DHH wrote a blog post on Medium that is critical of Uber and YCombinator. The link was posted to Hacker News and received enough upvotes to get to the #2 spot.<p>The article sharply dropped in position (off the front page) at around the time west coast work day began.<p>As far as I can tell, nothing in the article violates the 'Hacker News Guidelines'.<p>Is there an technical explanation of why this would happen related to the algorithm? Has YCombinator offered an explanation of why something like this would happen in the past?<p>links--<p>https://medium.com/@dhh/deleting-uber-is-the-least-you-can-do-30c0601103ea<p>https://twitter.com/dhh/status/833701507585437700<p>https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/833697426846396416
Users flagged it and a mod applied two kinds of standard penalty to it: one because it was a copycat post that added no information to the two major articles/threads already on the front page, and two because it was an unsubstantive rant.<p>Those penalties are standard because follow-up posts (e.g. that try to capitalize on hot stories to get cheap attention) and informationless rants routinely get tons of upvotes—many more than the substantive stories that HN is supposed to be for. That's a well-known weakness of the upvoting system. HN can't live by upvotes alone. If we didn't have countervailing mechanisms such as moderation, the site would not survive. I've written about this lots of times, e.g. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10292239" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10292239</a>.<p>It had nothing to do with San Francisco (the moderator was elsewhere), nor with the rant being about Silicon Valley, etc.; anyone familiar with HN knows that critiques of all those things appear here all the time, and that's fine. We're hoping for thoughtful critique, though, not rage trolling.
There is a feature of HN that is sometimes called "flamewar detector" that tends to apply various countermeasures to threads that are getting a lot of replies and/or upvote/downvote churn. One of the observed effects is that the thread drops off the front page. For example, see this post from moderator dang: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7508443#7509979" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7508443#7509979</a><p>You can see more discussion about these behaviors when you search HN: <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flamewar%20detector&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flamewar%20detector&type=comme...</a>
The answer nearly always is "because users flagged it", which adds a high penalty to the ranking (which the mods sometimes override if they feel like a story shouldn't be punished this way). (Other cases are articles with more comments than upvotes, which afaik get penalized as potential flamewars, but that doesn't apply to this example with as of now ~300 points and ~100 comments).<p>If you want an official answer by HN, please contact them via e-mail.
You mean this? <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13687493" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13687493</a>