> And for those who think it's just organic with all of the upvotes, HN absolutely does have a bias for authors, and it does automatically feature certain people and suppress others.
Exactly.
There are configurable settings for each account, which might be automatically or manually set—I'm not sure–, that control the initial position of a comment in threads, and how long it stays there. There might be a reward system, where comments from high-karma accounts are prioritized over others, and accounts with "strikes", e.g. direct warnings from moderators, are penalized.
The difference in upvotes that account ultimately receives, and thus the impact on the discussion, is quite stark. The more visible a comment is, i.e. the more at the top it is, the more upvotes it can collect, which in turn makes it stay at the top, and so on.
It's safe to assume that certain accounts, such as those of YC staff, mods, or alumni, or tech celebrities like simonw, are given the highest priority.
I've noticed this on my own account. Before being warned for an IMO bullshit reason, my comments started to appear near the middle, and quickly float down to the bottom, whereas before they would usually be at the top for a few minutes. The quality of what I say hasn't changed, though the account's standing, and certainly the community itself, has.
I don't mind, nor particularly care about an arbitrary number. This is a proprietary platform run by a VC firm. It would be silly to expect that they've cracked the code of online discourse, or that their goal is to keep it balanced. The discussions here are better on average than elsewhere because of the community, although that also has been declining over the years.
I still find it jarring that most people would vote on a comment depending on if they agree with it or not, instead of engaging with it intellectually, which often pushes interesting comments to the bottom. This is an unsolved problem here, as much as it is on other platforms.