According to HN's software, this story has been heavily ring-voted. That's what has affected its rank.
Call that "penalized" if you want, but it has nothing to do with the content, so that tweet is misleading—and ironic, too, given what provoked the "penalizing".
(Also, in case anyone's wondering, moderators haven't touched the post.)
While I realize you can't go into too much detail about ring-voting detection to prevent people from finding ways around it, can you elaborate a bit on what ring-voting means to HN, beyond the obvious?
The obvious definition would be a clique of accounts that all upvote each other's stories, but that seems rather unlikely in this case; is there a secondary criteria? Are you looking to prohibit what Wikipedia calls "meatpuppetry"? Are you also looking to prevent upvotes from people who reach an HN discussion via Twitter or other sites?
I'm happy to elaborate on nearly any aspect of Hacker News, but this is one area (maybe the only area?) where I resist the impulse to explain. We're in something of an arms race against a lot of people who try to get their content on the front page through non-organic means. Accidentally helping them do so would be a genuine shot in the foot.
But let's say what good voting means to HN. It means voting for something that you personally find intellectually interesting, regardless of who posted it and regardless of what you or your friends are hoping to promote.
Do certain types of content set off the ring-voting detection more frequently? The type of content likely influences how it's shared and how people respond to it, which would affect how it's voted (and/or flagged). Algorithms are not unbiased, particularly when no one's bothered to study their confounding factors.
> Do certain types of content set off the ring-voting detection more frequently?
Sure—people posting their startups, for example, set off the ring detector more frequently than the typical news article. Friends voting for friends' blog posts, too. But is that a bias of the algorithm? That strikes me as a stretch.
Interesting. How do you guard against coincidental rings?
(i.e. a subgroup of people who all love, say, Lisp, and therefore always vote up Lisp stories. They're not an organised group - but they do tend to vote in concert.)
I used to worry about that too, but it turns out not to be a big problem in practice. (I realize that's not a satisfying explanation, but this is one area where we can't give out details without enabling people to game the site. Having put a ton of effort into HN's anti-voting-ring measures, I dread the thought of having to climb all the way down the mountain and push that boulder up again.)
I'm wondering that as well. In particular, it seems like content that's more likely to be shared via various social networks would be more likely to set off the ring-voting detector.
I'm not assuming either correlation or causation; I'm suggesting a hypothesis that seems worth testing and evaluating.
There's a difference in motivation between "check this interesting article out" and "please upvote me", but the ring-voting detector can't necessarily tell the difference.
> There's a difference in motivation between "check this interesting article out" and "please upvote me", but the ring-voting detector can't necessarily tell the difference.'
In the former case, why would they be linking to HN in the first place, instead of the article itself?
HN has a basic voting ring heuristic to ignore votes from direct links to HN submissions from a non-HN referrer for this reason.
I can't speak for other people, but personally, when I find a good article, I link to the source I found it through, rather than bypassing the source and linking directly to the article. (I don't do that when submitting stories to HN since HN considers that "blogspam", but personally I like finding new sources of good content, as well as sources of good discussion, rather than just the content itself. And in any case that's a heuristic for what to submit to HN rather than what to link to from elsewhere.)
At a minimum, I would tend to put something like this: interesting article (link to article) via HN (link to HN).
Though I'm certainly less likely to do that now that I know that HN does not like such links.
I don't think it's appropriate to post something like that about one's own story, but for a story you found interesting and want to share, I think it makes sense.
Call that "penalized" if you want, but it has nothing to do with the content, so that tweet is misleading—and ironic, too, given what provoked the "penalizing".
(Also, in case anyone's wondering, moderators haven't touched the post.)