Thread

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

205 points · 110 comments · theanonymousone

PreciousH · 1789860987 · focus · HN ↗
weird that posts with lots of comments are also penalized though, the `controversy` reasoning is not solid enough for me.
1. hn_throwaway_99 · 1789861485 · focus · HN ↗
  It's not just "lots of comments" though. It's more comments than upvotes. You may disagree, and it may not be a perfect metric, but in reality I think it's works very well. 90+% of the time when I look at a post with tons of comments and a relatively small number of upvotes, it's flamewar central.
  1. user_7832 · 1789861810 · focus · HN ↗
    True, but there's that 10% posts where there's (eg) a good cancer breakthrough, and it's two guys going back and forth on the methodology adding a lot of comments. Not always, but not never either.
    I really wish there was a way to "mark" such posts as "high quality, ignore comment to vote ratio" just like how you can vouch a comment. Enough such marks and it gets auto turned off the flamewar parameter.
    krapp · 1789865236 · focus · HN ↗
    Back-and-forth conversation isn't high quality by definition, it's just the baseline for not being bad enough to downvote. I think Hacker News wants the baseline to be some degree of exceptional.
    fragmede · 1789865879 · focus · HN ↗
    Or just not boring. The guidelines state, among other things:
    > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity
    <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    Reading yet another thread where commenters go back and forth on, eg how Elon Musk sucks/is awesome doesn't make for interesting reading because it's the same conversation that's been had before, and neither side is getting convinced by the other side's argument.
2. ChrisMarshallNY · 1789861657 · focus · HN ↗
  Note the trajectory of any stories about the IDScan drivers' license leak. They don't stay up long, after US East Coast SoB time.
3. NDlurker · 1789861781 · focus · HN ↗
  Check out this thread I made. It quickly moved to the top of the front page but then somehow moved down to like page 3, even though it had more upvotes and discussion than all or most of the other threads posted that day.
  <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171656">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171656

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