Thanks for the explanation. It triggered my ‘internal’ red flag when I saw a post on #1 very quickly and with no comments at all. That is very rare. Maybe the authority of the submitter (and his network for upvotes) had something to do with it?
It's not as rare as you might think, but yes, I'm sure Garry's (well deserved) reputation was a big part of it.
I noticed one dubious upvote making it past HN's anti-voting-ring software, but that's not enough to push a story onto the front page, let alone to #1. It's also extremely common. I didn't notice evidence of any "network for upvotes".
If you mean that you don't signal boost YC posts then why not say that? Moderating less means to me reads as if they are less likely to be downgraded in ranking.
if YC disable_moderation;
Age all posts, push them down the ranking
No moderators touched this submission means nothing if they touched every other submission.
But that would be utterly deceitful. If you're going to imagine that sort of interpretation, why believe anything I say in the first place?
When I say we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or YC startups are involved, the word "moderate" means all of the above: boosting submissions, downweighting submissions, intervening in comments, and so on. When I said we didn't touch this post, I meant we did nothing to affect its rank.
There's an important thing to add, though. "Less" does not mean zero. We still moderate—we just do it less. Mainly we try to be consistent with how we moderate other submissions, in order to be fair. In this case, for example, I just reduced the effect that flags are having in driving this post down the front page. But I reduced it by less than I would have if the post were non-YC-related. If that sounds scandalous, please re-read the previous sentence.
> When I said we didn't touch this post, I meant we did nothing to affect its rank.
Ok, that's clear and unambiguous.
> If that sounds scandalous
It sounds like you are following through on exactly what you said you were doing on the search you linked elsewhere. I read some of those and it clearly stated "less intervention". So for you to apply "less intervention" here is you being consistent.
> flags
For the record I didn't flag the submission. It didn't appear, to me, to violate any guidelines.
> If you're going to imagine that sort of interpretation
Sounds like I have violated the guidelines:
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I appear to have escaped censure at this juncture, perhaps due to the lesser moderation applied in this thread.
Right. And from my interpretation dang wanted to clarify that not only they didn't touch that, they also keep away from such submissions in other ways.
It's not cynical, it's open and clear if you track HN story positions that a large part of rankings are not organic. In the past HN were more open about that fact than they are now.
I've posted tens of thousands of comments explaining how we moderate HN, and can tell you that we're more open than ever, so I'm not sure where you got that.
It is clear that some stories are boosted up, and some are boosted down, and it is not clear the process those get chosen.
It may be that "you find them interesting is enough", and it's your site so this is not a complaint, but it is not a transparent process because despite "thousands of comments" there is little documentation or explained policies.
We know there's an "anti flame war" trigger on the down side, but of more interest is what causes stories to jump hundreds of spots and that has never been well explained to my knowledge. (Or perhaps it has but I haven't been to read such an explanation).
Trying to write comprehensive policies would end up interesting only the sorts of users who like policies, including the sort who will raise objections no matter what we do. The more policy we produce, the more objections and meta concerns they will raise, so to go down that road would be to perform a DoS attack on ourselves. It would suck limited resources away from things we can do to improve HN for the community as a whole, instead of just a vocal, litigious few. Since we're going to get criticized from this angle no matter what we do, we may as well take our lumps up front. If that sounds harsh, I'm sorry—it's mostly because policy-writing is the last thing my soul cares to do, and the bureaucratic parts of this job make me grumpy.
HN has always been curated, and that involves human judgment and interpretation—there's no way around that, no way to spell it out, and certainly no way to formalize it. As far as I can tell, the community is somewhere between fine-with-that and prefers-it-that-way. HN has always been a spirit-of-the-law, not a letter-of-the-law place, and we want it to stay so.
But we're fully open to answering questions. I spend hours each day doing that, in threads and by email. There's basically nothing people ask about HN that we don't answer. Before someone objects to "basically", I'm throwing that in because there are always corner cases (e.g., a question we can't answer because it would compromise some other user). You can't run a site this complicated without inconsistency. But the principles we practice are deeply about openness and satisfying curiosity. Even though we don't publish a full moderation log.
As for stories "jumping hundreds of spots", if you mean jumping up, that's the second-chance pool (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380). If you mean jumping down, it's some combination of software penalties and/or user flags and/or moderation downweights. Most often it's user flags.
It may be a matter of perspective because from my point of view, the comment you have linked is the past to which I was referring: that is from 4 years ago.
That may have flown by for you but is much of the time I have been visiting HN.
My guess is that flags are responsible for a lot of weird movement in the front page ranking. You flag an article and it starts losing spots - a number of people do it and the article can die entirely. The flag count is hidden to prevent bandwagoning but is an important signal. Thus front page posts move in mysterious ways as if guided by an unseen hand.
Well they are and the hand is users flagging posts. Plenty of times I've seen
Where A is ranked above B despite being older and having fewer votes (the signals we can see). I think the missing link is flags. I bet if we knew the flag count the front page ranking would make more sense.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
(Launch HNs are an exception. Those are one of the things that HN formally gives back to YC in exchange for funding it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)