Hacker News Reader

Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated, but how many nytimes employees are here upvoting nytimes stories?

It has to be right, unless they're the last quality publication on earth, it's everyday... (nytimes.com) (nytimes.com) (nytimes.com) (nytimes.com) (nytimes.com)...

Don't get me wrong I'm not saying they do bad work. It's just hackernews has become a lot less about hacker news.

(Edit: and the downvotes came flying in...!)

View on HN

... What exactly do you have against the NY Times? I'm from Germany, don't have any ties, and generally enjoy their articles (thus upvote them). Not everything you disagree with is a conspiracy.

NYtimes is probably the most reputable news source on earth. I incredibly doubt there's a significant number of NYTimes employees here.

It may be amongst them, but do not discount other organizations with a similar pedigree merely because they're not American. Financial Times, The Economist, and so on.

At any rate, this article is an opinion piece along with plenty of other NYTimes articles posted to Hacker News. When judging an opinion piece the the pedigree and reputability of the newspaper matters much less.

That is true but HN is overwhelming an American readership, which is obvious to non-Americans or anyone who lives outside of the US timezones.

Which isn't too surprising, all things considered, it just is what it is.

But given all too human "familiarity bias", it also isn't surprising that an American readership submits & upvotes primarily American sources.

Tangential, but I would be very interested in a census of HN. Does anyone know if this has been done?

Except for that time they weren't! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair

You're probably getting downvoted for sounding paranoid. Is it really that difficult to believe that professionally written articles published in one of the most reputable newspapers can appeal to the HN crowd?

What are these NY Times articles competing against on HN anyways? More JS libraries that reinvent the wheel? Rants against big tech companies? TechCrunch rehashes of press releases? If you want to see other publications represented, you're welcome to submit them yourself. (And I would welcome more non-paywalled, non-newspaper things on HN as well.)

HN has pretty sophisticated countermeasures against that sort of thing, both technical and human.

Where would one be able to find out what these countermeasures are? Unless you're involved with the operation of HN, how would you know?

dang has mentioned the behind-the-scenes workings of HN a few times over the years, although finding them in amongst all of the other comments might be a bit of a slog: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang

There is a surprising amount of manual intervention going on when it comes to what appears on the front page, for example. This was discussed a few days ago IIRC but I can't find the relevant comments now.

2nd chance queue.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19862701#19871817

Tracked down through Algolia:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=second%20chance%20submissions&...

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