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Comment by BigJono

1 year ago

Tell you what is a good question, why is this thread on page FIVE of HN (ranked #125) with 1000+ upvotes, 400+ comments and only 7 hours old?

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BigJono

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dang  1 year ago

This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. See "How are stories ranked?" and "Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?"

About this specific case: it set off the flamewar detector (a.k.a. the overheated discussion detector) and also got moderation downweights. We sometimes turn off that penalty, but I don't think we'd do so in a case like this, because HN gets so many posts of this nature. They flare up with Big Drama that is sensational for a while but not particularly interesting, and therefore not really what the site is for.

In fact HN gets so many posts of this type that it has become a joke, and not only that but a cliché, so much so that the top comment of the Reddit thread repeats it [1]. That's about as repetitive as anything gets. The basic idea of HN is to gratify intellectual curiosity [2] and avoid repetition [3].

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1b14bty/netlify_jus...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

  • BigJono  1 year ago

    I don't really buy that to be honest.

    I read this whole thread before the CEO posted and after, and neither time thought any of the comments were out of line or even that the general mood was any more heated than any other random HN thread. People are politely asking pertinent questions.

    And I think once the CEO makes a statement which contradicts the company's support response, that becomes very interesting. Particularly to anybody that uses their service. I'm certainly not finding the conversation very repetetive or cliche.

    • dang  1 year ago

      You're welcome to disagree, of course. My main concern is to explain what the principles are. I'm not saying we apply them perfectly—sometimes we make bad calls.

      I can tell you pretty much for certain though, that we'd hear many more complaints if a Reddit thread about a customer support shitstorm stayed on HN's front page for very long.

      Btw, the Customer Support Fuckup category is one of several $X where HN has become known as the place for $X, but only because HN is not actually for $X. Another example is the Site Is Down category—people often come to HN to find out what's going on when some $Site or other is having an outage. But just as HN itself isn't a site monitoring platform, it's also not a customer-support-of-last-resort platform.

      If the community feels like this customer support fuckup is altogether more interesting, I'd consider reversing the call, but again, my gut feeling is that we'd get even more complaints that way.

      6 replies →

    • 7moritz7  1 year ago

      I'm not a fan of opaque ranking algorithms either. Just use this, the only thing it has is a 500 point threshhold and surprise, that works perfectly fine to determine what is currently trending in the community

      https://hn.moritz.pm