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A comment on Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week (2016). Parent comment

Re:Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week (2016) by dang on Friday January 15, 2021 @12:36AM (#25787385)
It's the same algorithm, but it only considers upvotes by users who registered before (checking the code...) December 13, 2008. That's astonishingly long ago—only (checking the data...) 1.5% of HN accounts existed back then. Yet the "classic" frontpage is not that different from the main frontpage. This was the main conclusion when pg launched the feature: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271, and again in 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2073513.

What that tells me is that the forces creating the HN front page don't have much to do with changes in the userbase over time. That's a major finding, and I think to most people (me included, and pg probably included) a counterintuitive one.

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Re:Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week (2016) by michaelt on Friday January 15, 2021 @05:53AM (#25789331)
It's an interesting result - it only counts upvotes by users from before December 2008 who are still active on the site

After all, if you changed HN into a My Little Pony discussion site you'd lose 98% of old users, retaining the 2% who like ponies - and thereafter, 100% of remaining old users would like ponies.

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Re:Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week (2016) by dang on Friday January 15, 2021 @11:18PM (#25799986)
That's a good point. But there are a lot of users from 2008 still active on the site. It would be interesting to see how the attrition rate has changed over time, but I've never looked into that.
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Re:Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week (2016) by ayewo on Friday January 15, 2021 @04:10AM (#25788634)
This is an excellent find!

My memory is hazy but I probably found out about HN via Slashdot or via Michael Arrington's HN post [0] from Mar. 10, 2008; so I have been reading HN since before Dec. 13, 2008 and still come back because of some really good conversations that can be had here, compared to elsewhere on the Internet.

0: https://techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-news-i...

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