~
floatingatoll
“Desaturated”?

~~~
nerdponx
The text color is lighter, as if the post had been downvoted.

~~~
floatingatoll
That's the 'visited link' color, which indicates that you've visited a given
post's link. Posts do not change color based on votes. For posts without a
link, reading the post requires still visiting the post's link, so it works
out as expected from there.

~~~
frosted-flakes
No, the actual colour of the text on text-only posts is super light. I read
somewhere a while back that it was supposed to discourage people from using it
too much.

Here's an example from the front page:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438930)

~~~
floatingatoll
Ah, thanks for clarifying.

------
tripu
I think the minimalistic design is appropriate and efficient mostly.

…with a couple caveats regarding accessibility: the default font is way, way
too small, and some colours don't have enough contrast (eg, the “visited
link”). Also, a tiny bit more of formatting would make comments more readable
while keeping them sober and focused (eg, blockquotes, monospaced inlines,
true hyperlinks).

------
speg
Is there a simple link to get the top stories from the past week? /best seems
to only return from the past couple days.

------
ufmace
I was always kind of surprised that there's a relatively high karma threshold
for downvoting, but seemingly not for upvoting. Seems like it would invite
voting rings. I guess there's already other software to detect that though.

~~~
billme
Downvotes per item are limited to -4 and the signal-to-noise ratio for
negative votes beyond pushing them below the “new comment” boost is of little
positive impact in filtering content, in my opinion.

And yes, there a lot of filters in place for upvotes, many of which are
intentionally kept secret.

Personally, I don’t use downvotes.

------
rikkipitt
Thanks for posting this. I've been an avid reader of HN for years (with a few
modest/minor submissions). I had no idea about a substantial amount of this...
I wonder how much is commonly known in the community?

------
danielecook
Does anyone know why the top bar sometimes has a thick black line underneath
it?

~~~
dang
minimaxir should add that one! It doesn't look like it's on the list.

~~~
minimaxir
Huh, I thought I did add that. Will do!

------
zaroth
Can we make feature requests here? Hah.

I would absolutely love it if the comment box was taller than 7 lines on
mobile, perhaps just at least when editing a comment.

~~~
floatingatoll
If you set the delay profile value to X it’ll let you edit and save a comment
for up to X minutes before other users can see it. I use it extensively on
mobile and have mine set to 7.

~~~
zaroth
Ooh, that’s a good one because I tend to post then edit, edit, edit, so a
little delay would be nice. Thanks for the suggestion!

------
randyrand
I find it interesting that politics and diversity each have their own section
on here. I always considered diversity a political topic.

~~~
chaorace
I suspect that it's more about optics than practicality. Not all diversity
topics are political, but most diversity topics are probably outside of what
the mods believe to be within the purview of HN.

Making it a separate category bin bypasses all of the hemming and hawing over
particulars.

------
sawyer29
The front page way back feature is pretty cool.

------
elorant
One thing that I'd like to know is if there is any kind of penalty if the
stories you submit get flagged.

~~~
dang
No.

------
mhdhn
Thanks! Pretty useful. Can anyone supply a good comparison between Hacker News
and Reddit?

~~~
billme
Stating the obvious, Reddit was in the first YC batch; YC is HN’s parent
company. Further, HN was created in part because Reddit’s intend is more
general than HN; HN’s intend is to focus on substantially new information that
triggers both curiosity & notable dialogues.

~~~
dsr_
Tip: intend is a verb. She intends to win the election. What did you intend?
Paul intended not to lose.

Intent is a noun. That is her intent.

Intent is also a verb: She is intent on winning the election.

You wanted "intent" as a noun in both your usages above.

~~~
tchaffee
I don't think intent is a verb. It is either a noun or adjective. In the
sentence "She is intent on winning the election" the verb would be "is" and
"intent" is an adjective that describes her.

Compare:

His program focused on dinosaurs. (verb) His program is focused on dinosaurs.
(adjective describing his program).

You would never say "his program intented on dinosuars" because it's not a
verb.

~~~
dsr_
Correct.

------
codeddesign
“Moderators will sometimes rescue a post which didn't receive a lot of upvotes
and reset the submission time on the post.”

This sounds more like manipulation of content based upon moderator viewpoints
or interests. HN has a wide enough audience to hit a good post the first time
around.

~~~
O_H_E
> HN has a wide enough audience to hit a good post the first time around.

Unfortunately, it is widely agreed that a lot of good quality content goes
unnoticed. Which might be due to the sheer number of submissions.

That could be seen in yesterday's post about quality content that goes under.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23392049](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23392049)

------
benjaminsuch
/leaders is pretty cool. First place got over 300k points, wtf.

~~~
billme
Related link, leader list:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/lists](https://news.ycombinator.com/lists)

Direct link to top users by rep:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek)

(tptacek’s comments are super useful and extremely knowledgeable)

------
drdeadringer
I'm glad to know about the hex-color change ability.

------
waynesonfire
incredible that all these features in combination is what make hackernews
great.

------
billme
Good bye HN!

Dang (HN’s mod) just asked me to be identifiable and given that’s not a good
fit for me, this will be my last post:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23441542](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23441542)

~~~
amaccuish
>Dang (HN’s mod) just asked me to be identifiable

But that's not what they said. Were you asked to use your real name? Nothing
stopping you keeping to one, anonymous sounding username

~~~
owaty
I see where billme is coming from. I don't do it here (because I don't comment
much, because I mostly use [https://hackerweb.app](https://hackerweb.app) for
reading), but I do it on reddit.

Once you've left enough comments, a motivated party has a good chance of
identifying you based on the intersection of your (relatively uncommon)
interests, various bits and pieces of the personal info that you tend to drop
in comments etc.

------
4636760295
People should check out [https://lobste.rs/](https://lobste.rs/), it's like HN
but with less censorship and less content marketing BS.

~~~
kick
lobste.rs is almost entirely content marketing spam, and it actually has
heavier censorship of non-spam than HN does; you can see this pretty easily by
checking their mod log.

~~~
greenyoda
I just looked at their mod log. The last article removed by a moderator was
deleted because it was "not about computing". I read the same article on HN,
and it gave rise to some interesting discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23437529](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23437529)

Some of the most interesting discussions on HN are not directly related to
computing, and they're one of the main reasons why I stick around HN (and
would not be interested in moving to lobste.rs).

~~~
pushcx
Howdy, Lobsters admin here - I agree entirely with you, and expanded on that
in previous comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156438](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156438)

