alt Hacker NewsThe algorithm was shared in the past. The scoring is pretty simple tbh
- the older it is, the less score
- the more votes and comments it has, the higher the score
- penalties reduce the score ( eg. By moderator)
How it works for the end-user:
- People browsing in newest, make it visible in the main page.
- Most people see the main page
Result: interesting topics go to the main page
Replies
themafia • yesterday at 7:19 AM
Additionally: Time of day and day of week seem to matter.
> the more votes and comments it has, the higher the score
Unless this has changed, I don't think comments contribute positively to the score. Apparently they (used to?) contribute negatively if there are more comments than upvotes and the number of comments exceeds some threshold. See e.g. this very old article: https://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-reall...
> In order to prevent flamewars on Hacker News, articles with "too many" comments will get heavily penalized as "controversial". In the published code, the contro-factor function kicks in for any post with more than 20 comments and more comments than upvotes. Such an article is scaled by (votes/comments)^2. However, the actual formula is different - it is active for any post with more comments than upvotes and at least 40 comments. Based on empirical data, I suspect the exponent is 3, rather than 2 but haven't proven this.