HN downranks any topic that attracts a high level of activity in a short space of time. Immigration is one topic that definitely does that.

it's funny because that's obviously what people want

then instead in top 5 there is some weird article about like "How I used my old CRT monitor to create a fish tracking app using radios" and some guy reply about some home project in 20 000 words no one really cares about

I did not really care about this before, but you just made the strongest case for the algorithm and now I'm glad it possibly* exists.

*I'm not sure how factual the algorithm claim is

You can watch it in action sometimes, with amusing results. Some very active posts do, in fact, vanish from the front page with surprising speed, whereas less-active posts can literally linger for days.

While your claim is plausible there is a lot of confirmation bias, among other biases, when it comes to our idea of what what see on a socially algo'd front page.

I'm not saying you are wrong but I'm saying my confidence starts quite low with this kind of idea. (e.g. the cause could be something different like manual moderation; the effect may just be confirmation bias and not exist; etc.)

Qualifier: I haven't looked into the algo at all, for all I know it could be openly published by YC/HN. I'm mainly responding because I feel like it is important to TRY to be self-aware of our own biases. Emphasis on the TRYing and asymptotically approaching 100% confidence (Qualifier to the Qualifier: it is also important to be at peace with decisions based on <100% confidence lol)

I personally prefer those sorts of topics to yet another entirely-predictable immigration "discussion"

I don't even mean about immigration. Layoff threads or economy threads also get a lot of comments fast

but for some reason those almost autistic special interest posts few care about is getting quite some upvotes

ProTip: You can browse news.ycombinator.com/active for the topics that become "too popular for the front page." I visit /active at least once a day to see what interesting articles I missed because the algorithm immediately buried them.

cool, thanks man

My most charitable explanation is that these topics do not lead to any novel discussions and instead creates flame wars between the pro and anti visa people for no benefit.

Because many of the companies funded by venture capital benefit from abusing those systems and this is a pro-venture capital site.

Also there maybe many individuals who are not pro immigration.

I think you’ll find the companies abusing the process are almost entirely staffing agencies or worse. Very few, if any, are venture funded startups. At every company I’ve worked at and hired for an H1-B is more work to hire and is treated no differently from a compensation perspective as compared to their US citizen peers.

The theory that HN is part of a vast conspiracy in the startup world related to H1-Bs is misguided.