
Ask PG, HN: Is someone tampering with article positions? - stagas
Can someone explain to me how the same algorithm can classify a highly controversial topic like the Monsanto story[1] in place 128 while another story[2] of the same publication time with less points and much less comments be on place 29 on the frontpage at the same time?<p>[1]: http://imgur.com/2IU0JCD<p>[2]: http://imgur.com/XspkTjs
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DanBC
Flagging is taken into account with article position. People are flagging the
monsanto article.

HN could be a useful place to discuss monsanto, but that thread is an
excellent demonstration of why topics like that fail on HN.

There's a bunch of people who've gone into that thread with fixed opinions.
They're not going to change their opinions; they're going to cherry pick
articles to support their view points. Discussion is limited and polarised.

~~~
stagas
That makes sense and I understand it. However it seems way too artificial for
me, because I was watching the Monsanto thread and it went from place 2 in the
1st page to the 3rd page in the span of a couple of minutes before anyone had
a chance to express their opinion so as you see it now it's because only those
of us that were in the thread actually continued discussion.

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btilly
Advanced users can flag articles. Flagged articles sink. Controversial topics
are more likely to get flagged.

~~~
impostervt
I had no idea that flagging was essentially a down-vote. Thanks.

~~~
trotsky
It's worth noting that if you actually use it that way on any kind of a
regular basis you'll very quickly have the ability to flag articles removed (I
did, and it took less than a month and no more than a couple dozen flags)

~~~
lmm
There must be a bit more to it than that; I flag pretty aggressively (though
admittedly only articles that I think are _inappropriate_ rather than simply
_bad_ ) and the link is still there.

~~~
benologist
I think there's some flagging-ring detection, I heavily flagged a group of
spam accounts over and over again until I lost the ability which might look
suspicious without examining the targeted accounts.

It never comes back either.

~~~
trotsky
that seems to fit with me as well, i was flagging a spammy subset of articles
on a subject that were being relentlessly promoted by a rather small group of
people.

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webtrill
I believe someone is tampering with the position of links submitted. I say so
because last week or so, I submitted our startup to HN which was on the first
page for most of the day and receiving some positive comments/feedback. At
some point in the day, we were no where to be found (unless I utilized the
search functionality), only to appear again on the first page after a while.
Later on in the evening, it dissapeared again.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
That sounds a lot like flagging. cf. recent article on Margaret Thatcher that
bounced in and out of existence. I actually assumed it was a moderator
decision but info@ explained it got flagged dead, then put back by mods -
which is almost a description of your events.

Oddly enough I have _never_ flagged an article (except with a fat finger) -
usually because I simply dont know what it does.

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stagas
Clickable:

[1]: <http://imgur.com/2IU0JCD>

[2]: <http://imgur.com/XspkTjs>

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mjdn
given that this is a meta thread, could somebody explain why all my posts end
up on the News page rather than the Ask page. Is my karma too low to post the
Ask page? I'm new

see this for example <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5534167>

------
chris_gogreen
Does the rate that up-votes come in change the rankings?

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cooldeal
There are a few ways that an article can appear lower than it should.

1) Flagging by people with karma over the threshold (currently set at 500).

2) For some domains, only 1/3rd of the upvotes count, e.g. Reddit, XKCD,
images, tweets.

3) There is a "controversial" score which can bring down a story. Not sure how
it is computed but perhaps it's based on number of comments versus number of
points.

4) Voting ring detector. This can bring down a post pretty hard if it's
triggered.

5) I suspect the HN supermoderators can cause a post to sink to the second
page instantly.

Most of the time it's #1 that causes posts to go down.

I've usually seen it happen to posts that are anti-Apple, anti-Google or posts
related to Microsoft that are not negative towards it. It's like the
moderators flag posts that they don't want others to be seeing.

For example, the Surface Pro review

<http://i.imgur.com/uFPTSqR.png>

<http://i.imgur.com/ADMcanz.png>

~~~
trotsky
5 is a big part too, a moderator flag appears to instantly drop a post about
60 ranks (from first to third page). I think when you see it only get to the
second page that's user flagging.

~~~
stagas
That's interesting. Can we have background information for these "moderators"
that are given these god like abilities? We need to know who's deciding what
we should be reading or not.

~~~
chc
Nobody's deciding what you should be reading. They're just deciding what gets
top billing on Hacker News. I'm pretty sure none of the moderators believe the
top stories on Hacker News are the only things worth reading. Hacker News is
meant to be tightly focused on certain areas, so other things (e.g. politics)
get buried whether you should read them or not.

