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Ask HN: Do posts by authors with more karma rank higher?

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Re: Ask HN: Do posts by authors with more karma rank higher?

#31

Post by j1elo »

tptacek wrote: post #6

There's no documented karma input to ranking and I doubt any exists. Stories I submit are picked up as randomly as anyone else's. The same isn't true of stories I write; I have a pretty good track record of getting blog posts on the front page. But HN doesn't know when something I've submitted is something I've written; what gets stories from high-karma users ranked is mostly just name recognition. I doubt people are…

I have never checked out how much karma anyone has in here, but after reading you I went on to have a look. First time I look at this, and it turns out you have "331331". That was a strange enough number that for a split second made me think I was looking at some random description field and you had put some magic number you like (a la 1337 or the likes)

Re: Ask HN: Do posts by authors with more karma rank higher?

#33

Post by dang »

nick-garfield wrote: post #7
jimbob45 wrote: post #5

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented This might help answer some of your burning questions.

woah, this is crazy! The flamewar detector (# comments > upvotes) is pretty funny

There was a large thread about that article 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437

and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 in 2019.

Re: Ask HN: Do posts by authors with more karma rank higher?

#34

Post by weinzierl »

I don't know if it is purely based on upvotes but what I can say for my account is that on average I used to get significantly less then one karma point per upvote. When I watched the upvote counter on the individual item[1] and compared it with my karma increase a view years ago it was pretty consistent at 0.5.

Back then I shrugged this of as effect of the voting ring detector but it left me wondering: can the false positive rate be so high and so consistent ... IDK. Needless to say that I never participated in a voting ring and I'm not that well connected that many upvotes should be from the same people.

An alternative explanation that crossed my mind was if it could depend on the story/comment ratio because back at the time I submitted much more stories than I wrote comments. I did this with good intentions, I often like to read what other think even if I don't get involved in the discussion, but I could understand if a platform incentivized a healthy ratio of submissions and discussion.

[1] I can't remember if this was true for stories or comment but I think I could only see it for one type of submission.

Re: Ask HN: Do posts by authors with more karma rank higher?

#35

Post by IvyMike »

I always thought it would be neat to apply something like pagerank to reddit (or HN, or whatever) comments. Surprised nobody has done this.

(Maybe it would turn into an echo chamber pretty fast, but I'm not 100% certain, which is like I'd like to see someone try it.)

Re: Ask HN: Do posts by authors with more karma rank higher?

#36

Post by dang »

dheera wrote: post #11

No, but the only way to get a post to the front page of HN these days is to discreetly ask a bunch of your friends to upvote it. And people with high karma are probably people who tend to have other friends who are also HN readers and who they can ask for upvotes. As much as this probably isn't the fair system we all want, it's what the system's optimization encourages today. Try posting something SUPER interesting,…

Why do you say these things? I'd be fascinated to know.

Almost everything here is wrong. HN's anti-abuse software isn't perfect, but if you ask friends to upvote your article, there's a high chance it won't help and you'll get your (and their) accounts penalized in the process. We actually go through the penalized posts looking for things to rescue because people tank their own good work in this way so reliably.

The dupe detector does not work the way you described.

If you post something super interesting that doesn't get attention, you (or anyone) can always email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we might put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380), in which case it will get a random placement on HN's front page.

Re: Ask HN: Do posts by authors with more karma rank higher?

#37

Post by dang »

weinzierl wrote: post #34

I don't know if it is purely based on upvotes but what I can say for my account is that on average I used to get significantly less then one karma point per upvote. When I watched the upvote counter on the individual item[1] and compared it with my karma increase a view years ago it was pretty consistent at 0.5. Back then I shrugged this of as effect of the voting ring detector but it left me wondering: can the false…

Not all upvotes count towards karma. This is related to HN's anti-abuse systems. It would be nice if it could just be simple, but one-to-one mappings turn out to be the most gameable things, so we've had to do fancy footwork over the years.

Re: Ask HN: Do posts by authors with more karma rank higher?

#38

Post by dang »

modeless wrote: post #26
dheera wrote: post #11

No, but the only way to get a post to the front page of HN these days is to discreetly ask a bunch of your friends to upvote it. And people with high karma are probably people who tend to have other friends who are also HN readers and who they can ask for upvotes. As much as this probably isn't the fair system we all want, it's what the system's optimization encourages today. Try posting something SUPER interesting,…

> the only way to get a post to the front page of HN these days is to discreetly ask a bunch of your friends to upvote it This is not true. I don't do this and 5/13 of my submissions hit the front page in the last 12 months. The most important thing is to find an article that already has a suitable title so that you don't have to editorialize it against the site guidelines just to get the crucial first upvotes. It's…

This is a difficult subtlety to get across publicly, but it can be ok to edit the title to grab attention when an article is particularly good for HN. That sin is venial.

If the article isn't particularly good, and especially if someone is just trying to promote something, woe betide.

Re: Ask HN: Do posts by authors with more karma rank higher?

#39

Post by weinzierl »

dang wrote: post #37
weinzierl wrote: post #34

I don't know if it is purely based on upvotes but what I can say for my account is that on average I used to get significantly less then one karma point per upvote. When I watched the upvote counter on the individual item[1] and compared it with my karma increase a view years ago it was pretty consistent at 0.5. Back then I shrugged this of as effect of the voting ring detector but it left me wondering: can the false…

Not all upvotes count towards karma. This is related to HN's anti-abuse systems. It would be nice if it could just be simple, but one-to-one mappings turn out to be the most gameable things, so we've had to do fancy footwork over the years.

Makes sense. Just to avoid the wrong impression, when I said I never participated in a voting ring, what I really meant was that I never tried to game the system im any way. Easy for me to say, I know, unfortunately impossible to proof. Anyways, I was just curious about my story/comment ratio theory, but I guess I will never know...

Re: Ask HN: Do posts by authors with more karma rank higher?

#40

Post by majewsky »

vl wrote: post #29
jimbob45 wrote: post #5

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented This might help answer some of your burning questions.

Even this doesn’t stress how heavily HN is moderated. You can see it occasionally when there is some news cycle and you look an HN and everything is “Rust is cool. How we raised a round for a product we don’t have (yet). Tips for thinking effectively while in the open office.” This basically tells you that dang decided enough is enough and cleaned up the front page.

> when there is some news cycle and [the front page does not reflect it]

Political news is discouraged by the site guidelines and quickly flagged by users without mods' intervention (source: I'm one of these users). If I want the latest Trump nonsense, I can go to MSNBC or Fox News or Colbert or whatever. I'd rather have more stuff on the front page which we can have a (mostly) constructive conversation about.

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