Hacker News Reader

Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

> Because it would undermine HN's goal that we vote for and comment on content on its own merits, not whether it was posted or commented on by someone you like.

That's hardly HN's goal, though. HN itself has code and features that encourage some users to vote for content purely based on who submitted the content or what company they work for. HN's certainly not a democratic voting society where votes are treated equally and we're all encouraged to vote purely on the merits of content.

I do like HN a lot, even with that lack of fairness built in to the system. I agree that letting normal users follow each other would make the 'problem' worse (this is what brought Digg down, as a core issue), but it's not like HN sees this as a problem, exactly.

View on HN

> HN itself has code and features that encourage some users to vote for content purely based on who submitted the content or what company they work for.

That is not true. What gave you that impression?

Thanks for the feedback. Well, there are special features for users who are involved in YC, right? Name-highlighting, or specific new story queues, or something like that? An unavoidable consequence of those features is that they encourage voting favouritism.

I understand that you may not have built those features with that favouritism consequence in mind, but it's there for sure. Also, it seems likely to me that you'd consider this favouritism to (probably) produce higher-quality content hitting the front page more frequently, which I've certainly seen as a stated goal of HN (quality is more important than fairness or user preference, hence titles changing, etc). So maybe it's not a bad thing. I dunno, really.

The only such feature is that YC alumni usernames are displayed in orange to other alumni. This is one of the two things that HN gives to YC; the other is /jobs.

I'm admittedly a bit sensitive to charges of favouritism on HN because we put so much effort into trying to be even-handed, even though (a) it's impossible to balance these things perfectly, (b) it's hard to measure whether we're getting it right, and (c) some people won't believe what we say anyhow. For what it's worth, the corresponding complaint on the other side (i.e. among YC founders) is that HN is biased against them.

> That's hardly HN's goal, though. HN itself has code and features that encourage some users to vote for content purely based on who submitted the content or what company they work for?

Hmm? What do you mean by this? If you're referring to the (YC) submission tags, that doesn't indicate that particular bias.

Note that submissions from certain people/companies add extra relevant context

Well, I believe it's more than that, but I've never seen it so I'm not sure. I've heard rumours that all YC alum have separate features that encourage friendly voting between them, or something similar.

> Note that submissions from certain people/companies add extra relevant context

Yes, I think I agree. I'm okay with the way things are, ish. It would be better with more transparency, though, but HN's "goal" seems to be quality, and they certainly think that quality is increased with increased visibility to YC-related submissions. My only problem would be HN posing as "fair", which I don't think they do.

As mentioned below, YC founders have orange usernames. But that doesn't give them immunity from flagging when they submit bad articles. :)

This may be the case, but it surprises me. In the 3-4 years I've used HN, I haven't noticed it.

If you are a very well known user like patio, it's possible that you'll get a good amount of upvotes more easily. For most users, however, it seems to me to be a matter of good title, good content and luck as to whether or not your submission does well.

Interesting that you give patio as an example, since his last submission was about a year ago, with most of his submissions being 4 years old: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=patio11

Patio's comments, in my experience, are an outlier in quality/length, so it's hard to use that as a trend.

Good catch (used Patio11 because off the top of my head can't think of other popular users by their handle).

Anyway, to me it seems that, with the rare exception, HN is pretty good in each submission being judged on its own.

The orange user names are shown only to other YC alums, not others.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com