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Comment by throwanem | Hacker News Reader

I gather that recency of submission and high comment rate contribute to a "controversiality" metric which can weight a story off the front page. But given the HN moderators' generally thoughtful style, I would not be surprised to see either that story retrieved and this one's comments folded into its thread, or that one's comments folded into this.

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The problem isn't the mods' local actions (though the mods are not nearly as assertive as I would like in this area); it's the Hacker News community's toleration of bigots and therefore the macro action of failing to remove them.

Inaction is a form of action.

I didn't down vote these stories, but to be blunt they aren't value adding content. I come to hacker news for interesting discussions and to learn. Reading yet another story about sexism or inequality in tech doesn't add any value to my life. The stories are predictable; the comments are predictable; and there are very few opportunities for meaningful discussion or learning. I therefore typically ignore them and I can understand why others down vote them.

Bitching about things online isn't action. Changing behavior offline is action, and I doubt these stories generate any meaningful behavioral changes among the groups that need them, so what's the point?

Is that really how it works? Stories about Uber typically get high comment rates, and I usually see them near the top.

I think I remember it being something about the ratio of comments to votes; lots of comments per vote mean that it's controversial, and controversial posts age off faster.

I'm pretty sure this is it. I heard once that if a story has more comments then votes it starts falling, though I don't know if that's accurate.

Sadly there's basically zero transparency in flagging vs comments/downvoting penalty. However when a new thread with few comments is artificially low it's almost certainly due to flag abuse. Trends in the topics that tend to get flag abused become obvious over time.

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