Ask HN: What does the percentage next to posts mean?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10101229

by flippant • 11 years ago

166 68 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

jerrac2• 11 years ago

No idea, but I'm guessing the percentage of votes that positive. Or something related to that.

0942v8653• 11 years ago

Stories cannot be downvoted, no matter how much karma you have.

rev_bird• 11 years ago

A TWIST! Now I have no idea what these could be.

fimoreth2• 11 years ago

That's what I was thinking as well. I refreshed the page repeatedly and saw the percentage fluctuate as the score only went up.

Not exactly a foolproof test though. I think you're probably still right.

spydum2• 11 years ago

Heat/trending of some sorts?

jeo12346• 11 years ago

I think it is likely something along these lines. I up-voted this question and the percentage rose.

enraged_camel2• 11 years ago

But I upvoted another submission and the percentage fell!

jerrac2• 11 years ago

If @0942v8653 is correct, stories can't be downvoted, then this sounds like the best guess to me. :)

enraged_camel2• 11 years ago

This is a chance for moderators to conduct a social experiment: let people speculate in this thread for two days before revealing what it is. Just to see what crazy theories people come up with! :)

joaq• 11 years ago

And after two days it turns out it's a random number.

raidan• 11 years ago

A random number that goes up when you upvote..

inopinatus• 11 years ago

I like it. Crowdsourcing your ideas. A meta-MVP.

vowelless• 11 years ago

"freshness"

other_herbert3• 11 years ago

Percentage of visitors that click it?

netcraft2• 11 years ago

speculation: could be the ratio of how many people upvote vs how many view the link?

5424582• 11 years ago

Thats an interesting theory, but unless everybody votes way more often than me those numbers seem really high.

netcraft2• 11 years ago

agreed, they are relatively high for that.

guiomie• 11 years ago

is there an xhr attached to opening of the link in a new tab?

geofft• 11 years ago

Does HN even track how many people view the link? As far as I can tell, there's no JS on the home page other than the not-even-AJAX powering the upvote and downvote buttons, and they're not using <a ping>, so I'm not sure how that information would get back to the servers.

gradys• 11 years ago

You could simulate it by recording its position on the front page for each impression. Assume that higher positions on the page are seen more. Then your metric is something like upvotes per position-discounted impression.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that dang would get much value out of this kind of metric unless he was trying to tune the ranking algorithm or something like that.

Springtime• 11 years ago

It's quite distracting. There's already enough text packed closely together as it is.

fimoreth2• 11 years ago

Also, why are some red & grey? Looks like it turns red at 50%.

jeo12346• 11 years ago

Don't think so. Last time I looked this question was at 72 and grey, there was another which was 23 and red.

adventured4• 11 years ago

Any normal posts turn red at 51% and above. Ask HN posts never turn red. Went back through the top 500 posts, all of the reds are 51% or above. Might be some other variable that triggers a rare sub 51% red, but I can't find an example right now.

5424582• 11 years ago

The colors are strange too. Some percents in red, some in gray, but it doesn't seem to be directly correlated with the quantity displayed or the post age.

jeo12346• 11 years ago

I think the colours may relates to the way the story is trending (up or down).

Absentinsomniac• 11 years ago

All of the colors above 50 percent seemed to be red, while none below were.

ZoF• 11 years ago

I though it was %upvoted/downvoted as well.

Posting in epic thread.

other_herbert3• 11 years ago

Totally out there option... Rain percentage from the geolocation of the ip that submitted it

blairbeckwith• 11 years ago

And, they're gone.

archimedespi• 11 years ago

I don't see them either.

polemic• 11 years ago

What does it mean if I can't see them while logged in?

adventured4• 11 years ago

Nothing, they've disabled them now.

jeo12346• 11 years ago

Maybe YC has made part of the sorting algorithm public. Perhaps by accident.

pshc• 11 years ago

Was it an indicator of the quality of the comments section?

Looks like the percentages appeared, then HN went down briefly (server restart, sorry @dang), and now the percentages are gone.

dang5• 11 years ago

then HN went down

We prefer to call that "restarting the server" :)

spydum2• 11 years ago

I really admire you guys for keeping it simple. I have seen too many outages due to piss poor "high availability" design, which would have simply been avoided by not trying to be highly available! Damn, we really need a catchy term/phrase for that (besides ironic)

brudgers• 11 years ago

I think it may have been sentiment analysis. The low ranked threads appeared to have a more negative tone, at least during my quick anecdotal survey, and this thread was high ranked perhaps because people hadn't had time to create really long complaints.

faizshah• 11 years ago

It can't be sentiment analysis because some items didn't have any comments but still had a percentage. Some other clues that we have is that the percentage didn't correlate with the color and that pretty much all the recently submitted links didn't have percentages.

jeo12346• 11 years ago

Seems unlikely, pretty hard to attached a computer created value to something like that.

other_herbert3• 11 years ago

That's why you need debug output to see how it's doing :)

adventured4• 11 years ago

In this case, you'd do it based on the upvoting and downvoting ratios of comments.

50 comments, with 15 grey comments = bad sentiment, lots of negativity, non-productive conversations etc. Then come up with a scoring algorithm, with red being volatile or bad sentiment so the moderators can spot them instantly visually.

codezero• 11 years ago

nope, there are examples of posts with a percentage that have no comments.

Some of the percentages appear related to upvoter count.

There is one with 9 upvoters and a percentage of 33.

My guess is it's a measure of clique voting. X% of people voted on another story together.

Not sure, that may be more complicated than needed, but it seems to be a percent measure of the upvoters.

rdtsc2• 11 years ago

The numbers of this post were 106/70% , then I upvoted it, refreshed, it became 107/69%.

So maybe percentage is how many people viewed the front page but didn't upvote it (since you can't downvote it)...

... A-a-and it's gone now...

dang5• 11 years ago

I was experimenting with collecting some stats on posts and accidentally published that version of the page.

Normally I'd say sorry, but this turned out to be so amusing that I guess I'm not sorry. Carry on!

Edit: you guys blow my mind. One of these years we should do this on purpose.

jeo12346• 11 years ago

Which stats?

stevesearer• 11 years ago

I remembered there being special options and information for mods from a post a while ago and was able to dig up this screenshot which contains a % score: http://imgur.com/ge3ZBgt

The mystery continues! :)

EDIT: And apparently that % score was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972234

adventured4• 11 years ago

So now you're going to leave a thousand hackers to figure out what it did without any further hints. I see how it is.

dang5• 11 years ago

The mystery is so much better.

zer00eyz2• 11 years ago

I have to ask, why are you even LOOKING at a production server on Friday? Do you like wrecked weekends, cause thats how you get wrecked weekends.

eck• 11 years ago

Yeah. I can't even imagine how much revenue YC must lose for each minute of news downtime.

rdtsc2• 11 years ago

Good point. Read-only Fridays are thing for sysadmins ;-)

engi_nerd• 11 years ago

Oh man, I wish I had that luxury in flight testing. No one likes flying on Friday afternoons. Especially when things break.

arrmn• 11 years ago

Bit off-topic: At my last workplace they used to push our code for several ecommerce sites to production on fridays, every week, without tests. It somehow worked out.

Zenst• 11 years ago

Dilbert cartoons will be written about this in later years, if not already.

mukyu• 11 years ago

http://i.imgur.com/nlwvHJK.png an example for those that did not see it

ghayes• 11 years ago

Now let's see if someone can pull from the API and cross-correlate to figure out what they likely meant.

tux3• 11 years ago

Here's another: https://i.imgur.com/hsRJnPw.png

Ask HN: What does the percentage next to posts mean?

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