Comment by elpocko
1 year ago
The things you see on HN are not purely decided by the community. Mods can and do "freeze" the vote count on comments and posts, and do other non-obvious things too. You will notice the effect after participating for a while.
We don't freeze vote counts. What made you think that we did?
Comments on frontpage posts that go up quickly but then suddenly don't receive any votes in any direction makes me think you do freeze vote counts.
We definitely don't. But I'd love to see any links to posts where you've seen that—or if you see it in the future. It's an unusual case that I've never heard of before!
The reason I say we definitely don't is that we'd have to write code to do that, and I'd remember writing such code.
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Exactly, the front page is heavily moderated. Almost every day you'll see posts with 50+ upvotes falling of the front page within an hour or two when some article about LISP with < 10 upvotes will remain here for a whole day.
It's disingenuous to blame it on the users when there are clearly other "forces" at play here.
Yes, HN is a moderated/curated site and always has been. Here's 10 years' worth of me explaining that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
What people maybe don't realize is how many constraints there are on HN's system. There aren't many degrees of freedom for us to change things that wouldn't lead to a massively different site, and most of those outcomes would be worse, because most of them would be closer to internet default.
It's easy imagine "HN, but without the things that I personally find annoying". But try to generalize that for a moment and the problem quickly becomes intractable.
The "force" is actually one or two people. It's hard to prove and impossible to change. No one will believe you, either.
If it works..
There are a billion forums with less stringent moderation. Moderation is a very large part that makes HN good and not so game-able like most sites
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Could you make your accusation more clearly? Are you saying it's 'dang' and 'pg'? One or two regular users abusing the flagging system? Or a couple dark and shadowy figures who have no public presence?
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I’m sure the HN codebase has some secret creed to make lisp more popular
The code is written in Lisp, but it doesn't know that and has no way (edit: that I know of) to expand its empire.