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Open secrets about Hacker News

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Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#51

Post by nuerow »

bborud wrote: post #19
vadfa wrote: post #2

>readers reacted negatively, even violently, to seeing [...] stories that were placed there randomly >HN users have an intense emotional relationship with the front page If a "greatest 80s hits" radio station started broadcasting music from the 00s and people got pissed off you wouldn't say "listeners of this station have an intense emotional relationship with it". When they tune in to the "greatest 80s hits" station…

So as long as something doesn't challenge our beliefs, values, opinions or prejudices it's OK.

> So as long as something doesn't challenge our beliefs, values, opinions or prejudices it's OK.

You're trying way too hard to make this about bias. There are more charitable and simpler explanations, such as signal-to-noise ratio and the expectation that submissions to HN are focused on geek-oriented science and tech topics.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#52

Post by simion314 »

implements wrote: post #45
simion314 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent is trying to tell that off-topic is not welcomed by some users. I am the same opinion, I don't want to see on HN news about some non-technical political thing in LA or India , or see 3 days in a row someone toy Rust project. You can try to change my mind that I should never use GOTO, some fanatic submitted such articles and comments using the "NEVER" and I will be happy to reply because is still on topic.…

> You can try to change my mind that I should never use GOTO … It’s handy for jumping to the bottom of a control loop if the language lacks a CONTINUE statement - the sin being outweighed by cleaner and easier to maintain code.

Sure, but even if you have continue some languages give you the GOTO so you can exit out from nested loops, useful when you need to work say with pixel colors in a big image, you need all the performance you can get.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#53

Post by bborud »

simion314 wrote: post #31
bborud wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So as long as something doesn't challenge our beliefs, values, opinions or prejudices it's OK.

The parent is trying to tell that off-topic is not welcomed by some users. I am the same opinion, I don't want to see on HN news about some non-technical political thing in LA or India , or see 3 days in a row someone toy Rust project. You can try to change my mind that I should never use GOTO, some fanatic submitted such articles and comments using the "NEVER" and I will be happy to reply because is still on topic.…

I don't think it is hard to pick clear examples. It is harder to pick clear policies for examples that end up in some gray area.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#54

Post by AshleysBrain »

weinzierl wrote: post #3

Many 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…

Just this week I had a submission hit the front page and end up with ~80 votes, but I only got ~40 karma, so I think this is still true.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#55

Post by mkl »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #49
zahma wrote: post #46

One 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?

You need a higher level of karma to downvote.

Specifically > 500: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#56

Post by weinzierl »

metafunctor wrote: post #8
lordnacho wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean on stories? I've noticed upvotes on stories don't give you 1 karma each, it's less. Not sure if it's a linear 0.5. But upvotes on comments seem to be 1 each.

I think the karma from a story is more or less capped to the number of comments on the story. At the same time, a story which gets more comments than upvotes quickly vanishes from the front page. Both modulo moderation, of course.

This is an interesting idea and another rabbit hole to fall into. There are this uninteresting posts that never get any attention (no upvotes, no comments) and there are the popular posts that get a ton of upvotes and comments. That much is understood.

Occasionally, though, I have this post that gets a decent amount of upvotes but not a single comment. I never understood why. I post for the comments and not for the upvotes. It is very frustrating, especially since it is a miracle to me what distinguishes these posts from the popular ones.

Capping the points on these makes a lot of sense though. In the end they don't contribute much.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#57

Post by simion314 »

kergonath wrote: post #39
simion314 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent is trying to tell that off-topic is not welcomed by some users. I am the same opinion, I don't want to see on HN news about some non-technical political thing in LA or India , or see 3 days in a row someone toy Rust project. You can try to change my mind that I should never use GOTO, some fanatic submitted such articles and comments using the "NEVER" and I will be happy to reply because is still on topic.…

Entirely agree about political stories and rust projects du jour (I’d go as far as associating out-of-topic posts on $random_software about how it’s be much better in rust). Just ignore/downvote/flag and move on, though. Nobody is forcing anyone else to read anything, and it’s normal that some people here are interested in things in which I’m not. None of us is the arbiter of what should or should not be on HN. Not u…

I am not clear about flagging, I don't want to get myself tagged because I flag-ed someone 3rd submission of his weekend Rust project, or those COVID conspiracies/magic cures, I could offend some free-speech extremist if I have the opinion that the HN is not the correct place for that.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#58

Post by actually_a_dog »

rimliu wrote: post #21
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…

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 contribution was deemed harmful, but not ban-worthy, I say this:

I disagree that this approach is correct in that case. If you want to discourage certain behavior, then, on a site such as HN, you should treat your users as adults and tell them what you don't want them to do. Simply locking them out for an unknown amount of time, for unknown reasons, is just going to drive them away. This is just basic operant conditioning. Presumably, driving the user away entirely is not the result one wants a significant portion of the time.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#60

Post by pansa2 »

etskinner wrote: post #23
pansa2 wrote: post #9

> A story needs to accumulate 5 points to appear in the Live List. I don’t think this is right. During quiet times, I’ve definitely seen stories in the “live list”, and even on the front page, with only 3 points.

Was it on the bottom half of the front page? If so, it might fall under the moderator-curated group that the author mentions. Or, if it was lower, it might have been there earlier.

This story is currently at position 5 with only 3 points:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024572

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