I seem to remember reading that in an attempt to avoid "controversial" subjects, posts are penalized if they generate comments too quickly. Social issue are often hotly debated and occasionally some of the most actively commented on posts on the site until they drop off the front page. So while HN might not actively be penalizing these posts, they might be penalized in indirect but still very real ways.

I believe a thread with more comments than votes is penalized as well, suggesting that commenting on a thread without upvoting it first is implicitly flagging it.

And of course there may be other arcane metrics involving thread depth, average comment rate, comment size, thread shape, etc. Who knows?

Whoa, really?

...I've been flagging a lot of articles.

Only a factor if it's got more comments than upvotes.

I would hope that HN's "flamewar" detector is somewhat more sophisticated than just "generate comments too quickly".

There's an aspect of it that's a ratio of comments to upvotes, which seems to work pretty well from what I've observed.

Now that makes more sense. A story that generates a large number of comments and a large number of upvotes very quickly seems likely to be a good story. A story that generates many quick comments without upvotes seems likely to have produced comments negative about the article; if you posting a comment but you don't want to upvote the article, that does seem like a good sign of controversy and possible flames.

But it doesn't just penalize flamewars, it penalizes all conversations. For example, I have now posted two comments in this discussion and only upvoted the article once. Does that mean this is a worse article than one that I only upvoted and never commented on or a better article than one I upvoted and commented on three times?

Keep in mind that HN also has a "deep thread" mechanism, which hides the reply button for a while on sufficiently deep comment threads to discourage rapid-fire posting without thought. (Slashdot used to have the same thing; if you posted comments too rapidly, you'd get a "whoa, slow down there".)

I'd also hope that more weight goes to "more commenters than upvotes" rather than "more comments than upvotes", though as vague heuristics neither seems too far off.

I think it's mistaken to assume that not upvoting and downvoting are each implicitly negative, though. There is a neutral dimension to subthreads as well - conversations which are neither praiseworthy nor trolling.

I would be more fair to address the broader point of the post rather than just one sentence. It's good that the moderator(s) specify why something is penalized[0], but it doesn't really change the overall result.

[0] As defined by the post in question.

Stories about hot social and political controversies reliably attract both a lot of upvotes and a lot of user flags. This, together with how the software interprets votes and flags, explains the effects the OP is describing.

On hot social and political issues, many people find it irresistible to conclude that HN is biased against the side they favor and favors the side they oppose. They perceive this bias in all things HN: the community, the software, the mods, etc. But the truth, as far as I can tell, is that on most of these issues the community is divided. That's why the threads on them turn into flamewars.

Users reliably flag threads that turn into flamewars on HN. (By "flamewar" I mean angry arguments over predictable positions.) Moderators do so as well, though not to the same degree. But this isn't a bias against social issues per se, let alone particular social issues—the same pattern holds on threads about, say, basic income, or high-frequency trading, or even something like static vs. dynamic typing in programming. It's a matter of how divided the community is and how strongly people feel. It's more noticeable on any issue where one feels strongly.

What I do think it makes sense to call the bias of the site is a bias against the low-signal/noise discussions that inevitably result when people angrily disagree, especially when they do so through the filter of a pre-existing ideological battle. This is biased in the sense that HN's guidelines are biased: they call for certain types of stories and discussions rather than others.

Sometimes people argue that HN should abandon its anti-flamewar bias, because after all these are important issues and they need to be debated. But this fails to consider systemic effects on the site. The more ragefires burn, the more thoughtful users leave. That selective process, repelling the users HN most wants and attracting those attracted to flames, is a vicious circle that (a) is hard to get out of and (b) would turn the site into scorched earth. For all HN's flaws, it would be nihilistic to just let it burn.

That doesn't mean we aren't open to ways of balancing these things better: they're hard to balance, and if we're missing something we want to know.

> Users reliably flag threads that turn into flamewars on HN.

Then why not simply disable comments on sensitive stories?

> But this isn't a bias against social issues per se, let alone particular social issues—the same pattern holds on threads about, say, basic income, or high-frequency trading, or even something like static vs. dynamic typing in programming. It's a matter of how divided the community is and how strongly people feel. It's far more noticeable, of course, on any issue where one personally feels strongly.

Sure, but of all of your examples, only social issues are really important. It doesn't matter what people's intentions are (this is something that we seem to always get back to). If the result is that really important stories -- stories that touch on the very core of technology, start up culture and innovation -- get "silenced" (and, as a result, cause observes to view HN's community in a negative light) then it's your duty to make sure that this doesn't happen.

> But this fails to consider the systemic effects such a change would have on the site. The more the ragefires burn, the more thoughtful users leave.

So disable comments on those stories.

> But this fails to consider the systemic effects such a change would have on the site.

Except that there's an opposite systemic effect: HN readers get the sense that being thoughtful means shying away from those issues (but not from vapid stories about some startup raising money). Also, thoughtful users might abandon because anything that's truly interesting (other than, say, objective discoveries) -- and therefore controversial -- is not featured on HN. Your policy appeals to those attracted to the vanities of SV culture (and then YC people write blogs trying to educate people against them) while repelling those who are interested in reading criticism of it.

Not saying something sometimes sends as clear a message as saying it.

Disabling comments on sensitive stories has the effect of privileging the viewpoints of people who happen to win the front-page contest, and endorsing whatever framing happens to accompany whatever happens to be the most popular telling of that story. That seems like an extremely unfortunate dynamic to adopt.

Please, HN, do not allow people to post stories on the site that can't be contextualized or even rebutted in comment threads. Lots of popular stories are really, really bad.

I actually think this would encourage more thoughtful rebuttals in the form of long blog posts. One great thing about this community is that usually there are enough people to promote stories on opposite sides of the debate to the front page.

The assumption here is that blog post followups to popular front-page stories will themselves naturally find the top of the front page. But of course they won't. For one thing: simple causality guarantees that they won't be available until hours or (depending on the quality of the post) days after the original story first hits the front page, when it's at the zenith of its gravitational pull for HN votes.

You may want to consider writing a blog.ycombinator.com post about this. I think there are lots of HNers who would find these algorithms interesting :)

We must have a crossed signal here. Of course those are part of the ranking algorithm! My point is that except for the exceptions I mentioned, none of the code considers social issues. What part is disingenuous?

If social issues are more likely than the average story to trigger aspects of the ranking system that results in them disappearing, the ranking system is biased against social issues. The fact that it's also biased against various other topics is irrelevant to the point I was making - you've constructed a ranking system that makes it almost impossible to maintain visibility of stories about diversity. In an era where the lack of diversity in our industry is so extreme and stories about harassment so visible that the mainstream media have picked up on it, that seems like a problem.

My guess is that I fall right alongside you in terms of the valence of my opinions about diversity, "meritocracy", and the working culture of the San Francisco Bay Area. I'd even hazard a guess that my level of militancy on those topics is similar to yours.

I am a reliable flagger of diversity stories that I perceive as inviting flame wars --- even though I'm also a willing participant in those flamewars, as you can quickly find out from the search bar below.

What I'd like more people to consider is that HN can't be all things to all people. I find the site personally interesting, have met several friends here, and have extracted considerable professional value from it. Those are all very important things to me.

Meanwhile: there's a whole big wide Internet out there that can host discussions and debates on social issues of all stripes. If those debates, hosted here, are going to rip the site up (and evidence suggests they will): not worth it.

There are people whose opinions I respect a great deal --- Maciej Ceglowski being a good example --- who strongly disagree with me on this point. Of course I might not be right about this. I'd just say, be careful about assuming that the bias is in favor of a status quo on the substantive issues. For a lot of us, this is a process issue.

Given how often diversity stories are on the front page, there doesn't seem to be much of a problem getting such stories visibility.

In fact, the top story all day long today has been a diversity story, with a massive number of comments on just about every possible aspect of the story.

You said:

"The Hacker News ranking algorithm does not penalize stories that address social issues."

And then explained the observed effects as being from flags and vote ring detection.

People flag stories that address social issues, thus, the ranking algorithm is penalizing stories that address social issues. That (the collective) you did not specifically intend this makes a nice case study in unintended consequences and/or the collision of technology and humanity, but doesn't change the point being made.

By your logic, the software must also be biased against the things users downvote, since after all the code records the vote.

Of course the algorithm penalizes (most) stories that users flag. But it has no knowledge of what those stories are about. If some topics get flagged more than others, that is a function not of the algorithm but of the inputs users give it. This seems so obvious that I fear this dispute is purely definitional.

Those two words are not interchangeable in this context. The algorithm is the code. The system, in your example, is the whole thing.

There's nothing wrong in making it clear that the code itself does not target social issues.

> There's nothing wrong in making it clear that the code itself does not target social issues.

I agree, and I suppose if you choose to read my comment completely free of the context of the rest of the thread, my attitude might not make sense. But when you realize he had also said to 'somehow' that he "thought that was the main point of the article?", it's obvious he was missing the forest for the trees.

Because clearly this dispute is caused by his inability to understand you, not by your inability to understand him.

I seriously have no idea what you're talking about. If you'd like to point out something specific you think I've misunderstood, I'm listening. If you just want to engage in content-free sarcasm, I'm uninterested.

... Wow.

You're here calling @"dang" disingenuous when he has posted nothing but straightforward explanations of what inputs the HN ranking algorithm uses. Then you make a reply laced with the pretense that he doesn't get what you are saying, or are trying to say.

Really he's (I'm just inferring here, because it's soooo obvious) 100% clued in to your conversational gambits.

As far as I can tell, a fair number of users abuse the flag ability to squelch discussion on topics they don't want to see discussed or a viewpoint they don't agree with as an alternative to downvoting (since one cannot downvote a submission).