Open secrets about Hacker News

Post by dang » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:17 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #177

kuu wrote: post #67

If pool is curated by moderators and dang is the only moderator, does it mean that pool is actually dang selection? :)

It's possible for HN readers to make suggestions for the pool, and I'll do this periodically. Usually it's for a story which simply died in queue, which as TFA notes, is the default. Occasionally it's to see if a discussion might get "re-railed" after it's gone off on some tangent --- people responding to a title or an early comment, most often. I don't nominate my own posts, of course. It may be a matter of how many…

Post by asdff » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:22 PM UTC

blauditore wrote: post #107

polote wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ring detection works for people who don't know it exists. And thus works well a lot of times. But is very easy to bypass, and I won't tell you how. And if I recall well, dang has already said several times that he will not disclose the algorithm https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

> But is very easy to bypass, and I won't tell you how. That really depends on how it works, and whether you know how it works. Simple signals such as IP location and temporal distribution of votes are easy to use for detection, but also easy to manipulate. On the other hand, if you employ a graph of user associations based on votes and comments in the past, you can detect clusters among them, voting collaboratively.…

Post by throwawayapples » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:25 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #178

coupdejarnac wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been a lot of misguided moderation that happens to be in favor of China. Earlier in the pandemic, the left bought into the propaganda that the lab leak theory etc were racist. I attribute the pro-China moderation to good intentions and ignorance.

I don't know if you're talking about HN, but what you're describing there is not the dynamic here.

Post by bookofjoe » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 8:11 PM UTC

capableweb wrote: post #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 th…

Post by xwdv » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 8:37 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #160

xwdv wrote: post #84

One of the things about Hackernews karma system is that a lot of downvotes get filtered out as fraudulent. However, once you are “targeted” that filter is removed and downvotes against you become more powerful. I used to have a very high karma nearing 1000, and then one day it’s like a switch got flipped and my karma began a decline that never stopped, a year later I’ve been completely drained of karma. I might never…

You're talking about the mechanism that sama wrote about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605973 . We recently restored the code to mostly work the way it did before that, so this effect should be less strong than it was. On the other hand, if you were to do a slightly better job of using HN in the intended spirit (and sticking to the site guidelines - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ), we…