[casefields]

People always interested and fascinated by the algorithm whenever it comes up. Dang makes the (correct) assertion that people will much more easily game it if they know the intricacies. PG always churlishly jumps in to say there’s nothing interesting about it and any discussion of it is boring.

Pretty asinine response but I work in Hollywood and each studio lot has public tours giving anyone that wants a glimpse behind the curtain. On my shows, we’ve even allowed those people to get off the studio golf cart to peek inside at our active set. Even answering questions they have about what they see which sometimes explains Hollywood trickery.

I’m sure there’s tons of young programmers that would love to see and understand how such a long-lasting great community like this one persists.

[pvg]

There's a public tour of HN stuff pretty much every day in the moderator comments. The story ranking and moderation gets covered frequently.

[yojo]

I dunno. This is standard practice for things like SEO algos to try to slow down spammers, or risk algos to slow down scammers.

HN drives a boatload of traffic, so getting on the front page has economic value. That means there are 100% people out there who will abuse a published ranking system to spam us.

[serf]

wait long enough and the other product will be able to expose the secrets.

future gpt prompt : "Take 200000 random comments and threads from hacker news, look at how they rank over time and make assumptions about how the moderation staff may be affecting what you consume. Precisely consider the threads or comments which have risque topics regarding politics or society or projects that are closely related to Hacker News moderation staff or Y Combinator affiliates."

[heavyset_go]

> Dang makes the (correct) assertion that people will much more easily game it if they know the intricacies.

Which is interesting, because it's sacrilege to insinuate that it's being gamed at all.

[dang]

It's not sacrilege, it's just that people rarely have any basis for saying this beyond just it kind of feels that way based on one or maybe two datapoints, and feeliness really doesn't count. We take real abuse seriously and I've personally put hundreds (feels like thousands) of hours into that problem over many years - but there has to be some sort of data to go on.