Ask HN: What's Going on with the HN Algorithm?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33366830

by debacle • 4 years ago

80 46 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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.

leephillips3• 4 years ago

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

PheonixPharts2• 4 years ago

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.

naikrovek2• 4 years ago

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

svnpenn• 4 years ago

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.

leephillips3• 4 years ago

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.

abudabi123• 4 years ago

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

lettergram• 4 years ago

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.

qclibre22• 4 years ago

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

cr4nberry3• 4 years ago

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

chewxy3• 4 years ago

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

spiderice• 4 years ago

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.

doctoboggan• 4 years ago

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

chewxy3• 4 years ago

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

smoldesu• 4 years ago

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

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

debacle• 4 years ago

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?

zinekeller• 4 years ago

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).

franciscop• 4 years ago

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.

cr4nberry3• 4 years ago

I agree, also interesting that people are downvoting this

beauHD• 4 years ago

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.

robryan• 4 years ago

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

themitigating• 4 years ago

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

j-bos• 4 years ago

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.

mbreese• 4 years ago

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)

lwneal• 4 years ago

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

bhj• 4 years ago

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

keyle• 4 years ago

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.

bergenty• 4 years ago

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.

tejtm• 4 years ago

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

jonas21• 4 years ago

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...

_hyn3• 4 years ago

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?

agileAlligator• 4 years ago

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).

netmonk• 4 years ago

The HN strange attractor/repulsor.

411111111111111• 4 years ago

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%

Ask HN: What's Going on with the HN Algorithm?

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