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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

3 comments total from this account totaling 28 karma at the time of writing and this of the top comment on a 1500+ comment thread about a major issue? Ok.

That fact is relevant to the issue. This comment is the most “State Department talking points” comment you could make and the finger is put on the scales to elevate it.

That’s exactly what Google and Meta do with content via recommendation algorithms and comments.

And it’s what TikTok doesn’t do, which is the exact reason it was banned.

Oldheads will remember when comment karma was public. Its hidden now basically to hide just how manipulated comment rankings are.

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Maybe an oldhead can shed some more light on this: hasn't it always been the case that comments are ranked by a combination of timeliness and votes, as to prevent any single comment to dominate the top of the page for the duration of a story's frontpage time?

Comments will absolutely get rotated so the same comment generally doesn’t dominate. My understanding was there was a lot of manual intervention in this process. I could be wrong.

It’s also true it’s never been a strict ranking by net votes either. Getting a lot of upvotes quickly will elevate a comment.

It’s also suspected that certain users will have their comments upranked or downranked based on their history as well as manual intervention.

Organic ranking still exists but there are many, many thumbs on the scale. Hiding comment karma just makes that less obvious.

I don’t normally engage in HN meta-commentary. In fact, it’s highly discouraged. It’s somewhat ironic that an obvious, egregious case of content manipulation here is directly relevant to the issue at hand: the TikTok ban.

You do realize that comment weight it’s time and point based? 0min comment will show up at the top. Get out of here with your conspiracies.

Lol. I lurk on Hacker News. I am not a U.S. government employee.

I just felt compelled to state what I thought was missing from the conversation.

The issue isn’t about you per se. it’s about what HN promotes. Since we can’t see comment karma anymore, we usually can’t tell.

But your case gives us a window into that. 28 karma from 3 comments, none of them grey, puts a really low ceiling on the karma this comment has.

Again, nothing against you personally.

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