Comment by dang
1 day ago
That's inevitable, because consistency is impossible: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... How to interpret the inconsistency is a different question, of course. I'm curious what you see that seems most discrepant to you?
The closest I can give to an account of "how things work in reality" is the 80,000+ moderation comments I've posted over the last 10+ years: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang&type=comment&dateRange.... You're free to decide it's all lies, of course, but if you (or anyone) randomly scroll back through that feed, I doubt you'll find much that's miles apart from the rules as they are written. As a matter of fact I'd be surprised if you found anything that could be fairly be described that way, because trying to apply the rules as they are written is a matter of integrity for us. If it weren't, we'd change the rules until it were.
I had to rely inline above because of some questionable circumstances but not here to debate that part at all.
But on the topic of this active page I do find it rather poetic that in this exact thread we have people asking what is this page they’ve never heard of.
When I call it secret, I don’t mean it’s necessarily a coverup or something I mean that nobody seems to know that it exists or that the front page doesn’t actually represent what people vote for.
You might want to use a more accurate word like 'obscure' in that case.
At this point I'm not sure what you're accusing us of, other than HN not being a different kind of site. The mandate of this place is clear (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and it simply isn't primarily to feature political/sensational/outrage stories. That's the root issue. The mechanics of voting, flagging, etc., are in service of that.
From my perspective, you're arguing for a health food store to devote its shelf space to chocolates and pastries. Or, if you prefer the other way round, for a confectionery to devote itself to turnips.
I don’t think that actually engages with literally any of the points I’ve made but sure, I wasn’t expecting anything else. Like I said earlier it seems from where you’re sitting everything is going great and there’s nothing to answer for.
I was hoping however you could at least shine some light on the active page question… what percentage of users actually visit in on any given day? We can play semantic games about secret vs obscure but it’s not a debate about semantics.
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