Thread

How Hacker News ranking works: scoring, controversy, and penalties (2013)

205 points · 110 comments · theanonymousone

VCFundedGenYer · 1789856614 · focus · HN ↗
This falls apart completely if you’re like me and only see the list presented on brutalist.report which is strictly chronological and with zero algorithms.
1. perching_aix · 1789856955 · focus · HN ↗
  Indeed, if you go out of your way to circumvent automatic story ranking, the particularities of automatic story ranking no longer affect you...
  A capability available without visiting any third party sites, by the way: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newest">https://news.ycombinator.com/newest
  I just hope you don't believe that somehow this magically allows you to escape bias. A (reverse) chronological sort is still a sort.
2. gong_hits · 1789857496 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
3. Retr0id · 1789857774 · focus · HN ↗
  Looks algorithmic to me. Reverse-chronological with upvote threshold(?), where upvotes are correlated with sort rank on vanilla HN.
  1. VCFundedGenYer · 1789857965 · focus · HN ↗
    Again, not a thing if you are on the site I mentioned.
    tptacek · 1789858070 · focus · HN ↗
    If there's a vote threshold, it's still profoundly influenced by the HN algorithm, because front page exposure is the principal component in how many votes a story gets.
    Waterluvian · 1789858176 · focus · HN ↗
    There’s clearly decision-making going on because it’s not listing most HN posts. How is it deciding what not to show?
    LastTrain · 1789859355 · focus · HN ↗
    Not to mention HN posts don’t spontaneously emerge out of the randomness of the cosmos.
    Waterluvian · 1789859937 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure they do. Just with extra steps.
    Remember that thing Carl Sagan told us: “if you want to complain about AI from scratch you must first invent the universe.”
    Retr0id · 1789858410 · focus · HN ↗
    Saying it a second time doesn't make it any more true.
4. oblio · 1789858248 · focus · HN ↗
  That site's interesting, but it would be super helpful with some summaries of the stories and maybe of the comments. Though I imagine that would make it a LOT more expensive to host.
5. zahlman · 1789860430 · focus · HN ↗
  How does that differ from turning on showdead and going to /newest ?

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