Comment by denniskane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by denniskane | Hacker News Reader

This is weird. I actually posted this like 20 hours ago, and it was a spectacular flop. Now it says 5 hours ago, and now I'm actually on the second page of Hacker effing News!

(Hi Mom!)

About the "Why chrome?" page. I needed to put something there to explain why you need to use Chrome to get any use out of the site. I realize anything that I put there will only wind up as flame bait, so I tried to make it as "politically acceptable" as possible. The bottom line is that I couldn't care less about those political arguments. To me, the web will always be more about technical merit than anything else. Back in the "bad old days" of the original browser wars, Mozilla was at the forefront of pushing the technical boundaries of the web. Not so much anymore. Such is life.

But don't let that stop anyone from engaging in an old-fashioned flame fest. Anything that gets this to the front page of HN is a-okay with me :)

They're trying some experiments to make good content surface.

They tried sending an email asking people to repost. Now they adjust the time stamp and apply a small (1 extra point?) bonus.

I wonder how this works, though. I assume there is not any kind of automated system on the backend of HN trying to figure out what is "good content" and what isn't.

HN's algorithms make no sense to me, either. I submitted this story the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10561347

It goes nowhere. Someone with higher karma submits the exact same article with the exact same headline about two hours later, and it winds up on the front page of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10562207

The fact that they use their own karma system to automatically rank certain trusted users who might have done things like invent entire programming languages or started up 10 billion dollar companies ahead of random "asshats" who hang around HN is not very surprising in my opinion ;)

(edit: Whoever downvoted this, I was responding to someone who goes by the name AdmiralAsshat, and I was obviously joking. But that might just be HN automatically downvoting people for using words like asshat. In which case, HN is being a pure asshat.)

Mods look at every submission, I think.

I'm not sure exactly how it works, but I think it works better than the old mostly luck system did.

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