What's Going on with the HN Algorithm?

Whatever the admins are doing, I appreciate their work. I definitely like that the content on HN is "intellectually interesting" and not "hype driven" - for a lack of better terms.

I also am thankful for stuff I post, that goes totally unnoticed, brought back to life by admins days later, suddenly on the home page! The "second wind" effect.

If I cared about hype driven content, I'd go to Twitter. And in fact it's usually the main reason I close Twitter - incendiary content overload. So much shock-and-awe I should care about that I care about none of it.

What would be the point of duplicating Reddit, Product Hunt and Twitter? I come here to see something different.

This might just be HN's usual (although undocumented) behavior. See [1] for details.

One thing to keep in mind is that more comments is worse for ranking. Less controversial topics that get upvotes but no comments will tend to stay up for longer.

[1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

Probably heaps of flags, just like this post is likely not on the front page quickly due to flags.

My guess is that the news has been fractured too much. Normally in a situation like the Musk/Twitter news, @dang will merge a few of these stories together so that one post has all of the votes/comment momentum. There are a lot of stories out there, and still not a ton of confirmation yet. I personally expect for one of these threads to make it to the front page sometime tonight...

Also -- this Twitter news will likely affect many people on HN. It's going to be an ongoing topic of conversation; there are just too many people that might be affected in the coming days/weeks.

(Disclaimer: I posted one of these stories)

I definitely do NOT come here for flame wars so what ever they are doing, please keep it up. If I need a dash of pop culture I know where to go

The Facebook (Meta) stock price was on the front page yesterday [1]. But it was probably flagged by users after a while because, well, is it really that interesting of a topic?

https://web.archive.org/web/20221027141959/https://news.ycom...

As others have said, that's Reddit content basically. Some times mainstream content might reach HN, but I'd be very surprised if just "Facebook stock dropped" was a big HN thread, not the type of things to discuss in HN, this is not a mainstream news outlet, even if some times some mainstream news do come up.

For instance, I'd expect a lot more to see a thread here about things like, how to invest during these downturns for hackers, personal finance tips for devs in turmoil times, a dev actually affected sharing their story of FB's drop, etc. Things more related to the community.

I don’t envy the moderator(s), but there’s a lot of flagging for otherwise decent comments / posts lately. It happens lot with “political” content.

Unfortunately, political includes anything these days lol why is covid19 political? Why is Elon buying Twitter? Why is climate change for that matter?

All I can say is it is. The flags reduce the positioning.

There may be other stuff as well, I’m unsure.

> These are the two biggest stories in tech this week, but not apparently on HN.

Maybe because HN isn't meant to be a substitute for mainstream news? Idk what the creators' intentions were, but I'd prefer it stay a niche community.

The problem with mainstream news imo is it will drag in people who aren't invested in the site

I appreciate that news stories on HN aren't, for lack of a better term, popularity-driven. There would be no point to HN existing if we had the same news on frontpage as any other website (apart from the userbase, which I agree is far, far better than most sites).

How is a change in stock price of a company like Facebook of any intellectual interest?

Slightly off topic, but thanks for highlighting the 'what is code' post. I clicked through to the previous hn post of that article, saw the thousand (+?) points and decided to read the actual article. Well worth it.

No controversy on the front page and that’s the way I like it. Fully support whatever HN is doing, it’s the only forum with reasonable discussion.

This is because HN doesn't do 'megathreads' where talking points are consolidated into one super thread. All the copycat submissions you see are competing trying to get their submission to be the 'megathread'. Soon enough a submission gains traction and people agree that this submission is where everything should be consolidated.

The HN strange attractor/repulsor.

The HN algorithm works fine, use another frontend if you want a different take on the front page.

I.e. https://hckrnews.com/ on top 20 or 50%

I don't think you should make claims of censorship without evidence

> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

HN is largely a collaborative filtering platform with moderators. In collaborative filtering, the users ARE the algorithm. So, what's going on with you?