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 [flagged] Ask HN: What's Going on with the HN Algorithm?
80 points by debacle on Oct 28, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 47 comments
This thread, a repost, has nine points in 2 hours, and a single comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33331697

There are a half dozen Elon/Twitter posts on new with more comments and upvotes. Not a single one is on the front page.

Facebook had a massive dip this week, and it hasn't touched the front page.

Are posts on certain topics being censored or being given limited traction on the front page? These are the two biggest stories in tech this week, but not apparently on HN.



Whatever the admins are doing, I appreciate their work. I definitely like that the content on HN is "intellectually interesting" and not "hype driven" - for a lack of better terms.

I also am thankful for stuff I post, that goes totally unnoticed, brought back to life by admins days later, suddenly on the home page! The "second wind" effect.

If I cared about hype driven content, I'd go to Twitter. And in fact it's usually the main reason I close Twitter - incendiary content overload. So much shock-and-awe I should care about that I care about none of it.

What would be the point of duplicating Reddit, Product Hunt and Twitter? I come here to see something different.


This might just be HN's usual (although undocumented) behavior. See [1] for details.

One thing to keep in mind is that more comments is worse for ranking. Less controversial topics that get upvotes but no comments will tend to stay up for longer.

[1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented


Yes, another good reason to use something like https://github.com/hnrss/hnrss instead of depending on a (very transitory) front page.


Probably heaps of flags, just like this post is likely not on the front page quickly due to flags.


[flagged]


It isn't misused every time. Quite the contrary - it's a critical part of HN's immune system. Without it the site would be taken over by pathogens.

We don't have anything close to the mods we would need to examine every HN post, so relying on the community is a must, and the vast majority of users who flag posts are doing it responsibly.

This system doesn't always work correctly. If you see a post that shouldn't be flagged, let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. We often turn the flags off in such cases.


My guess is that the news has been fractured too much. Normally in a situation like the Musk/Twitter news, @dang will merge a few of these stories together so that one post has all of the votes/comment momentum. There are a lot of stories out there, and still not a ton of confirmation yet. I personally expect for one of these threads to make it to the front page sometime tonight...

Also -- this Twitter news will likely affect many people on HN. It's going to be an ongoing topic of conversation; there are just too many people that might be affected in the coming days/weeks.

(Disclaimer: I posted one of these stories)


I definitely do NOT come here for flame wars so what ever they are doing, please keep it up. If I need a dash of pop culture I know where to go


The Facebook (Meta) stock price was on the front page yesterday [1]. But it was probably flagged by users after a while because, well, is it really that interesting of a topic?

https://web.archive.org/web/20221027141959/https://news.ycom...


I'm actually curious as to what people think about that. Is Meta "over", at least to the point of losing that much of its value, or is it just that investors overreacted to a couple of relatively minor misses?


As others have said, that's Reddit content basically. Some times mainstream content might reach HN, but I'd be very surprised if just "Facebook stock dropped" was a big HN thread, not the type of things to discuss in HN, this is not a mainstream news outlet, even if some times some mainstream news do come up.

For instance, I'd expect a lot more to see a thread here about things like, how to invest during these downturns for hackers, personal finance tips for devs in turmoil times, a dev actually affected sharing their story of FB's drop, etc. Things more related to the community.


I agree, also interesting that people are downvoting this


I don’t envy the moderator(s), but there’s a lot of flagging for otherwise decent comments / posts lately. It happens lot with “political” content.

Unfortunately, political includes anything these days lol why is covid19 political? Why is Elon buying Twitter? Why is climate change for that matter?

All I can say is it is. The flags reduce the positioning.

There may be other stuff as well, I’m unsure.


There's bias at HN. Comes with being a message board.


> These are the two biggest stories in tech this week, but not apparently on HN.

Maybe because HN isn't meant to be a substitute for mainstream news? Idk what the creators' intentions were, but I'd prefer it stay a niche community.

The problem with mainstream news imo is it will drag in people who aren't invested in the site


I appreciate that news stories on HN aren't, for lack of a better term, popularity-driven. There would be no point to HN existing if we had the same news on frontpage as any other website (apart from the userbase, which I agree is far, far better than most sites).


How is a change in stock price of a company like Facebook of any intellectual interest?


It was the 2nd largest decline in the history of the company (the largest was February) how is that not of intellectual interest? It got Jim Cramer, the person who popularized the term "FAANG" to cry on camera about how wrong he was. This signals a major change in the recent history of the tech industry (especially when combined with the other massive dips we've seen this week).

However I do think it got coverage today on the frontpage that OP might have missed.

But to the OP's larger point, it's bizarre to not see Musk on the front page.

My good faith assumption is that dang is simply trying to figure out how to consolidate countless new posts into a single one so as to not flood the front page with slight variations on the same story.

Nonetheless there has been increasing and silent censorship of relevant topics here and I think it at least deserves some sort of explanation in this case.


> Jim Cramer

I don't come here to read about what Jim Cramer is doing. I don't care about that at all. If I did, I would just turn on my TV. I come here specifically because stuff like that is not here. Plenty of other websites also cover that type of content.

Not every website need to cover all the same stuff. Thats what used to make the web great, was niche sites and diversity of content.


the initial announcement of Musks twitter offer and attendant gloating / revulsion got many thousands of comments and it is actually quite interesting that the terminal side of this giant event has come through HN like a whisper.

And HN, like CNBC, exists mainly as part of a giant financial hype machine which is interesting in the same way that gravity or death is interesting. The whole tech world revolves around the price of things - your attention, clicks, term sheets, RSUs, etc. Cramer is not below HN, you are not above Cramer just because you don't perform on camera. We are all part of this machine.


I think you said it better than I did. It’s not tech news, or anything interesting. It’s financial news, which is inherently boring.


And yet it’s still boring, sorry. There’s nothing of inherent interest in this. Nothing with any substance about technology, science, or ideas. It’s a change in stock price. I would be interested if I owned shares, but I don’t.

Your theory about consolidating stories seems reasonable. But speculation about how HN works is also boring.


I must confess I am a bit of a stats nerd so when I see an 11-sigma event I consider it generally interesting, especially if the standard model for the underlying process is a normal distribution.


>the standard model for the underlying process is a normal distribution.

I don't think it is, though?


Meta's stock price is not interesting in any way. not even a little.


Most Meta employees are heavily compensated in stock. RSU's and options are what made the top-end of (US) software development so rich, and therefore pulled up the compensation of everyone else at every other level of that market. What effect will this have on compensation for everyone else?

I've never worked at Facebook, but looking at levels.fyi, a Facebook E5- between 4-15 years of experience, based on some other googling- would expect to make ~400k, ~half of that in stock compensation. The stock going down by 70% means that they are not getting the money that they thought they were. Are they going to start jumping ship to other companies? Is this going to flood the market with developers? Will the rest of the top-end of the software engineer market- who already got in trouble for colluding to try and keep down software engineer salaries[1]- lower their offers to match, with knock-on effects further up and down the market? As an American software developer, this matters to me, and I'd expect that a lot of other people would have opinions, rumors, and FUD to share on the topic.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...


I'm pretty sure bytedance is in the process of taking facebook's place as the high offer talent poacher, which is a shame imo because they aren't an American company

Also (this might not apply to you if you already own a home), but in the Bay Area it's like SWE salaries are tied to the housing costs. At the end of the day, what's the point of that 400k if the housing market leeches off of all of the surplus?


Especially because, as best I can tell, stock prices are not related (any more?) to the quality of their backing companies, nor their engineers/tech; it's just what supply and demand of a bunch of funds and algo bots can trade back and forth


Can you speak for everyone on this matter?


how could I possibly speak for anyone but myself?

Christ, you "hackers" are thick.


I guess price is a measure for the quality of capital allocation. This I understand from listening to Elon M. interviews.


Slightly off topic, but thanks for highlighting the 'what is code' post. I clicked through to the previous hn post of that article, saw the thousand (+?) points and decided to read the actual article. Well worth it.


No controversy on the front page and that’s the way I like it. Fully support whatever HN is doing, it’s the only forum with reasonable discussion.


This is because HN doesn't do 'megathreads' where talking points are consolidated into one super thread. All the copycat submissions you see are competing trying to get their submission to be the 'megathread'. Soon enough a submission gains traction and people agree that this submission is where everything should be consolidated.


The HN strange attractor/repulsor.


The HN algorithm works fine, use another frontend if you want a different take on the front page.

I.e. https://hckrnews.com/ on top 20 or 50%


I don't think you should make claims of censorship without evidence


> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Quarterly earnings for FAANGs have almost always made HN.

Elon + Twitter were all over the HN front page for months, and now suddenly there is no coverage?


There was an article on Tue that got to the front page about the near-impending acquisition. It's just that there's too many of the same thing that everyone is tired of it, to be honest. It'll be probably back when and if the acquisition is confirmed to be complete/cancelled again (not just plain old speculation).


That’s the thing. The acquisition was completed today but you wouldn’t know it from the HN front page.


I'm fine with that. Are you not? There's a hundred news sites. There isn't really a lot of intellectual discussion generated by it.


HN is largely a collaborative filtering platform with moderators. In collaborative filtering, the users ARE the algorithm. So, what's going on with you?


If that’s true then why aren’t the more upvoted posts getting ranked higher than the less upvoted posts. You didn’t address OPs comment at all.


Its not only upvotes that affect ranking, but also flagging.


Because time is involved. The scoring formula is something like `(votes/age)^g` where `g` is a "gravitational constant". So if there is a post with 200 votes overall but is 20 hours old will be ranked lower than a post with 30 votes but was created 1 hour ago


Are you sure that formula is right? f(x)=x^g is a strictly monotonic function for all positive g, so the ordering of the scores will stay the same no matter what constant is used for g (assuming g is positive).


It's a bit more involved than that. There are factors like nonURL posts etc. It's been some time since ycombinator.com/arc held the source code of HN (it no longer holds the source code) so I can not verify the actual formula.




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