> he is the best moderator in the world
Yes he is. Dang, you are amazing. Thank you for tending this beautiful garden in the middle of a sad and boggy Internet.
Open secrets about Hacker News
91–100 of 210 posts
Re: Open secrets about Hacker News
#92> Most stories ‘fail’ and have only one or two points Stories are like startups it seems :-)
Far too many of them are all about JavaScript?
Re: Open secrets about Hacker News
#93Many 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…
My bet is that some upvotes don't count either for your karma nor the karma of the post. And the upvotes that don't count are from account which HN considers as bots.
Re: Open secrets about Hacker News
#94Actually, I would be interested to know how the comments are sorted.
It's upvotes with some sort of recency bias so that newly posted comments get a few minutes near the top of the thread to be seen.
The sum of upvotes of the comments which replied to you are probably also into the score
Re: Open secrets about Hacker News
#95Another open secret is that you can have the history of any posts' position here : http://hnrankings.info/
But they don't seem to compute the ranking exactly as HN does it. I guess they use the same formula but HN discard some upvotes from 'bots' accounts
Re: Open secrets about Hacker News
#96One thing I’ve never understood is I can only upvote, but some comments are greyed out as if they’ve been downvoted. How does this work?
Why would you downvote something? 'You weren't invited, just move along', exists. Happy to say, I only ever upvote.
Why would you downvote something?
Sometimes people are mean about React and they must be punished.
Re: Open secrets about Hacker News
#97Lame. There's nothing here about Hacker News's disrespect for users, and their disgraceful "You're posting too fast" bullshit. They let people waste their time composing questions or answers, and THEN tell them they can't post when they press the "add comment" button. And we're talking two or three posts in a matter of HOURS being flagged as "too fast." ASSHOLES.
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Re: Open secrets about Hacker News
#98Add to the list, users can also be shitlisted instead of shadowbanned. If dang doesn't like your account, you will start getting rate limited with extreme prejudice with the message "You are posting too much".
Re: Open secrets about Hacker News
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Either I missed it or it does not mention "posting too fast" feature, which is very annoying, because if you commented on something you can be restricted from commenting on another, unrelated topic.
It's extremely annoying. It doesn't give you any indication how you triggered it, nor does it give you any indication how long you need to wait until you can post normally again. What's more, since the people who wrote the code for this feature are pretty smart, it's hard to believe these two things are oversights. Edit: In response to a now deleted comment on how this feature is intended to be annoying, because your…
Interestingly, I have never hit this. I heard about it before, and I have sometimes posted a fair number of comments over a fairly short amount of time too, but somehow I've never hit any limit on this.
This leads me to believe that in most (though perhaps not all) cases people are probably posting short comments. Nothing wrong with that sometimes, but overall it's the sort of thing HN tries to discourage, which isn't a bad thing IMHO.
Re: Open secrets about Hacker News
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is nobody making editorial decisions about what goes on the front page, beyond extreme cases. HN is more actively moderated than this, you can find piles of moderator comments about it.
YC companies can put in an submission; it goes to the front page but sinks fairly rapidly and can't be commented on. I think that these are usually employment ads. I also think that's the only direct placement, but I can't be certain.
There's more than that. Actually, this story mentions it:
> Moderators and a small number of reviewer users comb the depths of /newest looking for stories that got overlooked but which the community might find interesting. Those go into a second-chance pool from which stories are randomly selected and lobbed onto the bottom part of the front page. This guarantees them a few minutes of attention. If they don’t interest the community they soon fall off, but if they do, they get upvoted and stay on the front page.