How Hacker News Ranking Really Works

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How Hacker News Ranking Really Works (righto.com)

timdaub.eth

Fun fact: We used this algorithm in the beginning, but it turned out that there weren‘t enough new posts with enough upvotes and it was quite easy to get on the front page. Our algorithm for the front page has since then become way more complex and, for example, can require a higher upvote count when there are many good stories at the same time. The algorithm‘s variables also always need slight tweaking so that stories disappear or remain on the feed. It depends on how many users are active in a week and at what hours they‘re active etc. I could probably go on, it‘s an art in itself to build such an algorithm. I did it by just using the site quite a lot and a looooot of trial and error until I liked it.

macbudkowski...

>>> "I observed that many websites appear to automatically get a penalty of .25 to .8: arstechnica.com, businessinsider.com, easypost.com, github.com, imgur.com, medium.com, quora.com, qz.com, reddit.com, rt.com, stackexchange.com, theguardian.com, theregister.com, theverge.com, torrentfreak.com, youtube.com" (...) >>> "If an article gets a penalty factor of .4, this is equivalent to each vote only counting as .3 votes. Alternatively, the article will drop in ranking 66% faster than normal. A penalty factor of .1 corresponds to each vote counting as .05 votes, or the article dropping at 3.6 times the normal rate" This seems... pretty harsh. I understand that they want to give more space to less popular sources. Plus, I can understand why torrentfreak.com got into that list, but penalizing GitHub and StackExchange is pretty weird on the website called *Hacker* News.