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A comment on De-duplicating Hacker News. Parent comment

Re:De-duplicating Hacker News by Houshalter on Monday July 20, 2015 @02:29AM (#9914294)
Posts with >5 upvotes tend to go to the front page for at least a few minutes. More than that many people tried to repost it.
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Re:De-duplicating Hacker News by dang on Monday July 20, 2015 @02:45PM (#9918119)
What was the post? I'd be curious to look into it, if you don't mind saying. (Edit: might be best to email [email protected].)
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Re:De-duplicating Hacker News by Houshalter on Monday July 20, 2015 @04:47PM (#9918951)
It was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9856637
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Re:De-duplicating Hacker News by dang on Tuesday July 21, 2015 @03:11PM (#9924921)
Ok, there was another factor. When a site is the source of many stories marked lightweight, it eventually gets penalized as a lightweight site. We have software that does this, plus moderators do it.

This was the case here: that site has been the source of, not spam exactly (which is why it isn't banned), but a lot of unsubstantive and/or derivative articles. The post you submitted is an example of the latter, since it was derived from a Reddit thread.

The penalties I'm talking about don't make it impossible for a story to get traction, but they do set the bar higher. So you were right that it was randomness, but the randomness was also skewed.

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