Hacker News Reader

Comment by StumpChunkman | Hacker News Reader

What causes very active discussions like this to drop off the front page so quickly?

I saw another newer post that was probably made because the poster didn't see this post, and a comment made in there linked to this discussion.

View on HN

> What causes very active discussions like this to drop off the front page so quickly?

Supposedly posts with very high comments/upvote ratio are automatically classified as toxic and downranked.

That combined with random users flagging it, presumably.

In any case, seems more algorithmic than editorial (which is not to say that the latter never occurs around here in general)

Actually fascinating to really think of it as the inverse of what most social media platforms do these days, which is the opposite.

HNs is a fairly typical "lock threads that degrade to flamewars" strategy that i first encountered more than 20 years ago.

an elegant weapon from an older, less civilized time.

As an amateur HNologist, it's been my observation that controversial topics DO tend to fall off the first page quickly, much more quickly than tech topics. I suspect that there's some part of the algorithm that detects when there are a lot of downvotes on comments, and it counts against the thread itself.

They get flagged. Eventually flagging removes a post entirely but even a couple of flags cause it to slide down the rankings pretty quickly.

It's kind of weird the HN transfers comments on dupes but not upvotes

dupes split the discussion up all over the board.

they get merged to a single discussion.

I never said otherwise? I think you might have misread something. Edit: It was supposed to say "that HN" not the

This post had about 60 upvotes where the one that the comments go moved from was at something like 175. So it basically kills a posts ability to gain traction.

There is an "active" frontpage that actually ranks these appropriately:

https://news.ycombinator.com/active

> What causes very active discussions like this to drop off the front page so quickly?

One answer might be the same cowardice seen at ABC. But that's just one of the possibilities.

hacker news moderation does not like political stories. it's explicitly in the guidelines of what not to post: "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

it is of course in the interests of billionaire-owned companies like YC to keep the community all about "hacking" and "getting VC money" and away from rightfully discussing the most alarming period in the US' history since the Civil War. because hackers need to be at their screens spinning more gold for them and not getting disillusioned by the ongoing collapse of society into an authoritarian dystopia.

I would argue the opposite.

That in dark times there is a tendency for all open discussion venues to descend into the same pits.

And there is value in avoiding that.

The fact that this discussion is still here strikes me as moderation in moderation. A nice balance.

I spent half the day yesterday explaining and defending why HN does allow certain political stories (or stories with political overlap). If you missed that, I understand—no one sees everything that gets posted here, including us. I just mention it because it's odd, if familiar, to be answering opposing criticisms at more or less the same time.

Point taken ! I'm sure you know my opinion here is partially from your criticism of my posts being "inflammatory" some time ago. Real things happening all day long right now are unfortunately inflammatory. We have a president literally making decisions based on how much pain and terror they will cause to his chosen Boogeyman, "the libs".

I hear you - the problem is that HN can't have a frontpage thread about all of these developments without turning into a current affairs site, which is not its mandate. So we end up taking a fairly small sample of the topics that arise. Many stories that HN doesn't cover are far more important than nearly everything on the front page. We know that and don't imply otherwise.

Every user has their own list of which stories ought to clear the bar for frontpage representation, and it's impossible to include them all. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource that HN has (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). As a result, there's no HN reader who gets the frontpage they want, including us. This is baked into the fundamentals of how the site is designed, unless and until we start customizing the frontpage per user preferences.

There's another important aspect that I wrote about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306 and still haven't explained very well. In that post it's called "the temporal decay of interestingness in any sequence of related stories"—a clumsy phrase—but if you follow the argument, the conclusion it's impossible to prioritize political stories by importance on HN, even if everyone were to agree about what the important stories actually are.

>There's another important aspect that I wrote about... and still haven't explained very well. In that post it's called "the temporal decay of interestingness in any sequence of related stories"—a clumsy phrase....

I think your immediately following phrase captures the idea well: "Curiosity withers under repetition," and that's compounded by topical subjects inherently being ephemeral.

Unfortunately I think that is by design, by the administration.

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/07/nx-s1-5289315/trump-week-in-r...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/11/musk-trum...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/us/politics/trump-policy-...

If people can't keep up, or interest decays, the opposition lose weight.

> HN can't have a frontpage thread about all of these developments without turning into a current affairs site, which is not its mandate.

The times are such that I don't think that policy is tenable.

And I hope we can return soon enough to a time when that policy will be tenable.

Because discussions that go political are quite boring. There are a million sites you can go on to find such “discussions” so HN doesn’t feel like it’s the type of content that aligns well with its ethos.

At least change the name to VibeCodingBroNews then and stop appropriating "hacker." The founders of the computing industry were activists, I don't know any real hacker that would flag down posts about government censorship.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com