Re:Hacker News Rankings. Graphs of HN posts rank on timeline
by cbeach on Friday March 22, 2024 @01:52PM
(#39793087)
I've also tried reverse engineering the algorithm recently to plot a scattergraph of story ranks vs age-adjusted score. I'm looking for outliers in order to work out where HN moderators have intervened.
It turned out to be very difficult as there are so many arbitrary factors, and the HN API doesn't expose those factors.
It's good to see the OP's graphs over time, showing the large jumps which clearly indicate manual intervention. That's a much more effective approach than my own analysis.
My motivation is to surface any patterns in those interventions. Annecdotally I notice that positive news about Elon Musk and his companies has been suppressed more than once.
Obviously, the moderators are responding to things like user flags, but in my opinion there should be more transparency around this, in order to prevent users brigading certain topics, using flags inappropriately, to manipulate the narrative.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1q6HS4Gcw8KVp5nTRC_H0...
It turned out to be very difficult as there are so many arbitrary factors, and the HN API doesn't expose those factors.
It's good to see the OP's graphs over time, showing the large jumps which clearly indicate manual intervention. That's a much more effective approach than my own analysis.
My motivation is to surface any patterns in those interventions. Annecdotally I notice that positive news about Elon Musk and his companies has been suppressed more than once.
* Elon Musk nobel prize nomination: https://twitter.com/chrisbeach/status/1760277351621878066
* xAI open-sourcing Grok: https://twitter.com/chrisbeach/status/1769755409391222868
Obviously, the moderators are responding to things like user flags, but in my opinion there should be more transparency around this, in order to prevent users brigading certain topics, using flags inappropriately, to manipulate the narrative.