

Ask HN: Post goes from #1 to #30 in 1 hour with 170+ points? - ljlolel

Is there something in the algorithm that would make a post go from #1 on the front page to #30 instantly?<p>Can it be semi-flagged?<p>It's a popular post with lots of thoughtful comments, no politics, and certainly on-topic. 170+ points and 100+ comments.<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2116062
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cd34
If I recall earlier discussions about the decay of posts, age of the post +
age of last upvote is modified by the number of total votes.

As new posts get upvotes, their ranked score is enough to push older posts
below. It is lunchtime in California, mid afternoon in the Eastern USA... it
is entirely likely people are upvoting newer content.

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taylorbuley
A good way to help old content "decay" is to multiply the votes/relevance by
the current timestamp (which is always greater than previous timestamps). If
you, say, round to the nearest hour -- then there would be an inflection point
come the next hour when a 59 minute turns into a 60 minute old post and gets
its point total multiplied by a smaller bin than posts coming in during the
current hour.

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trotsky
When people flag submissions that acts as downward pressure on the page
position, similar to how a down vote would. There doesn't appear to have to be
any moderator involvement (though if there is that will weigh heavier)

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elbrodeur
I'm assuming it was flagged because it looked like blatant blog spam: A repost
of a post you wrote and submitted a year ago with a linkbait title.

