Hacker News metrics (first rough approach)

http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/33551.html

by edwintorok • 12 years ago

88 68 12 years ago

mjg59.dreamwidth.org

styger• 12 years ago

Thanks for doing the work of trying to apply data to investigate this. It's too often lacking in discussions like these.

pron6• 12 years ago

But for now the evidence appears consistent with my innate prejudice - the Hacker News ranking algorithm tends to penalise stories that address social issues.

My innate prejudice says something worse: that many stories that have to do with social justice but are oblivious to their potentially adverse effect (intentionally or not) are not penalized and are rather handsomely rewarded. These are stories that seem to be about "innovation", but are really about a power struggle (e.g. stories about companies providing marketplace services in the "sharing economy"), with the sole exception of privacy (which fits with the techno-libertarian bias).

It is often said that discussion here shouldn't be about politics, but the worst kind of politics is that which you don't even notice (or choose not to notice).

And once something of substance does come up, it's so frustrating to see it quickly drop in rank because it's automatically tagged as controversial. So a story about a company offering cheap food delivery can stay at the top for a while, but a discussion about a workers' strike against Uber quickly disappears from the front page.

maxerickson2• 12 years ago

You may be including it in "automatically tagged as controversial", but I have the feeling that there are lots of people that are flagging those topics (which fits under "automatic" if you include reflexive flagging of social issues topics, but doesn't if you limit "automatic" to the software running the site).

I pretty much don't flag anything, but I can see how that flagging could be driven more out of a feeling that those discussions don't accomplish anything than out of a desire to penalize those stories.

pron6• 12 years ago

Right, flagging is another issue. But as to "those discussions don't accomplish anything", what does any discussion on HN accomplish? On the more technical stories, the discussions often educate. Thing is, HN isn't /r/programming, and there are many stories about company culture, startups raising money, SV superstars etc.. What do the discussions about that kind of stories accomplish? It's just people schmoozing for entertainment. What's wrong with that?

But I have a practical suggestion: Instead of having unpleasant discussions about important stories related to technology, innovation and startups (like women in startups, which is a far more important topic than, say, Uber raising another trillion dollars), simply block comments on these stories, and at least let people read them without having them drop due to too many comments. Sure, people will still flag the stories, but AFAIK, the flagging privilege can be revoked if a user abuses it.

untog• 12 years ago

An interesting read. Of course, it criticises HN for actively penalising talk on social issues, which might well mean that this story itself will be penalised. And so the great cycle continues.

zorpner2• 12 years ago

In fact, it was: https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/527890332206510080

dang9• 12 years ago

According to HN's software, this story has been heavily ring-voted. That's what has affected its rank.

Call that "penalized" if you want, but it has nothing to do with the content, so that tweet is misleading—and ironic, too, given what provoked the "penalizing".

(Also, in case anyone's wondering, moderators haven't touched the post.)

minimaxir4• 12 years ago

Actually, I believe Hacker News stories are penalty words too. (discourages meta discussion which can be toxic)

dang9• 12 years ago

The Hacker News ranking algorithm tends to penalize stories that address social issues.

The Hacker News ranking algorithm does not penalize stories that address social issues. It doesn't consider social issues at all, apart from a couple of special cases that we turn off once a major wave subsides [1]. The effects the OP is observing are mostly caused by user flags and the voting ring detector.

1. The intention there is to prevent copycat and follow-up stories from clogging up the front page. For example, NSA stories used to be weakly penalized, but no longer are, and I think there's still a similar penalty on ebola stories.

somehow• 12 years ago

I would be more fair to address the broader point of the post rather than just one sentence. It's good that the moderator(s) specify why something is penalized[0], but it doesn't really change the overall result.

[0] As defined by the post in question.

dang9• 12 years ago

Stories about hot social and political controversies reliably attract both a lot of upvotes and a lot of user flags. This, together with how the software interprets votes and flags, explains the effects the OP is describing.

On hot social and political issues, many people find it irresistible to conclude that HN is biased against the side they favor and favors the side they oppose. They perceive this bias in all things HN: the community, the software, the mods, etc. But the truth, as far as I can tell, is that on most of these issues the community is divided. That's why the threads on them turn into flamewars.

Users reliably flag threads that turn into flamewars on HN. (By "flamewar" I mean angry arguments over predictable positions.) Moderators do so as well, though not to the same degree. But this isn't a bias against social issues per se, let alone particular social issues—the same pattern holds on threads about, say, basic income, or high-frequency trading, or even something like static vs. dynamic typing in programming. It's a matter of how divided the community is and how strongly people feel. It's more noticeable on any issue where one feels strongly.

What I do think it makes sense to call the bias of the site is a bias against the low-signal/noise discussions that inevitably result when people angrily disagree, especially when they do so through the filter of a pre-existing ideological battle. This is biased in the sense that HN's guidelines are biased: they call for certain types of stories and discussions rather than others.

Sometimes people argue that HN should abandon its anti-flamewar bias, because after all these are important issues and they need to be debated. But this fails to consider systemic effects on the site. The more ragefires burn, the more thoughtful users leave. That selective process, repelling the users HN most wants and attracting those attracted to flames, is a vicious circle that (a) is hard to get out of and (b) would turn the site into scorched earth. For all HN's flaws, it would be nihilistic to just let it burn.

That doesn't mean we aren't open to ways of balancing these things better: they're hard to balance, and if we're missing something we want to know.

slg2• 12 years ago

I seem to remember reading that in an attempt to avoid "controversial" subjects, posts are penalized if they generate comments too quickly. Social issue are often hotly debated and occasionally some of the most actively commented on posts on the site until they drop off the front page. So while HN might not actively be penalizing these posts, they might be penalized in indirect but still very real ways.

JoshTriplett7• 12 years ago

I would hope that HN's "flamewar" detector is somewhat more sophisticated than just "generate comments too quickly".

krapp2• 12 years ago

I believe a thread with more comments than votes is penalized as well, suggesting that commenting on a thread without upvoting it first is implicitly flagging it.

And of course there may be other arcane metrics involving thread depth, average comment rate, comment size, thread shape, etc. Who knows?

nknighthb6• 12 years ago

This is insanely disingenuous. User flags and the voting ring detector are part of HN's ranking algorithm, whether they're labeled as such in the code or not.

dang9• 12 years ago

We must have a crossed signal here. Of course those are part of the ranking algorithm! My point is that except for the exceptions I mentioned, none of the code considers social issues. What part is disingenuous?

Bahamut• 12 years ago

As far as I can tell, a fair number of users abuse the flag ability to squelch discussion on topics they don't want to see discussed or a viewpoint they don't agree with as an alternative to downvoting (since one cannot downvote a submission).

grimtrigger• 12 years ago

I think there's plenty of evidence that humans by nature are uninterested in "politics", except when it might effect them. Then it becomes an object of great importance.

As for the role of the algorithm, I think its just an extension of "garbage in, garbage out".

Stories like this are a nice reminder that every community is also a bubble.

aw3c2• 12 years ago

Not sure about penalising algorithms but I make sure to flag pointless social war mongering posts.

pron6• 12 years ago

Right, because it's the posts that incite social wars rather than the real events they discuss. This is how it happens:

1. Something bad happens due to what we can call "SV culture", at least bad for some people.

2. A brave soul writes about the injustice, and posts the story (or someone else does) to HN.

3. The story is promptly flagged because the discussion of the injustice is "pointless social war mongering".

4. Order is restored.

5. Another brave soul writes about how HN reflects the SV social hegemony by ignoring important issues.

6. That story is promptly flagged.

imaginenore3• 12 years ago

So much butthurt.

This is Hacker News, not Tumblr. Social justice idiots try to inject their nonsense into every culture, and I would prefer this community to stay on the technology.

walterbell• 12 years ago

See also this thread about manual elevation, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8313505

goodJobWalrus• 12 years ago

Can someone explain how flags are applied? For example, today a post where person is asking for a job got killed, but I have seen same posts (people looking for a job) before that were left on the front page. Why was this one killed?

hippowithgas• 12 years ago

wow - the money quote "I scraped Hacker Slide to get just over two months of data in the form of hourly snapshots of stories, their age, their score and their position" -- how did he do this? I can barely get to the homepage say 14 times out of 20, without hitting the error page from their CDN/DDOS Protection pages (cloudfare?) And that's not to scrape content, just to read the headlines from time to time.

notlisted• 12 years ago

Interesting. I see that that four stories critical of AirBnB were penalized despite many comments (113, 70, 63, 54) and upvotes. The ones touting its value weren't.

I am not surprised. At least 5 times now, I've seen negative stories on AirBnB disappear from the home page fast, whilst silly links remained. Is someone protecting their investment?

V-2• 12 years ago

   This clearly isn't an especially rigorous analysis

Not especially, no.

Data samples consisting of two or five articles per keyword??

And 2 out of all 5 penalized "female" entries have nothing to do with social issues etc. (one is about female mice, another about mixed-sex animals).

Comparing stories on social justice against ARM and Intel is also cherrypicking, because we don't know whether this is supposed to be a bias against social issues, or just non-tech stories in general, or something else.

And what's your methodology of choosing keywords?

"Female" - which made it onto your list - gets penalized 5 to 1, all right.

But then in case of "girls" (omitted from your list) it's actually 0 - 3, telling us a different story.

And unlike with the "female" bunch, none of these articles is about mice. They're about how girls get better grades, how to get them into engineering and why it's easy to teach them code.

"Women" (plural) lose 13 - 4 and so the keyword is featured on your list, but "woman" (singular) wins 7 - 2, and surprise surprise, it's absent.

"equal", as a word stem (counting "inequality", "unequal" etc.) - penalized 2 times, not penalized 3 times. Holy smokes Batman, it rates better than "x86"!

Statistics, huh ;)

If this submission gets penalized, do we count it as bias against social justice, or junk science

onewaystreet• 12 years ago

This article is humorous considering that it was submitted on the same day as Tim Cook's op-ed which has been #1 on HN all day and now has over 2000 upvotes.

Hacker News metrics (first rough approach)

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