[HN Gopher] Hacker News Ranking Algorithm
___________________________________________________________________
Hacker News Ranking Algorithm
Author : vignesh_warar
Score : 165 points
Date : 2023-04-10 08:55 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (vigneshwarar.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (vigneshwarar.substack.com)
| pluralistic wrote:
| last month, "update to kagi search pricing" ranked 275 with
| metadata 116 points by exist 8 hours ago with 132 comments
|
| its cohorts ranked 270 to 282 (by my screenshoot) are of age
| 1day+ and with ten or more comments
|
| it's weird that post which is new, popular and engaging then sunk
| to the bottom 275 very fast within hours
| pluralistic wrote:
| it seems that someone replied with a link and it's gone
|
| here's the link: https://hnrankings.info/35078392/
|
| it shows "update to kagi search pricing" started and stayed in
| the front of hn for 1.5 hours
|
| it then left the front page and raced to rank 300 within the
| next 4 hours
|
| the disturbing thing is that this hn post with id 35078392
| generates 116 points with 132 comments
|
| poof, just like that
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| karmakaze wrote:
| Downvotes on posts is another way. It can require a minimum karma
| level and the value of downvotes can reduce with use to avoid
| abuse by individuals.
| manx wrote:
| Great to see more people thinking about this stuff! Our group,
| "Social Protocols" recently published a concrete idea on how to
| improve the ranking algorithm by introducing a new metric:
| https://github.com/social-protocols/news/blob/master/README....
|
| The metric in action: https://news.social-protocols.org/
|
| HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35183317
| didgetmaster wrote:
| I am often faced with a dilemma when trying to decide whether to
| vote on a particular post or comment. There are times when it is
| very informative, well written, and you can tell a lot of thought
| went into it; but I happen to disagree with the author's point of
| view. The same occurs when I agree with the author's sentiment,
| but the comment itself is poorly written and not well argued.
|
| There is only a single up/down vote. You can't upvote a
| thoughtful comment for its quality, while also downvoting its
| conclusion. Sometimes I have strong opinions about something; but
| I also try to educate myself with the other side of the issue by
| reading thoughtful articles and/or comments from people with
| different points of view.
|
| It would be nice if you could choose between two different
| 'modes' in the interface. One where the highest quality comments
| are near the top. The other where the most popular viewpoints are
| prioritized.
| lonk11 wrote:
| The dilemma you face stems from the ambiguous nature of the
| upvote button:
|
| 1. As an "agree" button - you upvote to get the perspective you
| share to be displayed more prominently to other people. It is a
| way for you to influence other readers.
|
| 2. As "it was useful to me and a good use of my time" button.
| You use it because you think other users will find it
| informative as well. In this case you are doing purely for the
| benefit of others.
|
| 3. As "it made me laugh or evoked some other emotions" button.
|
| All three could be viewed as different dimensions of content
| and one item/comment can have different combinations along
| these dimensions.
|
| It is complicated by the fact that content creators are
| actively optimizing their content along these dimensions to
| gain more visibility.
|
| When I come to HN, as a reader, I want to see mostly
| informative content - which is only dimension 2. I don't want
| to be influenced or persuaded. And while I enjoy a good laugh -
| that's not my goal coming to HN. This makes the other two
| content dimensions contribute to noise.
|
| Your suggestion to split out the upvote into separate labels
| like "agree", "informative" and "funny" [1] and to let users
| sort by the dimension of their choice may not solve the problem
| of separating "agree" from "informative" because there is no
| incentive for the voters to vote truthfully. People who upvote
| content they agree with want other people to see that content.
| If most users are sorting by informative then those voters will
| upvote content they agree with using the "informative" button.
|
| I think you need to change the system of incentives in order
| for voters to upvote only informative content and not 1 and 3.
|
| One way to do this is to make what you upvote have more
| consequences for the type of content you see in the future and
| less directly affect the ranking of that content for all users
| [2]. With a feedback loop like this the upvote button is no
| longer "what content do I want other people to see", but "what
| type of content do I want my future self to see". It makes you
| think before voting - "Was it worth my time?", "Is this kind of
| content aligned with my long term goals?"
|
| [1] - Slashdot has something like this: "funny", "interesting",
| "insigthful"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot#Peer_moderation but I
| don't think you can sort by it. Also, only a subset of users
| are given these moderator points.
|
| [2] - I'm building https://linklonk.com that works this way.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I think it's probably better to just upvote well-written or
| well-argued comments whether you agree with the author's point
| of view or not. Makes for a more interesting place where people
| occasionally change their minds.
|
| I was going to say that the HN guidelines advise doing this,
| but I cannot actually find anything about what an upvote
| 'means' on HN. Plenty about what makes a good submission, or a
| good comment, but nothing on voting. Maybe they just gave up on
| trying to do that!
|
| The above notwithstanding, I would like to see something like
| your proposal implemented, just to see how it works out
| empirically.
| andromaton wrote:
| I upvoted your comment on both criteria. It would be very
| useful to have 2 dimensions. It's amazing nobody does afaik!
|
| @dang, as a Arc expert, let me assure it's only 4 lines of
| code, 1 field on db, 52 bytes of js, css, and html, and it
| won't cause performance, security, accessibility, privacy, or
| usability issues /s
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| We may be getting to the point where we can directly predict the
| quality, interestingness, and originality of a comment before it
| has a chance to receive viewer feedback. This would be similar to
| how we can now rank historical chess players according to how
| chess bots evaluate their moves. A forum could then start
| comments off where it approximates their rank will end up, and
| then potentially let viewer feedback take over from there.
|
| 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.
| slushh wrote:
| HN is not the place for new ranking algorithms since it is more
| than good enough. However, the other social networks could
| benefit from better sorting. Would it be possible to create a
| Youtube client that only shows the interesting comments?
| bbarnett wrote:
| _Would it be possible to create a Youtube client that only
| shows the interesting comments?_
|
| But what is interesting? To you and I, perhaps, it is an
| intellectually well thought out comment.
|
| To YouTube, perhaps, it is what makes people engage emotion.
| prepend wrote:
| > I can't find the official page on why Paul Graham created HN,
| but to me, HN is the place to find the most interesting links and
| have a healthy discussion about various topics. In fact,
| discussions are my favorite part, except for the useless
| comments.
|
| Is there an official reason? I've wondered this as well and sort
| of assumed it was because hackers like having some community
| aspect and are novelty-seeking so YC created this due to the
| largesse of PG for the YC group and someone said "why not just
| make it public so applicants and future YCers can participate."
| And job postings were added on to generate some revenue so it
| wasn't a pure cost center.
|
| This headcanon reenforces my belief that the best community sites
| are accessories to something else and that you can't make money
| from a community without diminishing its value (since the
| incentives for monetizing conversation are not the same and I'd
| guess 90% at odds with good conversation- mainly because bad
| things draw attention).
| paulcole wrote:
| Remember that there's often the story and then the ret-conned
| "story." From Wikipedia:
|
| > Initially called Startup News or occasionally News.YC.
|
| HN exists to serve the interests of YC. It's a
| marketing/advertising tool. It's great to believe that it's a
| community, a place where interesting conversations happen, etc.
| (and those things may also be true) but remember what it is at
| its core.
| krapp wrote:
| AFAIK the "official" reason for creating HN was as a proof of
| concept for a viable web forum written in Arc, the lisp dialect
| PG was writing at the time. And bear in mind it was called
| Startup News before it became Hacker News.
| AraceliHarker wrote:
| I always read Hacker News through Feedly because the web page has
| too small letters and it's hard to follow them, so I hardly had a
| chance to see the ranking.
| phailhaus wrote:
| > why don't we apply PageRank for every user based on the upvotes
| they receive for the comments they leave on any post
|
| Absolutely not, think about the incentives this creates! Imagine
| yourself to be an adversary, how would you game this system?
| _Easy_ : spam low-effort highly agreeable comments across the
| site. The more the better, they're basically guaranteed to get
| _some_ upvotes and boost your karma. Now, with your newfound
| power, you can shape the HN front page to your will.
|
| Instead of the front page being a signal of quality, it would be
| correlated to the posters' karma. And because the front page is a
| limited resource, you basically get a crappier version of Twitter
| where relatively low-karma accounts have practically no chance to
| get on the front page even with high-quality posts, and high-
| karma accounts will be able to roll their front-page posts into
| even more karma. This is pretty much one of the biggest flaws of
| major social media websites today: they concentrate power in a
| few users with massive influence.
| cinntaile wrote:
| 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?
| gerikson wrote:
| It should be possible to derive the algorithm using an LLM
| given that timestamps, number of comments etc are available
| using the API.
| jpalomaki wrote:
| You are probably right. Without any analytics, based on gut
| feeling a good indicator for controversial topic is having more
| comments than upvotes.
| bluelightning2k wrote:
| Two obvious points: why not machine learning, and a more explicit
| mix of exploration and exploitation
|
| Meaning give more posts a chance, a certain number of views to
| determine the upvote rate.
|
| Conventional wisdom would apply spam filter, boost new users
| (e.g. first post), detect blatant manipulation (or more
| sophisticated manipulation using clustering).
| muyuu wrote:
| With machine learning you have the same kind of problems with
| an added factor of unpredictability.
|
| ML to make the recommendations more dynamic per user means
| people are not seeing the same things and engagement tanks.
|
| ML to make the recommendations more global means a lot of
| people are going to see stuff they don't care about and they're
| going to have no idea why. It's usually this family of problems
| that ML adds an extra layer of opacity to the most.
|
| Then you add extra tabs to give the user more control, and now
| you've added a fresh complexity trade off.
|
| The sanest aggregators have simplistic recommendation
| algorithms and a bunch of janitorial work on top in the form of
| moderation/censorship. There must be something to this formula.
| kens wrote:
| The article mentions a couple of formulas for the ranking
| algorithm. I'd like to point out my data-driven reverse-
| engineering of the HN ranking algorithm from 2013. The basic
| ranking formula uses votes and age with various exponents. But in
| my analysis, I found that "penalties" had a large effect on the
| ranking. Some penalties are applied automatically based on title
| words or the domain. Other penalties would be applied later. Too
| many comments would trigger the "controversy" penalty which would
| cause a sudden and drastic ranking drop.
|
| Link: https://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-
| reall...
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| I don't understand this blog post. The authors says that HN is
| great for discussions. Then they go on to suggest a different
| ranking algorithm? Why? To answer the authors question: I would
| change absolutely nothing about HN. It's great for discussions as
| is.
|
| _Edit: I suppose there is some insinuation that HN doesn 't
| really use the original algorithm, and this is the author's
| attempt to reconstruct what's going on. Is that what I was
| missing?_
| ggm wrote:
| Totally agree. Ain't broke, don't fix it.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| << I don't understand this blog post.
|
| Well, the article is something of an ad. The author discusses
| current ranking and effectively proves that it could be gamed
| to an extent ( author links his non-SEO search engine, which
| obviously you cannot do unless you are deep into SEO stuff,
| which includes HN ranking algorithm ). The complaint is mildly
| self-serving, but only mildly so. FWIW, it worked on me.
|
| Still, I will echo what others said. Despite my grievances with
| HN at times, don't change what ain't broken.
| jasfi wrote:
| If it works, don't fix it. You'll most likely break it.
| jitix wrote:
| I think product management across the industry needs to take
| this more seriously.
|
| In my personal experience, YouTube and Windows 11 are some
| recent examples of usability degradation due to unnecessary
| changes.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| I would argue they are taking it seriously, just not in the
| way most of us would like.
| shjake wrote:
| Well they need ways to justify their jobs and advance
| their careers. Which is perfectly understandable, UX is
| almost always is secondary to that (as it should be from
| the perspective of individuals).
| jorvi wrote:
| Is it working?
|
| Post ranking works pretty well, but as far as discussions go
| I often see insightful responses sent into low-contrast
| oblivion whilst a glib comment or quip gets accolades.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > Is it working?
|
| In my experience, HN seems okay for reading and
| participating in meaningful discussion. Comments that don't
| contribute or are inappropriate don't stay in sight for
| long (possibly due to the community upholding the
| guidelines), whereas useful discussions and references to
| projects tend to stay towards the top. I don't always agree
| with what sits at the top, but if nothing else it's
| civilized and reasoned.
|
| In some respects HN has the typical issue of most attention
| focusing on the first page posts and most discussion being
| in one or two top level comments, but that's just how
| people engage with the content, short of randomization
| there's no way around that. There will always be a top
| comment and everything else will receive slightly more
| lukewarm reception and activity.
| jasfi wrote:
| Others might disagree with your idea of what to upvote.
| It's very hard to benchmark something like this.
| bnralt wrote:
| Two big issues I've noticed with post ranking are:
|
| 1. There seems to be a group of people that abuse the flag
| button to get stories downvoted. You notice this when
| highly upvoted stories with a lot of points suddenly drop
| from the top and fall quickly beyond older stories with
| many fewer votes. For instance, there seems to be a group
| that was mass flagging submissions about Rob Lee's recent
| death until one was made that didn't mention his cause of
| death and explicitly forbid discussion of it in the
| comments.
|
| 2. Partly because of #1, you can have a topic with a lot of
| votes at the top of the page suddenly drop to page 5 and
| disappear within a very short amount of time. This
| significantly lowers the incentive to spend any time
| writing a thoughtful response or researching useful
| information, because even spending 20-30 minutes on a
| response might mean that no one is going to see what you
| wrote.
| haswell wrote:
| > _There seems to be a group of people that abuse the
| flag button...until one was made that didn 't mention his
| cause of death_
|
| 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.
| bnralt wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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
| haswell wrote:
| I think we're discussing different things. I agree that
| plenty of discussion tends to touch on those subjects,
| and in the 2020s, it seems increasingly difficult to
| separate them from many aspects of our lives. But those
| discussions are in a very literal sense exceptions to the
| rules based on their relevance to the tech community. And
| mentioning the cause of death was not forbidden.
|
| The initial post about Bob Lee was split off into two, so
| one could remain focused on remembering Bob for who he
| was [0], and the other could explore the surrounding
| circumstances [1].
|
| With that said, the site guidelines are pretty clear:
|
| > _Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or
| sports, or celebrities, unless they 're evidence of some
| interesting new phenomenon ... If they'd cover it on TV
| news, it's probably off-topic._
|
| > _Please don 't use Hacker News for political or
| ideological battle. That tramples curiosity._
|
| So this will often boil down to the framing. If the title
| is tinged with political implications, that's quite a bit
| different than mentioning the cause of death.
|
| The circumstances surrounding Bob Lee's death are
| relevant to quite a few readers here, and so there was a
| discussion about it. But a default assessment of any
| given submission if weighed against the guidelines should
| assume that such content is off-topic, unless there's a
| reason to believe otherwise (as there was in this and
| cases like the one you cited that are close to the tech
| community).
|
| Even with that separation, there was quite a bit of
| discussion that was clearly far outside of the guidelines
| in that thread.
|
| - [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35457341
|
| - [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448899
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| This is Hacker News. Over engineering things is part of our
| cultural heritage.
| vignesh_warar wrote:
| Yes, this is just a thought experiment, and the ranking
| algorithm is based on discussions.
|
| > Given that discussions are my favorite part, why don't we
| apply PageRank for every user based on the upvotes they receive
| for the comments they leave on any post, and replace the P
| (points) value in the current version of the HN algorithm?
| shjake wrote:
| > why don't we
|
| Because that would lead to absolutely terrible longterm
| outcomes due to obvious reasons.
| toastal wrote:
| I'd like to see a negative multiplier for Substack and Medium
| posts for the pop-up spam.
| nigamanth wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that already exists. Any post that doesn't link
| or links to sites like GitHub, Substack and Medium are
| downranked.
| [deleted]
| tbonza wrote:
| 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.
| cornholio wrote:
| 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.
| vignesh_warar wrote:
| 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.
| dsr_ wrote:
| You can put epicycle around epicycle, but there's a lot of
| computational efficiency in a score which can be calculated
| from an integer and a timestamp.
| buran77 wrote:
| > if someone wants to maintain their PR score, they need to
| actively engage
|
| Wouldn't that encourage people to "actively engage" even
| when they have nothing to say just to keep their score?
|
| Goodhart's law comes into mind here. People who want to
| stay relevant on this site will take your measure as their
| target. There's no system that can't be gamed if you know
| the rules. But the more "rock solid" you try to make those
| rules, the more you embed intrinsic discrimination between
| participants. You put "Proof of Work" in the rules and you
| alienate newcomers while all the rest do "busywork".
|
| Your own comments and submissions would sink like a stone
| because you didn't engage enough, regardless of how
| interesting your points are.
| vignesh_warar wrote:
| I think this part of the post answers your question.
|
| > Will I ever publicly write about how HN ranks posts if
| I am Dang (HN moderator)? No, because Pagerank can be
| manipulated by people despite its reputation. In fact,
| Pagerank is being exploited for years. Moreover, there
| are financial incentives for companies to get on the
| first page in HN.
| buran77 wrote:
| > Will I ever publicly write about how HN ranks posts if
| I am Dang (HN moderator)? No
|
| Lack of transparency is not a solution, and certainly not
| one that will sell well in a place where "security by
| obscurity" is disdained and open source cherished. It's
| particularly bad when you're dealing with a high profile
| site filled with intelligent people who would most likely
| make short work of reverse engineering just enough of the
| algorithm to understand how it works.
| [deleted]
| bookofjoe wrote:
| With 100% certainty dang ("Dang") read this comment.
| vignesh_warar wrote:
| I would be really happy to know his thoughts.
| lenocinor wrote:
| You can write hn@ycombinator.com . I've chatted with dang
| on that email address several times.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| This: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-
| valley/th... https://archive.ph/V9z3G is as close as
| you're likely to get.
| vignesh_warar wrote:
| Author here. Yes, reading time will be a helpful indicator. In
| fact, I already mentioned this in the post.
|
| > Reading time for the article.
| tbonza wrote:
| 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.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" ...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."_
|
| 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.
| eachro wrote:
| Not having an explicit ranking system means that things are
| ranked by submission time. This too incentivizes certain
| behavior (frequent posting). Maybe one can get around that
| with certain guardrails like rate limiting
| submissions/comments but that's yet another can of worms to
| open.
| cmh89 wrote:
| I agree with you mostly (and will give you an upvote). I
| think we've seen enough to understand that upvotes and
| downvotes are dolled out based on how well a comment agrees
| or disagrees with the voters preconceived notion of whatever
| the topic is.
|
| I also question the concept of 'hiding' comments. Are my eyes
| so delicate that I can't see certain comments by default? It
| seems like just a feature that exists to bias subsequent
| viewers against comments.
|
| It'd be really interesting to see a system where voters have
| both one upvote/downvote for the submission and the ability
| to upvote one comment and downvote one comment.
| skeaker wrote:
| I believe hidden comments can be seen if you enable
| showdead, and if you do so you'll learn why they are hidden
| (they add virtually nothing to discussions).
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| I think the article ranking is probably good enough.
|
| Where I have more trouble with is with comment-ranking within an
| article. The interface makes it hard to understand conversational
| flow, and of course that flow changes over time according to
| whatever the algorithm does. This makes it very hard to catch up
| later on an article's comments and get a view of what has changed
| since my last view. Maybe there is a way to do this via the
| interface, but if so it's not obvious.
| thunky wrote:
| > This makes it very hard to catch up later on an article's
| comments
|
| My biggest complaint related to this is that all threads are
| dead within 24 hours, which kills a lot of interesting
| discussion. And commenters have no incentive to reply to dead
| threads.
|
| This discourages in depth back and forth conversation which I
| usually find is the most interesting.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Admittedly, it varies, but I tend to look back for responses
| to older discussions if it was an interesting engagement to
| me. I agree with you that long form discussion suffers from
| current format, but I think it is part of the deal. It is
| hacker news and not hacker discussions.
|
| TBH, I am not sure if there is a good non-invite-only forum
| that facilitates that.
| lawkwok wrote:
| And even if someone replies to you specifically, the only way
| you would know is noticing your karma increased on the top
| right of the page.
| AnonHP wrote:
| Someone replying to your comment doesn't change your karma
| points. Someone upvoting your comment _may probably_
| increase your karma points (the _may probably_ is because
| of the undisclosed algorithms that attempt to compensate
| for gaming the system).
|
| In other words, looking at karma won't tell you whether
| someone replied to your comments or not. There is nothing
| on HN to indicate replies unless you dig into your comments
| history. There nay be other sites or browser extensions
| that could help on getting notified.
| djbusby wrote:
| Comments I haven't seen are a different color. But I read HN
| from a "custom" UI.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| Which?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| At one point you could email hn@ycombinator.com and ask to
| participate in the new beta, which among other things
| highlights new comments since you've last visited the page.
|
| I don't know the status of it, but it seemed like an
| interesting idea.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| That should be pretty easy to do in a browser extension. Keep
| track of the last time the comment section was opened,
| highlight comments newer than that.
| lonk11 wrote:
| 1. The article suggests running PageRank on a graph of users as
| nodes and edges as - "has user A upvoted a comment of user B" as
| an edge:
|
| """ Since it's likely that one user may upvote multiple comments
| from the same user, we check whether a user has already upvoted a
| comment from that specific user before considering their upvote.
| In other words, we treat user profiles as nodes and upvotes for
| comments as edges. """
|
| This is a very lossy conversion of the actual data:
|
| a. It does not distinguish if user C and D upvoted the same
| comment of user B or not. Maybe one comment was good and the
| other was bad. But when you convert it to the above graph you
| only get that C and D upvoted some comment of user B.
|
| b. It does not account for the number of comments user B left -
| 1000 or 5? This incentivizes spam because there is no upside to
| not posting.
|
| c. It ignores users that do not comment but upvote valuable
| comments themselves. Then the PageRank is used to weigh upvotes
| of users. This is backwards. The PageRank values should capture
| the value of each user's past upvotes in order to use it as a
| prediction of how valuable their future upvotes will be. But the
| suggested algorithm uses the value of the user's _past comments_
| as a weight of their _future upvotes_.
|
| To fix this I think the graph needs to be changed to a bipartite
| graph of users and comments as nodes and upvotes and flags as
| directed edges (when the author posts a comment - this should be
| represented as an implicit upvote of the comment). Then you can
| calculate how valuable each user's upvotes (and flags) are.
|
| 2. The "gameability" of PageRank stems from the fact that the
| random walk algorithm treats each users equally as a starting
| point. It means that you can create a ton of fake users and
| upvote the comments of a target user you want to artificially
| boost in upvote-power. Each time the random walk starts at one of
| those fake users the walk will end up in the target user -
| increasing their PageRank score.
|
| My proposal to solve the "gameability" problem is to start each
| walk from _you_ - the user that views HackerNews. It means that
| your past upvotes become the starting step of the random walk and
| so the resulting PageRank will be personalized for you. Instead
| of a single PageRank reputation score (which captures how user A
| 's contributions to HN have been to all users), there is a set of
| personalized scores that capture how useful other users have been
| to you.
|
| I'm building https://linklonk.com which uses this kind of
| algorithm to rank both links and comments. The details of the
| ranking algorithm are here:
| https://linklonk.com/item/3292763817660940288
| iamsanteri wrote:
| Is HN also built with RoR or is it something custom?
| ldjb wrote:
| HN is built with Arc.
|
| http://arclanguage.org/
| walterbell wrote:
| https://hnrankings.info graphs the history of every HN story,
| e.g. https://hnrankings.info/35510413/
| nebulous1 wrote:
| I don't like this idea. If hacker news comments were so numerous
| that the best comments by the "best" commenters always got lost
| in the maelstrom then there could be some sense to it. However,
| this has not been my experience of hacker news, and this shift
| towards a reputation based system seems unwarranted.
| krapp wrote:
| Karma is already intended to be a reputation based system - it
| just doesn't work as intended, since karma doesn't really
| measure content quality over time.
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