Absolutely. HN user 'EvanMiller had a lot to say about this, 11 years ago. His tl;dr is that the ranking score should be "the Lower bound of Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter."
I believe HN's ranking system is extremely creative and works great for the main page and day-to-day use (my understanding is that it additionally makes use of time-decay terms for comments and stories). Like you said, it's really just historical search (i.e. algolia) that seems broken.
I believe HN's ranking system is extremely creative and works great for the main page and day-to-day use (my understanding is that it additionally makes use of time-decay terms for comments and stories). Like you said, it's really just historical search (i.e. algolia) that seems broken.
https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15709405
https://www.evanmiller.org/bayesian-average-ratings.html
https://www.evanmiller.org/ranking-items-with-star-ratings.h...
https://redditblog.com/2009/10/15/reddits-new-comment-sortin...