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Hacker News Ranking Algorithm

vigneshwarar.substack.com

1–10 of 82 posts

Re: Hacker News Ranking Algorithm

#2
The actual algorithm seems to take into account post rate in some way. I think the assumption is that high early post rate implies controversial topic. If the ratio is too high it seems to get penalized pretty hard. Maybe downvotes and flaggings of posts is a factor too?

Re: Hacker News Ranking Algorithm

#5
Using page rank as suggested by OP, would provide weird incentives like frequent comments, or higher volume, could rank a person higher than if they had occasional comments further down the thread. If OP is interested in the most influential commenters, people who write frequently and have a posse, then PR would be a good way to do it. What would happen to a helpful comment from a throwaway account?

If there's more of a ranking algorithm, identifying who is most likely to have actually read the article could be neat.

Re: Hacker News Ranking Algorithm

#6
post #5

Using page rank as suggested by OP, would provide weird incentives like frequent comments, or higher volume, could rank a person higher than if they had occasional comments further down the thread. If OP is interested in the most influential commenters, people who write frequently and have a posse, then PR would be a good way to do it. What would happen to a helpful comment from a throwaway account? If there's more o…

What would happen is that the old accounts would accumulate "CommentRank" and the new users would always be sorted to the bottom. This is good for search, since we are looking for "the" answer, the site, a limited number of best pages for a topic etc., but it's quite bad for discussion; a bad take from Animats would forever be above a good comment from a greenhorn.

Re: Hacker News Ranking Algorithm

#7
post #5

Using page rank as suggested by OP, would provide weird incentives like frequent comments, or higher volume, could rank a person higher than if they had occasional comments further down the thread. If OP is interested in the most influential commenters, people who write frequently and have a posse, then PR would be a good way to do it. What would happen to a helpful comment from a throwaway account? If there's more o…

Author here. Yes, reading time will be a helpful indicator. In fact, I already mentioned this in the post.

> Reading time for the article.

Re: Hacker News Ranking Algorithm

#8
post #5

Using page rank as suggested by OP, would provide weird incentives like frequent comments, or higher volume, could rank a person higher than if they had occasional comments further down the thread. If OP is interested in the most influential commenters, people who write frequently and have a posse, then PR would be a good way to do it. What would happen to a helpful comment from a throwaway account? If there's more o…

What would happen is that the old accounts would accumulate "CommentRank" and the new users would always be sorted to the bottom. This is good for search, since we are looking for "the" answer, the site, a limited number of best pages for a topic etc., but it's quite bad for discussion; a bad take from Animats would forever be above a good comment from a greenhorn.

I thought about it while writing this post. It would be useful to have a decay factor for PageRank. In simple words, if someone wants to maintain their PR score, they need to actively engage in the HN community.

Re: Hacker News Ranking Algorithm

#10
post #5

Using page rank as suggested by OP, would provide weird incentives like frequent comments, or higher volume, could rank a person higher than if they had occasional comments further down the thread. If OP is interested in the most influential commenters, people who write frequently and have a posse, then PR would be a good way to do it. What would happen to a helpful comment from a throwaway account? If there's more o…

Author here. Yes, reading time will be a helpful indicator. In fact, I already mentioned this in the post. > Reading time for the article.

I see where you included metrics as a starting point like how long an article takes to read. Maybe like a word count approach as a starting point.

Thinking about understanding the content of an article and seeing who's most likely to be referencing that content in their post is more of what I had in mind.

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