[blhack]

Seeing threads like this remind me that HN is still a pretty tight-knit community of real people doing real things.

It's good to see this stuff sometimes. Thanks, Matt!

edit:

And then reading some of the other threads on this topic is a bit...something.

Guys, can you calm the conspiracy theory nonsense a bit? Please?

If you're not on this site very much, you might not realize that Matt pops into almost every thread where google is doing something strange regardless of who they're doing it to, and tries to help figure out what is happening. This isn't HN getting some sort of preferential treatment, this is just the effect of having a userbase full of hackers.

You'd see the same type of thing on /. years ago if you frequented it enough.

This is nothing new. This is what a good community looks like. Everybody relax.

Honestly if you read the things that Matt and Pierre have said, they just looked at "freshness" (I believe that is what it is called), and inferred that PG had blocked their crawlers.

This is all stuff you can get from within google webmaster tools (which isn't some secret whoooo insider google thing. It's something they offer to everybody, and it's just like analytics.)

OH! Wait! I mean (hold on, let me spin up my google conspiracy theory generator): thehackernews.com has more ads on it so google is intentionally tweaking their algo to serve that page at a higher point than the real HN because of ads!

DUH!

C'mon, guys, look at their user pages. They're both just active users of the site trying to help out.

[larrys]

"This isn't HN getting some sort of preferential treatment, this is just the effect of having a userbase full of hackers"

Of course it's preferential treatment. And if you scan the last month or two of Matt's comments they are general in nature and not specific as in:

"I think I know what the problem is; we're detecting HN as a dead page. It's unclear whether this happened on the HN side or on Google's side, but I'm pinging the right people to ask whether we can get this fixed pretty quickly."

You don't think "pinging the right people" and "get this fixed pretty quickly" is preferential treatment?

[jrockway]

He's done the same thing for nearly everyone that's asked about something Google-related here. So yes, everyone on HN gets special treatment.

Answering people's individual questions doesn't scale to the entire Internet, so Google really has no choice but to address problems on a case-by-case basis. In this case, Matt reads HN and personally wants to solve the problem. That's the only way Google could possibly work, so that's how they do it.

[ticks]

The preferential treatment is kind of annoying TBH. I've seen sites disappear from Google's listing for months as a result of simple issues such as a change of domain name (with all the required redirects in place).

Yet here, a website owner is purposely blocking the crawler and they jump with solutions to try to fix the problem. Sigh.

[noduerme]

All these years, you thought you were working with machines, and finally it turns out coding is a "people business". Did they change, or did you? Is quality less important than networking now because social networks make quality the equivalent of good networking? Or because of some corruption in the pure bootstrap capitalism of code=web=money=power? I don't know the answers to these questions, but I am concerned about being told to accept the output of raw logic and algorithms as holy writ, only being told a bit later that everything's negotiable if you have a personal relationship.

[billpatrianakos]

It really is but I was personally kind of glad not to see HN have that high of a ranking on Google for the term.

I remember when I first started visiting HN I saw all these smart people and the tight community and I was amazed that something that felt so close-knit and exclusive yet was still open could still exist these days.

I was a lurker for a long time before I actually signed up and participated because I honestly felt like I swasnt entitled to be part of "the group" and I should somehow earn my wings. Then in late 2010 I signed up but didn't submit for a bit and didn't join discussions. I still felt like I didn't have enough to offer. I now feel like I've somehow earned the right to be part of this community though in hindsight I'm quite embarrassed of my first few submissions.

So this story does have a point that I'm about to get to. I first heard of HN through an article in GQ and then forgot the link. I couldn't find the site again after searching Google for "Hacker News" as easily as I thought. This frustrated me slightly back then but now I think it's a good thing.

As the size of a community gets larger the quality of comments and submissions usually decreases. Letting people join HN freely and openly is a great thing but I fear that if it became a huge sensation then we'd be inundated by garbage submissions and comments way more frequently. I know about the post on how newbies often say HN is becoming Reddit and all that so I do try to remember that.

So the point is that not everyone respects communities like this and are thoughtful about joining and how they choose to interact on communities like HN the same way I was and I feel like maybe it's okay if Google isn't giving us the best ranking for certain terms. I mean, HN is easy to find still, just not that easy to stumble over.