Dang is going to have 65,535 karma points soon

Congrats Dang, you have done a wonderful job so far and moderate one of the most fantastic online communities out there. I am sure most of the job feels somewhat thankless but I want to let you know I(and many many other users on this site) appreciate your hard work and dedication.

If by “finest” you mean a Reddit mob mentality for tech, then yes I completely agree with this statement.

What do you think we could do differently? Serious question.

I don't like the mob thing either but it's how large group dynamics on the internet work (by default). We try to mitigate it where we can but there's not a lot of knowledge about how to do that.

I consistently wonder why posts critical of HN-affiliated companies that have stats like upvotes per hour and number of comments that would theoretically make them the top story getting pushed off the front page.

Are there people whose upvotes count for more than others? Or are these actively suppressed? Either way, it makes it hard to have important/robust conversations when the people seeing them gets suppressed

I'm afraid I don't understand the first bit - but in case this is what you meant: we definitely don't moderate HN to suppress criticism of YC-funded startups. That's actually the #1 thing of all things we don't do. There's tons of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... but the short version is that we know the community's good will is the only value HN has, so we try never to do anything that would damage that.

Re the second bit: there aren't any accounts whose upvotes count for more, but if accounts upvote too many bad* comments and/or get involved in voting rings, we sometimes make their votes not count anymore.

* By "bad" I mean bad relative to HN's intended purpose as defined here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Relative to that, "bad" means snark, flamewar, ideological battle, etc. — all the things that zap intellectual curiosity.

Then what is the algorithm for determining where something should be ranked. I see submissions with 400 votes in two hours being ranked far below ones with 100 votes in 10 hours, and often the variable seems to be the article is critical of ChatGPT or a YC portfolio company. What else goes into the rankings?

"How are stories ranked" is near the top of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. Does that answer your question?

In terms of moderator action: we might downweight ChatGPT topics (for oar against) if they seem repetitive rather than significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). But we don't downweight posts that are critical of YC companies—or rather, we do so less than we would downweight similar threads on other topics. See https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

That link doesn't really tell us. We're a very analytical bunch here, and when I see one story that should have a 10x higher rank according to the "basic algorithm" being ranked lower, that means these "other factors" are much more than a slight twiddling. And when you don't provide the full algorithm, just a hand waive, it makes it difficult to ascertain what's really happening.

Are you sure there aren't abuses from your portfolio companies managers/employees to flag negative stories? I imagine Sam, for example, knows exactly what he has to do to get ChatGPT criticism guided off the stage.

Edit: for example, do you know what happened with this story? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35245626

This is a very interesting/important topic. This was a new topic. It was really hot in the first hour, and just got smashed off the front page.

> Are you sure there aren't abuses from your portfolio companies managers/employees to flag negative stories? I imagine Sam, for example, knows exactly what he has to do to get ChatGPT criticism guided off the stage.

Quite sure. That is, there may be managers/employers of $companies trying to flag things, but being a YC portfolio company doesn't make that any easier. And yes I'm sure that Sam can't do that. (I also know that he wouldn't try, but that's a separate point.)

Re the FAQ: it doesn't give a detailed explanation (we can't do that without publishing our code) but it summarizes the factors comprehensively. If you want to know more I need to see a specific link. Speaking of which:

Re https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35245626: it was on HN's front page for 4 hours, and at some point was downweighted by a mod. I haven't checked about why, but I think most likely it was just our general approach of downweighting opinion pieces on popular topics. Keep in mind that the LLM tsunami is an insanely popular topic—by far the biggest in years—and if we weren't downweighting follow-ups a la https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., it would saturate the front page every day.

Actually we tend to not do that moderation on randomwalker posts (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=randomwalker) - because they're basically always excellent. But a certain amount of randomness is inescapable and randomwalker posts do great on HN most lot of the time. If we made the wrong call in this case, so much the worse for us and I'm genuinely sorry.

> it doesn't give a detailed explanation (we can't do that without publishing our code)

Precisely why would publishing (the relevant part of) the code be a problem? Twitter did it just a few days ago, and they aren't even known as an information hub of the open source world, plus they face a lot more public scrutiny for everything they do, to put it mildly.