| The post are ordered approximately by points / time^2 * penalties So after some time the article needs a gazillion of upvotes to be in the front page. The mods add some penalties for many reasons. For example when the article is borderline off-topic, or it's too similar to a previous article. Some penalties are automatic and some are manual. If too many users flag the article, then the article gets a penalty. Also, if the post has much more comments than points, the article gets a penalty (this prevents flamewars). And there are a lot of tweaks to the order. There was a blackbox analysis done a few years ago by kens: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799854 (920 points, 1319 days ago, 190 comments) It has more details, and some details may have changed, so use it only as an orientation an to solve your initial curiosity, but it's not set in stone. Anyway, for an official answer you can try to contact the mods hn@ycombinator.com but some parts of the algorithm are "secret sauce", some are temporal tweaks, ... |