Hacker News Ranking Algorithm

TBH, I am not sure if there is a good non-invite-only forum that facilitates that.

I’m not sure that I’d characterize this as abuse. HN stays interesting by avoiding flame bait topics and part of the realization of the community guidelines happens via this flag feature.

One way to reframe #1 is that the community’s self-moderation features are working as designed, and that any post about Bob Lee’s death that somehow editorializes it or positions it in a way that is likely to lead to political debates is against the site guidelines and thus were removed appropriately.

Regarding #2, this has happened to me more than once, and while frustrating, it made me think more about posts I encounter before commenting. When a post fits the criteria for “potential flame war” or “clearly outside of site guidelines”, I flag it instead of commenting, even if I know that at the core, the topic could be an interesting one. Most things get posted more than once, and usually at least one of the posts is within guidelines.

When I do lose a comment to a flagged post, I’ll reuse it in a more level headed discussion about the topic.

A lot of discussions on HN lead to discussions of government policies (both U.S. and foreign) when there's a connection to the story, including saying that certain policies lead to the death of individuals. There's only a subset that gets mass flagged. If he was shot to death by police at a protest, killed by a U.S. military strike in another country, died as a result of a mass Covid surge, stories mentioning the reason for his death wouldn't be mass flagged. People wouldn't be forbidden from mentioning the causes of death on the only one that isn't, and it wouldn't be dismissed as "political flamebait."

If Hacker News decides that discussion about government policies is off limits, that's fine. It might even make discussions better. But allowing it in some situations and having it "removed appropriately" in others is only reinforcing bias. I think characterizing that as abuse is appropriate.

Edit: If you want to see an example, look at the Hacker News discussion about the death of Aaron Swartz. The cause of death isn't hidden, and there's a lot of criticism of the government, none of which is getting dismissed as editorializing or political flamebait[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5046845

What's more: if you can't stop bots from dominating your signal, then directly predicting things like quality may be one of the only good options left.

I know I'll be out of step with most who comment on HN but I question the necessity of having a ranking/voting system at all. All it seems to do is to act as an ego booter for commentators and it messes up orderly discussion when people insist on posting replies to the first commentator.

As a news aggregator, no doubt HN needs some method of ranking stories to set their listing lifetimes and their importance (page ranking) but that could be accomplished by the number of clicks a storey receives and or how long a visitor/commentator stays on a story (or the time between link clicks).

I also question aspects of the voting system as currently implemented. It's not unusual for me to receive down-votes on comments to controversial stores but not receive a comment from the down-voter. Why bother with this system if the voter hasn't the gumption to say why he/she disagrees with one's views? (One could discuss the psychology and social philosophy behind this but here is not the place).

Another annoyingly aspect of the voting system is the lack of stats. The time I take from posting to checking to see if someone has replied varies wildly—from minutes to days to never. This wide variation is significant when I post to controversial stores. Days later I can check back to see if there's been any votes or replies only to find there has been none.

At other times, I've monitored the incoming votes almost in realtime and watched them oscillate around 0 or 1, that is I've received many up and down votes but the long-term average is zero. Come back and check days later and one hasn't a clue from the stats if anyone at all has actually read one's comment let alone the fact that it was equally controversial to both sides of a polarized audience. HN should allow users access to these long-term stats.