And an YC company, which maybe explains the #1 position out of the blue (but maybe I’m way too cynical)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
(Launch HNs are an exception. Those are one of the things that HN formally gives back to YC in exchange for funding it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
if YC disable_moderation;
Age all posts, push them down the ranking
it means they are less likely to intervene in the discussions on them.
User posts story to blog and includes hn link in an email blast. Followers upvote quickly then the article slowly losses interest.
But catchy title gives more attention. Podcast during a workday means more bookmarking for the ride home.
When I say we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or YC startups are involved, the word "moderate" means all of the above: boosting submissions, downweighting submissions, intervening in comments, and so on. When I said we didn't touch this post, I meant we did nothing to affect its rank.
There's an important thing to add, though. "Less" does not mean zero. We still moderate—we just do it less. Mainly we try to be consistent with how we moderate other submissions, in order to be fair. In this case, for example, I just reduced the effect that flags are having in driving this post down the front page. But I reduced it by less than I would have if the post were non-YC-related. If that sounds scandalous, please re-read the previous sentence.
Ok, that's clear and unambiguous.
> If that sounds scandalous
It sounds like you are following through on exactly what you said you were doing on the search you linked elsewhere. I read some of those and it clearly stated "less intervention". So for you to apply "less intervention" here is you being consistent.
> flags
For the record I didn't flag the submission. It didn't appear, to me, to violate any guidelines.
> If you're going to imagine that sort of interpretation
Sounds like I have violated the guidelines: Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. I appear to have escaped censure at this juncture, perhaps due to the lesser moderation applied in this thread.
I noticed one dubious upvote making it past HN's anti-voting-ring software, but that's not enough to push a story onto the front page, let alone to #1. It's also extremely common. I didn't notice evidence of any "network for upvotes".
It may be that "you find them interesting is enough", and it's your site so this is not a complaint, but it is not a transparent process because despite "thousands of comments" there is little documentation or explained policies.
We know there's an "anti flame war" trigger on the down side, but of more interest is what causes stories to jump hundreds of spots and that has never been well explained to my knowledge. (Or perhaps it has but I haven't been to read such an explanation).
HN has always been curated, and that involves human judgment and interpretation—there's no way around that, no way to spell it out, and certainly no way to formalize it. As far as I can tell, the community is somewhere between fine-with-that and prefers-it-that-way. HN has always been a spirit-of-the-law, not a letter-of-the-law place, and we want it to stay so.
But we're fully open to answering questions. I spend hours each day doing that, in threads and by email. There's basically nothing people ask about HN that we don't answer. Before someone objects to "basically", I'm throwing that in because there are always corner cases (e.g., a question we can't answer because it would compromise some other user). You can't run a site this complicated without inconsistency. But the principles we practice are deeply about openness and satisfying curiosity. Even though we don't publish a full moderation log.
As for stories "jumping hundreds of spots", if you mean jumping up, that's the second-chance pool (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380). If you mean jumping down, it's some combination of software penalties and/or user flags and/or moderation downweights. Most often it's user flags.
That may have flown by for you but is much of the time I have been visiting HN.
That's just the standard link I use to describe the second-chance pool. We've been just as open in the subsequent four years.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Well they are and the hand is users flagging posts. Plenty of times I've seen
Article A, 2 hours, 50 votes
Article B, 1 hour, 100 votes