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Comment by mehrdadn | Hacker News Reader

Off-topic question: Has this story gotten permanently capped to rank #10 on the front page somehow? If so, why? As of this writing, it has far more points than any higher story on the front page (this is at 168 points, whereas the next-highest one is at 121 points [1]), and some of those were posted hours earlier than this one. (e.g. [2] is at 45 points and posted 5 hours ago, whereas this story is at 168 points posted 3 hours ago.)

I'm asking because I'm pretty darn upset by this news and I care that people actually see it. So this apparent (artificial?) deranking is very much bothering me. What is the basis for it?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25492406

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25485541

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The formula involves time, votes, and the 'busy-ness' of the comments. And, IIRC, the time component is tuned to prevent a story from being on the front page (and continuing to displace other stories) for a very long time. It certainly has no concept of moral outrage.

If admins think a story is worthy (and I suppose if enough folks contacted them expressing this viewpoint), they can certainly make adjustments to keep it around a bit longer.

The time and votes don't explain this, and "more comments = bad" doesn't either. Because [1] has 27 points with 8 comments from 3 hours ago, whereas [2] has 28 points with 7 comments from 1 hour ago, and yet [1] is ranked #8 and [2] is ranked #13. I don't see how any of those explain this. AFAIK this story never went above ~#10 either, so it's not like it's been hanging around forever. It really looks like something/someone has been either artificially boosting other stories or artificially penalizing this one to prevent it from going near the top.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25494109

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25493495

Correct, time and votes aren't sufficient to explain story rank. This is in the FAQ:

Q: Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?

A: You can't derive rank from votes and time alone. See "How are stories ranked?" above.

From "How are stories ranked?": Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

Right, thanks, that part I had figured out. The detailed weightings don't concern me, but could you let us know if this involved moderator action (vs. automatic), and whether the ranking was hard-capped?

I didn't say "more comments = bad", I said comment traffic affects the ranking. Actually, a busy comment section improves the ranking of a story (again IIRC.) I think time is the most aggressive part of the formula - it would take a fantastic number of votes and very busy comments to keep a story on the front page for a full 24hrs.

I mean either way I still can't use that to explain this. Can you? Again, we have 8-hour-old stories with fewer votes and comments ranking higher right now.

I can only say these things are variables. I have no idea what the weights are. For all I know (I'm sure they tune the thing without publishing details) it now involves some kind of sentiment analysis. But rather that attempting to reverse engineer the process, I recommend getting in touch with HN and expressing your concern - if enough folks feel strongly about this story, it'll be buttressed a bit.

What I'm saying is this is beyond a "weighting" thing. You don't need to know the precise algorithm, but you can make some reasonable inferences (e.g. more votes probably doesn't penalize). If you just watch this story on the front page, it's acting as if it's hard-capped at #10, and where it's happy to stay for a while (though occasionally going to #11 and then coming back). It really looks like someone has interfered with it rather than it being an algorithm thing, unless the algorithm imposes deliberate hard caps on some stories. And given that it seems to have had some manual interference, I'd rather they address this publicly; everyone is entitled to know.

(Update: And just as I finish writing this comment, it's at #13, whereas the following 3-hour-old story with 19 points and 1 comments is somehow at #9 now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25493577)

HN moderators love to drank what they seem "controversial" topics, aka whatever doesn't align with their political views which are deemed the default/neutral view. Basically, you're allowed to discuss the latest iphone release but not how it's made.

That's not true at all. HN has already had several threads on this topic, we do not demote articles based on their political position, and there was no moderator penalty on this thread.

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