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Oh, one thing I forgot to mention: iirc HN has a mechanism that downranks articles that acquire a lot of comments relative to votes. Not sure if that has anything to do with your experience, but it explains why "controversial" posts (i.e. things like startup politics) tend to get buried.

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I really dislike that mechanism. I want to read controversial posts because they might challenge me. I have to resort to using /active to get an uncensored view (at least that seems to be what /active does). Also, getting many comments on a submission doesn't necessarily mean the subject is controversial -- it could simply mean that many people have experiences to share on a certain subject.

Can we just let the up votes do what they're supposed to do and stop trying to distort the system with weird arbitrary rules?

No, because then the front page would consist mostly of the same few hot topics over and over, and high-octane sensational threads, most of which are low-quality and turn into flamewars.

HN cannot live by upvotes alone—the upvoting system is pretty broken and needs countervailing mechanisms. Those mechanisms consist of software, community, and moderation. The result is the type of website this is. It would be completely different otherwise.

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