How Hacker News ranking works: scoring, controversy, and penalties (2013)

VCFundedGenYer

This falls apart completely if you’re like me and only see the list presented on brutalist.report which is strictly chronological and with zero algorithms.

tptacek

Presumably this has gotten way, way more complicated in the last 13 years.

Liftyee

The penalties are interesting. It shows that the design goal is not to maximise interactions otherwise "controversial" posts should stay up. Still though, I wonder what's the point of deranking said posts. Minimise the potential for a flame war to hit critical mass? Stop people from perceiving HN as an argument-filled forum?

anon_cow1111

Personally the first HN algorithm anecdote I really noticed was when the "stop destroying videogames' petition hit the front page a couple years ago. In the first hour it got a modest ~100 votes and comments with some organic discussion, so pretty typical for a good HN post. In the next hour it was dead and buried several hundred posts down. I don't want to be a tinfoil hatter here, but I think certain industries have a lot more influence over this site than most people realize.

NiklasKoehler

The part of this I always forget is how lazily the ranking is applied. HN does not rescore the list on every page load. A story is rescored when someone upvotes it, and separately one story out of the top 50 gets picked at random every thirty seconds and rescored. Pages cache for another ninety seconds on top of that. So the front page is never a clean rendering of the formula. A story that stops getting votes can sit at the wrong position for minutes at a time. Which is also why the penalty figures in the post are ranges rather than numbers. Shirriff is inferring them from stories ranked lower than their raw score implies, and a story that simply has not been rescored recently looks exactly the same from outside. He lists that as one of his sources of error, along with neighboring stories carrying their own penalties.

compiler-guy

Not sure when it started, but the second chance pool has moderators putting stories that didn’t get much attention when they were submitted directly on the front page. There may be some survivor bias here, but second-chance stories seem very front-page sticky to me. At least those I have recognized.

kens

Author here. I don't know why this popped up 13 years later, but hi :-)

PreciousH

weird that posts with lots of comments are also penalized though, the `controversy` reasoning is not solid enough for me.

syngrog66

I concluded long ago that voting rings are active here, along with paid/inauthentic upvote farms.

seizethecheese

> I observed that many websites appear to automatically get a penalty of .25 to .8: arstechnica.com, businessinsider.com, easypost.com… Easypost is a YC company, for those who claim hacker news moderation favoritism

mberning

Great analysis. I think there must be even more going on in the comments section. There are a lot of shenanigans especially on “controversial” topics.

zdw

Does anyone have an explanation of when you get a lot of karma why there isn't a 1:1 relationship between the votes a post gets and how much the account? Somewhere around 100k karma (I know, "on the leaderboard" problems...) the amount of points I got for posts (but not comments) reduced considerably compared to the number of upvotes a post gets.

at1as

I'd assume the algorithm has changed over the last 13 years. And they're probably better off not sharing exactly how ranking (and penalties) work. It's clearly easy to mobilize armies of users (or, these days, agents) to upvote submissions or warm up an account. I receive emails all the time offering this kind of service across virtually every website I have any presence. But without explicitly published rules, it's harder to figure out what works through trial and error, especially if account history plays a role. Agents will clearly optimize around the rules, so I it's probably more important than ever that they're vague. X "open sourced" its algorithm (sort of...), and the bot problem there is as bad as its ever been.

culi

Related: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented