Thread

1. anon_cow1111 · 1789859036 · focus · HN ↗

   Personally the first HN algorithm anecdote I really noticed was when the "stop destroying videogames' petition hit the front page a couple years ago. In the first hour it got a modest ~100 votes and comments with some organic discussion, so pretty typical for a good HN post. In the next hour it was dead and buried several hundred posts down.

   I don't want to be a tinfoil hatter here, but I think certain industries have a lot more influence over this site than most people realize.

   1. EA-3167 · 1789865139 · focus · HN ↗

      I’m guessing you got a surge of the people passionate and interested in that cause more than they cared about intellectual curiosity. Then the rest of us who don’t really want to see the same things everywhere didn’t engage and it dropped.

      It seems very difficult for some people to imagine that their passions aren’t universal, or that people might be tired of endless “awareness raising” campaigns shoehorned into every digital space.

      1. anon_cow1111 · 1789865966 · focus · HN ↗

         Yes, I'm very aware of that effect. The difference is that this was so aligned with the general attitude of HN users[*] that it stuck out as an anomaly; similar posts almost always hang around for a little while, usually several hours but sometimes over a day,

         (*examples include 'right-to-repair, Louis Rossman, all the John Deere and phone hackers, general "I want to own the shit I buy". You get the idea.)

         1. EA-3167 · 1789867059 · focus · HN ↗

            Remember the average person doesn’t comment, they just lurk and maybe vote. Our sense of who the average HN person is comes from an incredibly skewed sample.

            1. bigiain · 1789878388 · focus · HN ↗

               Arguably, there's at least two kinds on "average HN people", which I think of as participants and spectators.

               For me (and I'm not claiming my opinion is any more than a probable "No true HN person" fallacy), people who never or extremely rarely comment are spectators. And while they quite likely outnumber people who comment regularly by 100 or 1000 to one or more, they are not part of "the HN community" because they do not participate in it.

               I think most people's (including spectators) "sense of who the average HN person is" probably aligns reasonably well with the average HN _participant_.

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