

Ask HN: Why punish popularity? - fogus

It seems that there is a weighting algorithm in place that penalizes submissions that receive many upvotes from a common referral point.<p>For example, member jashkenas submitted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2872831 earlier today and offered a HN link via Tweet.  This article received a quick dozen upvotes but was quickly buried on the 2nd page and has since fallen into limbo.<p>Are all HN submission discussions intended to grow organically?  Is there no room for directing interested parties to HN via a common source for the purposes of stimulating discussion?<p>I can envision a scenario where this would stop karma-baiting, but come on... there must be a better way.  jashkenas is a valuable member of the HN community and it's ashamed that he cannot serve as a source for stimulating discussion through a (now) ubiquitous channel for communication.
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_delirium
I think I support the current system, though maybe there are ways of tweaking
it. If there's no preference for internal decision-making on HN by people
actually reading the /newest page, HN will tend to only consist of things that
had traffic driven to them from something like twitter, a popular blog, or
reddit (it's already pretty hard for anything on /newest to get noticed).

That seems like it'd lead to an HN that consisted mainly of discussion of
things that're already being discussed elsewhere. To avoid that, some
decoupling of communities so that what's at the top of HN is primarily driven
internally is good, imo. But, perhaps there's a better way than devaluing
externally driven votes.

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irrumator
I wonder if this new activity of the weighting algo noticed all the rapid
upvotes for new posts originating from #startups on freenode? That place is a
regular source of 'please upvote my story here guys: <link>' even from the
channel ops, two well-known HN-ers.

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ColinWright
Clickable: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2872831>

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schlichtm
Everything posted on Hacker News has the same and equal ability to be picked
up from /newest. If the content you are posting is interesting it will
naturally hit the front page and will not need artificial votes from friends.

