Ask HN: How exactly does Hacker News 'points' work?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7809498

by sunilkumarc • 12 years ago

129 64 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I wanted to know how many upvotes should a post get to get 1 point here. Because as i have noticed 1 upvote != 1 point.

RossM2• 12 years ago

From the FAQ:

How is a user's karma calculated?

Roughly, the number of upvotes on their submissions and comments, minus the number of downvotes. (The numbers won't exactly match up, because some votes aren't counted to prevent various types of abuse.)

sunilkumarc2• 12 years ago

I'm asking about a particular post. If a post has got say 10 points, how many people should have upvoted it?

jonlucc• 12 years ago

Roughly ten more people than downvoted it.

tgrass• 12 years ago

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

aidanf• 12 years ago

Also http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...

tgallant• 12 years ago

the only real answer. idk why people think the voting system is a magical black box. to add, the top comment in the following link is paul graham showing the code for the voting system https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781417

aspidistra• 12 years ago

People think it is a magical black box because the code in the parent comment, and in the thread you linked, is three and a half years old, and HN does not run these days on exactly the same code that was open-sourced in news.arc.

jacquesm2• 12 years ago

There is no way to exactly know what it means when an article or comment has 'x' points. Some votes are counted, others are not, nobody (except for dang) knows.

For instance, I could 'upvote' this article but it would not be counted (I know, because if I refresh the page the count has not changed). Similar vote suppression mechanisms exist for articles, article submissions and for flagging content and users.

It's a crappy situation, but it works, don't sweat the points and enjoy the content.

trebor• 12 years ago

Don't forget that HN has CloudFlare caching enabled. It might not be vote suppression but cache freshness that prevents you from seeing the upvote immediately.

jader201• 12 years ago

For instance, I could 'upvote' this article but it would not be counted (I know, because if I refresh the page the count has not changed).

How do you know that it's not a cached point value, and that after, say 30 seconds or so, that your upvote along with others will get added?

barrkel• 12 years ago

My article votes appear to work immediately.

On the other hand, I lost the ability to flag articles a year or more ago.

minimaxir• 12 years ago

All votes are counted, but there are some votes which will not affect the position/ranking of the submission.

nkozyra• 12 years ago

"Some votes are more equal than others," if you will.

orky56• 12 years ago

The marginal value of each vote does not equal a whole point, or else we would be looking at a completely linear curve. That would not easily capture the trending effect nor the relative popularity of articles posted at similar time periods.

IgorPartola• 12 years ago

I have seen this behavior when two people from the same public IPv4 upvoted a post. Only the first of those counted.

I also noticed that when someone is being downvoted into oblivion for a bad comment, at some point my downvote does not count.

I think there are lots of interesting mechanisms in play here, but you are right, it's not really worth worrying about most of the time.

chrisBob• 12 years ago

Also note that when a comment gets downvoted it will max out at -4 even as you continue to loose karma.

maurits• 12 years ago

Counting up and down votes is a surprisingly interesting problem.

If you are interested, have a look at chapter 4 of Probabilistic Programming and Bayesian Methods for Hackers [1].

[1] http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/CamDavidsonPilon/Probabil...

mattmanser• 12 years ago

One of the things I've noticed recently is that I'll say something controversial, stupid or ill considered, lose a bunch of karma, and then it'll gradually come back over the next day or so.

No idea what's going on, whether it's voting changes or what, but something seems to have changed.

matsemann• 12 years ago

I think it's only possible to up vote comments after a day or so, and no longer down vote. So when you say something controversial, the first hours you get a lot of both up- and down votes. But after a while, you only get the up votes.

NicoJuicy2• 12 years ago

This is how i think it works. The ammount of points you get, has nothing to do with the average vote count of a user (the avg. vote points / total vote count could influence when you appear on the front, but it doesn't influence the points you receive).

When you create a post you automaticly upvote it, this upvote doesn't count for your profile score, if anyone else upvotes you, you get 1 profile point. If anyone downvotes you, you get -1 profile point.

Someone with > 500 profile score can downvote you.

Edit: The one downvoting me, could you elaborate what isn't good about my answer?

colanderman• 12 years ago

You can't downvote posts, only comments.

NicoJuicy2• 12 years ago

In a way, both are items. But posts are level 0 and comments are level > 0.

Look at when you link to an item / post :)

lostInTheWoods3• 12 years ago

Obfuscation of the rules is clearly a key component of the voting system on HN. The less we know about the rules, the less we can game the system.

moonlighter• 12 years ago

Sounds somewhat like security by obscurity...

DanielBMarkham5• 12 years ago

I've come to the conclusion that HN voting/ranking is like Google search engine ranking: you're not supposed to know how it works. If you did, people would game the system.

So it's a magic act. As a programmer, this frustrates me terribly. I just emailed dang yesterday because I had submitted something that shot up, got a lot of attention, then died just as suddenly. Hell, I didn't know, I thought the system was broken or something. Turns out I was flagged.

The upvote thing you mention is especially annoying. You click the little button, you're expecting something to happen. That's the nature of clicking little buttons on computer interfaces.

Hell-banning also drives me nuts, for similar reasons. Computers should serve us, not the other way around. [insert long discussion here about having to manage a site with a zillion users, and how it's easy for me to rant about this but I should walk a mile in dang's shoes, etc.]

was_hellbanned• 12 years ago

Hell-banning also drives me nuts, for similar reasons.

Hell-banning is for spammers and the mentally-ill. The way HN uses it is utterly despicable.

DanielBMarkham5• 12 years ago

Flagging was supposed to be for articles that were so bad they didn't belong on the site, not just articles you didn't like.

But not anymore. If I had to bet, I'd say folks are using flagging as a tool to both get payback and game the rankings.

NathanKP• 12 years ago

I believe that a large factor in how it works has to do with the average karma score of the voters. (Visible on your profile page). From what I have been able to determine the higher your average score the more weight your votes have, and the longer it takes for your comments and/or submissions to fall down the page.

This seems to be designed to reward people who make consistently good submissions and comments, although it also has the bad effect on making it quite penalizing to make a comment that goes against the groupthink.

I think that other factors that may have an impact are age of your HN account, and your total karma count. So long story short votes by older accounts that make quality submissions and comments are worth more.

pessimizer3• 12 years ago

Hopefully they account for controversial comments, too. If a comment gets 130 upvotes and 145 (karma-equivalent) downvotes, I want to see it. Also, I know that dang has mentioned helping minority opinions out more than once.

Aldo_MX• 12 years ago

I rarely upvote, but when I do, is because a good comment has been downvoted unfairly.

thomasz• 12 years ago

It makes it quite rewarding to quickly post conformist opinions in typical circle jerk threads, at the same time it punishes participating in smaller and older threads.

jordigh• 12 years ago

Yeah, I really hate this. I have some relatively unpopular opinions (e.g. I believe that porn, strip clubs, and prostitution are the core problem holding back equality of women) but trying to express these opinion penalises me. The downvotes eventually hide my opinion.

I don't know if there is a better model for human discourse on the internet. Maybe it's a good thing that unpopular opinions get silenced, unless they're phrased in very careful, smart-sounding ways. I have to go through great lengths to convince my voters that I'm not a complete idiot for believing some things, and it's a lot of work. It's just easier to express unpopular opinions very selectively.

edit: Wow, there's a very good-looking response to this by lostcoyote which is marked as dead and will probably disappear. What a weird coincidence, very à propos.

gnopgnip• 12 years ago

Does the number and length of comments affect points?

mkempe• 12 years ago

It would be interesting to multiply points for comments that are well-written (readable [1], good grammar & rich vocabulary [2], with a couple of footnotes or references), neither too short nor too long.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunning_fog_index

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2264806/how-to-automatica...

swombat4• 12 years ago

I don't know that it affects points, but it definitely affects ranking. A post with more comments than points is likely to trigger the flame war detector and have the same effect as the post being flagged severely.

paulhauggis• 12 years ago

Downvoting shouldn't be used to silence opposing view points, but it is regularly used this way here on HN.

BrainInAJar• 12 years ago

How does downvoting even happen, I don't have a button for it

mschuster91• 12 years ago

You need >=501 karma points, then another arrow will appear below the upvote arrow.

metaphorm• 12 years ago

its a deliberately opaque system designed to reward group think conformity and insider quid-pro-quo vote manipulation.

pessimizer3• 12 years ago

Here's some inside: I looked at my average yesterday and it was 3.77, and today it's 4.16. Suspecting that it's either a short term moving average, or something even more complicated.

sz4kerto• 12 years ago

I've had an avg karma of ~7, then submitted an article that got ~200 upvotes, then my avg karma decreased to 3.9. So for the OP: I have no idea :)

yaur• 12 years ago

Average Karma is based on a window of comments. Something like the last 60 IIRC, so if you have highly rated comments that are moving out of the window because you are posting new comments it will decrease your score. I also suspect it is weighted towards comments (perhaps even 0 weight on posts) as my own 60some point submission had almost no impact on my average.

Ask HN: How exactly does Hacker News 'points' work?

Related Stories