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Open secrets about Hacker News

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Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#2
>readers reacted negatively, even violently, to seeing [...] stories that were placed there randomly

>HN users have an intense emotional relationship with the front page

If a "greatest 80s hits" radio station started broadcasting music from the 00s and people got pissed off you wouldn't say "listeners of this station have an intense emotional relationship with it". When they tune in to the "greatest 80s hits" station, that's the only thing they're looking for; they don't want to listen to random songs.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#3
Many good points. I'd like to add a common open secret that I believe is wrong: 1 upvote = 1 karma point.

This might be true internally and initially, before any ant-spam, anti-upvote-ring detection takes place. Effectively, from a user point of view it is not - at least for me.

When I look at the points one of my submissions get and compare my increase in overall karma it is very roughly 50% most of the time. Needless to say that I never participated in things that would be considered unethically (voting-ring etc.). Also not a complaint at all, just an observation that goes against what is often written in "about HN" type posts (but not OP).

EDIT:

1. My observation is from more than a year ago, so things might well have changed.

2. As lordnacho points out below this seems to be true only for stories. Regardless why it happens, awarding stories with less points than comments makes a lot of sense to me. After all posting a suitable story is much less effort than writing a decent comment.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#4

Many good points. I'd like to add a common open secret that I believe is wrong: 1 upvote = 1 karma point. This might be true internally and initially, before any ant-spam, anti-upvote-ring detection takes place. Effectively, from a user point of view it is not - at least for me. When I look at the points one of my submissions get and compare my increase in overall karma it is very roughly 50% most of the time. Needle…

Do you mean on stories? I've noticed upvotes on stories don't give you 1 karma each, it's less. Not sure if it's a linear 0.5. But upvotes on comments seem to be 1 each.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#5

Many good points. I'd like to add a common open secret that I believe is wrong: 1 upvote = 1 karma point. This might be true internally and initially, before any ant-spam, anti-upvote-ring detection takes place. Effectively, from a user point of view it is not - at least for me. When I look at the points one of my submissions get and compare my increase in overall karma it is very roughly 50% most of the time. Needle…

Do you mean on stories? I've noticed upvotes on stories don't give you 1 karma each, it's less. Not sure if it's a linear 0.5. But upvotes on comments seem to be 1 each.

Yes, I observed it on stories. I don't remember if I ever looked into comments. Also my observation is from more than a year ago, so things might well have changed.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#6
A collaborative resource with more information about undocumented/norms on HN: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

> Personally, I’d stay at 3. I’d also wait at least a day between re-posts (and try re-posting at different time slots).

Wow, that's not how I parsed the very same reposting rules. If I'm about to submit something and I found an older submission with the same URL, my personal rule is that it should be older than a year ago before I'd submit it again. Three posts with the same URL for three consecutive days seems a bit too much.

> Hacker News is moderated mainly by dang aka Dan Gackle (pronounced ‘Gackley’). He’s not of asian descent

??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#7
> In other words, the story must persuade 13.3% or more of readers to up-vote. That’s a pretty high conversion rate.

This I feel is a very good thing. Up-votes to readership is a good correlation and is better than Reddit's hotness algorithm for finding good content which seems to be just up-votes over time.

The main contribution to article goodness seems only to be the choice of those that read and up-vote however and there is no system that can replace that yet.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#8

Many good points. I'd like to add a common open secret that I believe is wrong: 1 upvote = 1 karma point. This might be true internally and initially, before any ant-spam, anti-upvote-ring detection takes place. Effectively, from a user point of view it is not - at least for me. When I look at the points one of my submissions get and compare my increase in overall karma it is very roughly 50% most of the time. Needle…

Do you mean on stories? I've noticed upvotes on stories don't give you 1 karma each, it's less. Not sure if it's a linear 0.5. But upvotes on comments seem to be 1 each.

I think the karma from a story is more or less capped to the number of comments on the story. At the same time, a story which gets more comments than upvotes quickly vanishes from the front page.

Both modulo moderation, of course.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#9
> A story needs to accumulate 5 points to appear in the Live List.

I don’t think this is right. During quiet times, I’ve definitely seen stories in the “live list”, and even on the front page, with only 3 points.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#10

A collaborative resource with more information about undocumented/norms on HN: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented > Personally, I’d stay at 3. I’d also wait at least a day between re-posts (and try re-posting at different time slots). Wow, that's not how I parsed the very same reposting rules. If I'm about to submit something and I found an older submission with the same URL, my personal rule is th…

China has not many surnames I think? A little google search showed that dang is one of them. ``` Chinese : The surname Dang comes from a branch of the ruling family of the Zhou dynasty (1122–221 bc) that spread to the state of Jin and the state of Lu. The character now also means 'political party'. German: from an old personal name Tanco, a cognate of modern German denken 'to think', Gedanke 'thoughts'.

```

So I'm guessing if you're from a country where that is a regular surname, you might assume it's like that and not DanG, so yeah I guess that happens

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