[minimaxir]

I've done a LOT of analysis into the voting patterns behind Hacker News stories (http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker-news/) and Hacker News comments (http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/). Here are a few thought regarding comments made in the thread.

1) Yes, submissions are manipulated, but due to the flagging mechanic, any bad submission with vote manipulation will be shot down. It's worth noting that public vote manipulation on HN (https://twitter.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator....) is far, far less worse than the meritocracy known as Product Hunt (https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=product%20hunt%20upv...), which doesn't penalize spamming people for upvotes.

2) Using startup-esque techniques like Recommended Articles and Verified users won't work, as it will kill the simplicity of HN (note that Reddit has tried similar systems not too much success). Content is the most important factor to determining upvotes.

3) Yes, there are a few articles by YC alumni over the years which receive suspicious amounts of upvotes, and I'm disappointed by that. (case in point, see the cofounder of ReelSurfer's submission history: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=njoglekar)

[kens]

I wrote up a detailed analysis of the HN ranking algorithm a while back, explaining the time decay of votes, penalized topics and sites, and the controversy penalty: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...

[TorKlingberg]

Flagging works for stories that are completely unsuitable for HN, but not product announcements that are somewhat relevant but not popular enough to reach the front page on their own.

[nhayden]

Any thoughts on why getmagicnow got such an insane amount of upvotes? Especially when there was so much negativity in the comments.

[minimaxir]

That was submitted on a weekend, which always results in atypical voting behavior.

Also, there's no correlation between negativity-in-comments and the number of upvotes an article receives.