Hacker News ranking exposed: 20% of front-page stories are penalized
How Hacker News ranking works: scoring, controversy, and penalties (2013)
By tracking the top 60 Hacker News stories for days, Ken Shirriff reveals that the published ranking formula is mostly accurate, but hidden penalties are rampant. About 20% of front-page stories get penalized, with automatic deductions for titles containing 'NSA' and for domains like GitHub, Medium, and YouTube. A 'controversy' penalty kicks in after 40 comments, causing popular posts to vanish suddenly.
Anything with "NSA" in the title is penalized and drops off quickly. A "controversial" story gets severely penalized after hitting 40 comments.
- kens
Author here. I don't know why this popped up 13 years later, but hi :-)
- 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.
- 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?
- culi
Related: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
- 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.
- tptacek
Presumably this has gotten way, way more complicated in the last 13 years.
- 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.
- syngrog66
I concluded long ago that voting rings are active here, along with paid/inauthentic upvote farms.