Livestream of Rand Paul Filibustering Reauthorization of the Patriot Act [video]

Re:Livestream of Rand Paul Filibustering Reauthorization of ... by jakobdabo on Wednesday May 20, 2015 @04:00PM (#9578881)

Thanks for the reply, I'm sorry for the off-topic discussion, it's just that I witnessed several times how a thread is doing very well (like 50 points in 10 minutes), is in the first places on the FP, then in a minute it's on the bottom of the FP, in another minute it's on the third page. So I though it must be the flaggings. Is HN's ranking algorithm public?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Livestream of Rand Paul Filibustering Reauthorization of ... by pzxc on Wednesday May 20, 2015 @04:20PM (#9579007)

If a topic gets 40 comments before it gets 40 votes, it gets auto-penalized even with no flags. (too controversial)

There are also other mechanisms, such as vote-ring-detection, that can kill a topic as well.

(That is my current understanding anyway, I am not HN staff, and I am not saying whether I agree/disagree with any of these mechanisms, just stating them to help alleviate your confusion about why some topics may be doing very well and then suddenly die -- it's not always because of flagging)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Livestream of Rand Paul Filibustering Reauthorization of ... by thaumasiotes on Thursday May 21, 2015 @01:57AM (#9581182)

> If a topic gets 40 comments before it gets 40 votes, it gets auto-penalized even with no flags. (too controversial)

I've heard about this before and it still sounds crazy to me. I comment quite a bit, and almost never upvote topics. Using the standard "other people are like me" heuristic, I deduce that the normal operation of HN involves automatically killing all the topics.

It's more likely that other people are in fact nothing like me, but I'd like to understand this a bit better.

[ Parent | on HN ]