Obviously we don't publish how HN's voting ring detector works. If we did, it would quickly stop working.
What matters in this case is (1) it's a software penalty that has nothing to do with the content of a story, (2) moderators didn't touch the submissions or even know they existed, and (3) once we did know that they existed, we merged the threads and placed the story on the frontpage - that is, we went out of our way to give this story more attention, not less - in keeping with the principle explained here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
In case anyone hasn't seen my other posts about this:
(1) I had no idea this story existed and woke up to claims that I was obviously* suppressing it.
(2) I looked into it and found that no moderator had touched either of the two submissions of the story, but that both submissions had set off HN's voting ring detector. (Whether there was a voting ring or not, I don't know - that software isn't perfect. It has held up well over the years though.)
(3) We merged the two discussions and placed the merged thread on the front page.
>I had no idea this story existed and woke up to claims that I was obviously* suppressing it.
To be fair, it seems you’re saying the submission was being suppressed, just not intentionally. Lots of props of course for transparency and reboosting the story
When people use the word "suppressed" they usually mean that we were personally intervening to do something suppressive. This being the internet, they say that with supreme confidence whether it's true or not.
For example, the comment I was referring to, which was the first one I saw, said "It is being suppressed by @dang" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47457010). You can't get more personal, definitive, or wrong than that.
Okay but my comment here said that it was being suppressed (intentionally?).
In my other comment, I actually did not mean to write “it is being suppressed by dang” but rather “it is being suppressed @dang”… Because my impression is that that alerts you somehow? I may be wrong about this.
Please give your long-time readers the benefit of the doubt. I was correct that it was being suppressed. I'm also very thankful for your moderation of the site. I know you do a lot of hard work on that front.
HN would be an entirely different place if people could just arrange to get their stuff upvoted onto the front page! We've spent hundreds of hours working on this over the years. Still not perfect of course.
My theory is that a lot of people may have looked for a story like this on the home page and then searched ‘Delve’ to see if anything was submitted recently and then upvoted one of those recently submitted posts.
We just found out about this story and the submissions of it. It looks like it didn't make the front page because it set off HN's voting ring detector.
Mods didn't touch either thread except (1) we merged the duplicate discussions and (2) we rolled back the voting ring penalty so that the story would be on the frontpage.
This is in keeping with the principle that we moderate stories less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is part of the story. That's been the case since the beginning, and I've posted about it dozens of times: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
Respectfully, I think there may be an issue with your voting ring detection, which is that if multiple people try to submit the same article and are redirected to an existing post and they upvote it, that might be setting off the voting ring alert. Can you check that?
Having been at this for 12 years I am pretty sure that the bulk of the community does in fact believe us when we say that, and even when we say other things as well.
There are a number of reasons why this is the case. One is that it is true. Another is that we've always treated the good will of the community as by far the biggest asset—in fact, the only asset—that HN has.
We were in the process of merging the threads. Actually tomhow had correctly merged them, but I misinterpreted which submission had been first and undid that. Then corrected my mistake.
Had you checked the other thread during that "good minute", you'd have seen that all the comments were intact.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
reply