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.

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