

Ask HN: Posts being unjustly removed from front page? - jqueryin

Today I browsed to Hacker News as I do every day and noticed a front page post on &quot;How I Made $6,000 in 7 Days with my Ebook.&quot; A friend of mine, Jeremy Olson, has a similar success story. Jeremy and his partner Nathan Barry wrote &quot;The App Design Handbook&quot; and pulled in $36,297 in the first 24 hours and over $56,000 in the first month. He posted these earnings on Twitter at which point I urged him to write up a blog post regarding his success. Jeremy replied with the following disheartening tweet:<p><pre><code>    &quot;@cballou kind of like this? [url redacted]
    
    That actually hit HN homepage but the mods 
    took it down :(&quot;
</code></pre>
He also followed up our conversation with:<p><pre><code>    &quot;@cballou yeah, actually we’ve had several posts taken
    off the front page. Don’t get it&quot;
</code></pre>
My question to the HN community, and particularly the mods, is WTFMATE?<p>Jeremy is a well respected member of the community with an Apple Design Award under his belt. He has a substantial following in the iOS community and my initial inclination is that him sharing the blog post led to upvotes which triggered flagging&#x2F;deleting his post. I believe that in the case of a post deemed to be as beneficial to the community as this one, you&#x27;d realize it&#x27;s likely not upvote gaming but true interest.<p>I&#x27;ll follow up with links to the Twitter conversation and the original article that was removed.
======
arh68
_Unjustly_? The front page is automated: it is not a human entity. It has no
notion of fairness or justice.

Do you understand all of the technical reasons why posts are penalized off the
front page? Do you have improvements to the ranking? Or is this merely a rant?
Sometimes things get unfortunately demoted. Life goes on.

~~~
jqueryin
The front page is far more than automated my dear friend. While automation
indeed plays a key role, PG and a select number of YC alum handle moderation
of the site.

As with most sizable sites that handle comment/post moderation, I'm under the
assumption the system automation flags certain posts and perhaps auto manages
others. The key being that certain tasks require human intervention as machine
learning only gets you so far. The automation aspect likely makes some very
well educated guesses, but there's always the aspect of confidence intervals
not being met and probabilistically performing incorrect actions.

------
brudgers
Seeing as the original story was posted over a month ago timing definitely is
a factor. There's nothing unjust about it, timing [or luck if you like] plays
a role. That's just the way HN works.

ALL-CAPS in the recent submission may have played a role - it's the sort of
thing which might trigger a spam filter.

More importantly, the statement that "several posts" were taken off the front
page lends itself to the possibility that some of the posts did not make the
front page organically - i.e. the complaint is consistent with using standard
social media promotional techniques on HN.

~~~
jqueryin
Let me start by saying that the outcome I'd like to see from this discussion
is an agreement that there's still room for improvement regarding moderation
and the underlying HN algorithm. Specifically, the case of two URLs being
submitted with and without a forward slash shouldn't be allowed. The follow up
submission should have attributed points to the initial submission and the
post shouldn't have been flagged.

1) The story was removed shortly after time of post. Specifically, the story
was submitted to HN the day the blog post came out. It's irrelevant that I
decided to discuss this issue a month later and not conducive to the
discussion; I just thought it was worthy to bring up that the post was removed
where others e-book sale posts have continuously risen to the top of HN
rankings.

2) The original post mentioned wasn't submitted in all caps as per danso's
link to hnsearch. If you visit the blog, it's likely all caps titled due to
text-transform:uppercase, not because the author chose to uppercase the title.

3) Several posts never made it to the front page. There was one post with 16
upvotes at time of removal which would've been the only post on the main page.
The fact that users submitted posts with and without a trailing slash is very
important here; it indicates there may have been a broader issue with HN's
spam prevention system.

~~~
brudgers
Let me be clear, the fact that this particular complaint emphasizes what
happened to other "e-book sale posts" reinforces my suspicion that the
underlying reason for the complaint is that HN squashed a social media effort
to promote a particular e-book.

My reason for making this clarification is that I don't think the HN ranking
algorithm is in particular need of improvement, so we are unlikely to reach
agreement.

However, for completeness, the reason I do not think it is broken is exactly
because it squashed the sort of post about which those with an interest cry
"unfair" and reference other "e-book sale posts" as a point of comparison.

I will add, that if I were trying to design a system intended to foil the use
of HN for social media promotion, I would consider a honey-pot strategy which
would allow a comparison of two streams of submissions.

------
jqueryin
Here's the accompanying Twitter conversation that led to me posting:

[https://twitter.com/jerols/status/408977497255337984](https://twitter.com/jerols/status/408977497255337984)

Here's the initial blog post that was removed:

$36,297 IN 24 HOURS: BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE APP DESIGN HANDBOOK LAUNCH

[http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-stats/](http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-
stats/)

------
chrisbennet
My view is that PG base given us a place to call attention to things that you
think might be interesting to other folks. While it is nice to get some
validation that others agree with you, I don't think that should be the aim of
the poster. Instead I think one should post to HN as a charitable act and not
whine if you or your post doesn't get the attention you think it deserves.
IMO, it is a gift to the community not a "look at me" opportunity.

------
danso
Here's the highest upvoted version of it:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6712226](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6712226)

It seems to have been submitted a few times in short succession:

[https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%2436%2C297+IN...](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%2436%2C297+IN+24+HOURS)

It's possible that the original submission just wasn't noticed, so a couple of
submitters tried resubmitting it, and a wary mod treated it as spam.

~~~
jqueryin
That trailing slash diff is an interesting case. I feel as though the system
should've been able to pick up on that one and attribute the point to the
original submitted article.

------
j_s
[http://hnrankings.info/6712226/](http://hnrankings.info/6712226/)

~~~
jqueryin
Have you learned anything from the site in regards to some of the noticeable
drops seen by a fraction of top 20 postings? It seems like a percentage of
them follow a very linear 30 minute drop onto page 2.

~~~
j_s
Mostly just wanted to confirm you know about this site tracking the articles.

It is hard to tell whether the percentage you mention are nuked by an admin or
the penalty kicks in after enough users flag the post... I'm far from an
expert.

