Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by oehpr 693 days ago
It's really clear that hacker news puts its thumb on the scale of pretty much everything in a pointedly opaque way. It's really easy to see this in action if you go down to the bottom of comments section and you'll notice a bunch of examples of comments that have negative total votes and are older sitting above comments that have positive votes and are newer. Makes me wonder, is hacker news applying global weights to users? If I post on a page, is there some metric I don't get to see that just says "this person starts with an effective -2 votes"?

I have completely lost patience with it. I no longer use the hacker news front page. Try using the hacker news search instead: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=*&dateRange=last24h

This is just the top in the last 24 hours, or you can switch it to last week to catch up. Plus the search is pretty nice and very fast so if you're looking for something specific it's convenient. This sort's explicitly in order of votes and nothing else. It's a lot better.

I'd tolerate all this rank fiddling better if it was transparent as to why things were being sorted the way they are. But that's not going to happen. Make the best of it you can.

1 comments

Normally things work quite well, with manual interventions by moderators explained in thread. However something seems to have gone wrong this time. Usually a new model from openai attracts more than 73 comments! I'm missing the depth of discussion and analysis that usually occurs here.