Comment by samtheprogram

6 months ago

What a joke. Nearly as many upvotes as tmux-rs in half the time, ~50% more comments, and this is just shy of the front page / twice as far from #1.

Doesn’t seem to match the natural algorithm.

My observation is that HN intentionally downranks highly commented threads. I used to think of it as unfair, but now it truly makes sense, considering:

- Posts with high comment-to-vote ratio often have political, scandalous or other kinds of heated themes

- Highly popular/engaging posts already act as self-amplifying snowballs

- High-volume discussion triggered by emotions is hard to navigate, is repetitive, and attracts the dumbest trolls even in HN

- The truly important topics tend to become visible anyway

If anything, the statistics actually suggest these articles were weighted the other way around. tmux-rs stayed on the frontpage much longer than it logically should have, especially compared to this thread.

https://hnrankings.info/44455787/

https://hnrankings.info/44460552/

...in any case, what's the "joke" about this? GPL violation is very serious, Tesla was forced to publish a substantial amount of proprietary code after a similar infraction.

  • That was my point / what the joke is: it appears to be down ranked (or it’s a comment thing as your sibling points out), it’s serious, and it’s a YC company.