
Ask HN/PG: What causes this sudden drop-off behaviour on HN submissions? - dazbradbury
http://hnrankings.info/4805154/
======
mrmaddog
It looks like this "Show HN" post wouldn't have a high "gag" score [1], so
either the post has been flagged multiple times (unlikely), or, most likely,
the majority of those early votes came from the same location, causing the
voting ring safeguards [2] to kick in.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1782058> [2]
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3894695>

~~~
dazbradbury
Unfortunately, I know this wasn't the case - I didn't provide the link to
anyone in our office, which has it's own IP, and I know they weren't aware of
the HN post until afterwards. I also wouldn't publicly use this as an example
if I knew I had been rigging the votes!

So maybe it was just a case of HNers flagging the story as it became popular,
as the title was fairly link-baity? I was under the impression that flagging a
story kills it rather than suppresses it, but regardless, if that's the case
then it makes sense.

Edit: One comment in your example link by ColinWright seems to state 2 or more
"flags" can cause this behaviour:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3893207>

If that's the case, it's probably best people don't know about it, as used
maliciously it would be fairly disruptive.

~~~
jtheory
> Unfortunately, I know this wasn't the case

You can't know -- just because it wasn't in _your_ office doesn't mean it
didn't happen.

One of the first readers to see it may have mass emailed his/her colleagues
who all read/upvoted when they got into work in the morning, for example....

------
pg
You set off the voting ring detector.

~~~
shanelja
There was really no need to respond so pointedly or awkwardly, the parent
posted a genuine question and it really begged a slightly more polite
response.

I understand that you are an extremely busy man and I don't mean to bag on the
owner of the site, but at the risk of getting hell-banned or massively down
voted your response came across as being unhelpful and rude, if it had been
someone else making the comment they would likely have been down voted for it,
or at the very least treat with indignation and ignored.

Perhaps you didn't meant to come across this way and perhaps I'm in completely
the wrong mindset about it, but such a short answer does nearly nothing to
help the parent, you simply stated they had set off a trigger and gave no
details as to why, what they could do in the future to prevent this or any
kind of statistics or advice to aid them.

~~~
jacquesm
He gave an answer when he was under no obligation to do so.

Anybody that is monitoring the effect of their submissions and is asking what
went wrong is asking about potentially dangerous information. HN is a pretty
fine balancing act, it would not take much to wreck it and the secret sauce
serves us all well.

~~~
shanelja
None of us are under any obligation to give a response or answer a question
put to us on this site, but the fact of the matter is that we choose to.

The key point I've taken away from this is that everyone says that the
websites monitoring software is secret and details can't be given, etc. but in
this case it is people who are not privy to this knowledge in the same way
that PG is.

Simply put, he saw the post, he responded, yet other people have had to give
the tangible and useful responses when it could have easily been subverted by
PG spending a little more time to explain his comment.

If he had the time to come on HN, look at the graph presented to him, come to
a conclusion and comment upon it, he must have understood much more than he
gave away and an expansion upon his first statement would have been useful,
for instance: "Your submission set off the voting ring detector, it believed
that ... and this caused it to trigger and lower your submissions ranking on
the site." would have been an order of magnitude more effective. Even if it
was only one short paragraph, it would have been _better_.

~~~
nhebb
What strikes me as rude and presumptuous is when people complain about the HN
site. There is no HN Pro with a support package. We're not paying to take part
in this community. It reminds me of all the stories of freemium products where
the free version users are more demanding than the paying customers.

~~~
vl
Well, this is really promotional site for Y Combinator, in the same way as
Joel's blog was a promotional blog for his company (Fog Creek). So by this
token we (users of the site) serve a double function - consumers and producers
of content and marketing audience, i.e. we are paying for use of the site by
being marketing targets.

------
dazbradbury
It seems unlikely that this is algorithmic, hence, I would guess if a post is
deemed to not be meeting HN standards / guidelines, moderators can "demote" a
post, essentially removing it from the front page. So in this case, was the
title simply too link-baity? And who judges that?

This is obviously a guess, and looking through the FAQ (Official and
unofficial!), I can't seem to see it stated anywhere.

Another possibility could be user flagging, but that would seem too easy to
game maliciously.

I think whilst some elements of your filtering you want to keep secret to stop
spammers, it would be helpful to understand this throttling behaviour to help
people submit better content. Transparency is often helpful to create less
work for both sides, so if an answer could be given, I think people would be
interested to know!

~~~
andrewcooke
i don't know how current it is, but i believe that hn source is included in
the arc download - see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1390685> \- so you
could try looking there to see how flagging is handled.

~~~
dazbradbury
Good point - could be in here, but it's 1:30am and I probably shouldn't be
learning Arc right now! Will take a look in the morning.

    
    
        (= flag-threshold* 30 flag-kill-threshold* 7 many-flags* 1)
    
        ; Un-flagging something doesn't unkill it, if it's now no longer
        ; over flag-kill-threshold.  Ok, since arbitrary threshold anyway.
    
        (def flaglink (i user whence)
          (when (and user
                     (isnt user i!by)
                     (or (admin user) (> (karma user) flag-threshold*)))
            (pr bar*)
            (w/rlink (do (togglemem user i!flags)
                         (when (and (~mem 'nokill i!keys)
                                    (len> i!flags flag-kill-threshold*)
                                    (~find admin:!2 i!vote))
                           (kill i 'flags))
                         whence)
              (pr "@(if (mem user i!flags) 'un)flag"))
            (when (and (admin user) (len> i!flags many-flags*))
              (pr bar* (plural (len i!flags) "flag") " ")
              (w/rlink (do (togglemem 'nokill i!keys)
                           (save-item i)
                           whence)
                (pr (if (mem 'nokill i!keys) "un-notice" "noted"))))))

~~~
wavesounds
This is the craziest programming language I have ever seen.

------
_sentient
Are there any YC companies competing directly in the space? 42Floors comes to
mind, although I believe they are focused exclusively on commercial real
estate at the moment.

If there is a YC company that competes directly with you, I could see
incentive for a mod to suppress your post. </tinfoil hat speculation>

~~~
ximeng
It's not tinfoil hat speculation. Sharp dropoffs also happened when the story
of an AirBNB house being robbed broke. Rather than just seeing one story
dropping off we need a way to see every time this happens to make our own
minds up over whether it's above board.

~~~
rpm4321
From everything I know about PG and YC, I highly doubt they themselves would
take that kind of action unless a post was outright slander. It just seems
Nixonian.

That said, there is obviously quite a bit of goodwill on HN for PG and YC. You
could call it fanboyism if you were feeling uncharitable. To me, that seems a
much more likely scenario - an anti-YC submission getting a bunch of flag
votes, rather than an intervention by admins.

~~~
ximeng
Agree, plenty of goodwill from me as well, which is why I was surprised to see
a popular voted question about a YC company having trouble suddenly disappear
then. Without a good explanation it makes me lose trust in the transparency of
HN, whether due to flag votes or direct intervention.

------
zerostar07
You 're all entrepreneurs (or wannapreneurs). Why doesn't one of you create a
service that will employ mechanical turks as seed to bootstrap a new website
by using it and providing honest feedback? I know i would pay for that. Being
on the frontpage in HN will not guarantee seed userbase; it's more of an ego
boost.

------
weaksauce
Probably the algorithm, check out these(old) posts on it...

<http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013>

~~~
dazbradbury
Those posts describe a smooth drop off as a function of time and votes - in
some instances (such as the one linked to) that clearly isn't the case.

~~~
legierski
I'm wondering if there's any description of the voting ring detector used by
HN

------
TallboyOne
What I want to know is how I get tons of HN traffic daily months after my post
is off the front page.

~~~
evilduck
Search engine results. The comments are indexed and are often niche enough to
dominate certain search terms.

------
supersaiyan
Can I ask what js framework/proj. you are using to graph the data?

~~~
jpalacios
looks like highcharts JS

------
JeremyMorgan
Because you're on the 15th page by then?

