Life & fun · February 22, 2023
UpvoteRate – Towards a fairer ranking formula for Hacker News
Hello HN! About 1.5 years ago we published an idea on how to improve the Hacker News ranking algorithm (https://felx.me/2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking...). The main idea was to counteract the rank-upvotes feedback loop by using attention as negative feedback. We received very valuable input from the HN community (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28391659), and have since come up with something that we think could be a real contribution: the upvoteRate metric. upvoteRate is an estimate of how much more or less likely users are to…
UpvoteRate – Towards a fairer ranking formula for Hacker News launched on February 22, 2023 with 15 votes, #1,331 of 3,829 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.
In plain words
UpvoteRate proposes an alternative ranking metric for Hacker News that addresses feedback loops in the current algorithm. Rather than relying on raw upvote counts, it estimates how likely users are to upvote a story relative to average posts, providing more stable comparisons. The metric is designed for Hacker News users and developers interested in fairer content ranking systems. A companion client called Quality News demonstrates the metric in practice.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hello HN! About 1.5 years ago we published an idea on how to improve the Hacker News ranking algorithm (https://felx.me/2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking...). The main idea was to counteract the rank-upvotes feedback loop by using attention as negative feedback. We received…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News2023 · news.social-protocols.org · ▲140Hello HN! TLDR; - Quality News is a Hacker News client that provides additional data and insights on submissions, notably, the upvoteRate metric. - We propose that this metric could be used to improve the Hacker News ranking score. - In-depth explanation: https://github.com/social-protocols/news#readme The Hacker News ranking score is directly proportional to upvotes, which is a problem because it creates a feedback loop: higher rank leads to more upvotes leads to higher rank, and so on... → ↗ ↘ Higher Rank More Upvotes ↖ ↙ ← As a consequence, success on HN depends almost…
- AWA Way To Hack HN's Karma2012 · ▲472
I submitted a link, when someone clicks on it I get an up-vote for this article. I don't want people to misuse this I just want to bring attention to this problem. This is the link I used that up-votes this: http://news.ycombinator.com/vote?for=3742742&dir=up&...
I made a tool to track the upvote/ranking history of HN submissions2021 · upvotetracker.com · ▲144upvotetracker adalah situs berita yang menyajikan laporan terbaru dari berbagai topik dengan analisis yang cepat, jelas, dan mudah diikuti pembaca.
- HNHacker News Outliers2024 · hn.moritz.pm · ▲147
I made a little website with a server that collects only HN submissions with > 500 upvotes chronologically. https://hn.moritz.pm/ It's quite simple because I wanted to learn from the project. But I think it's useful, to get a summary of what was important over the last days. The UI is almost identical to the HN frontpage, you can click on the comments to view the thread and on the username to see the profile. The rest of the cards takes you to the submitted URL.
- HNHacker News with categories and popularity2014 · newshack.io · ▲149
Did you want to know topics of the news or popularity of posts? "Hacker News Hack" helps you to find news based on some categories and importance or popularity. It tagged news with 9 categories with a natural language processing technology and supervised learning for categorizing news. It also calculates a speed of number of comments in each posts as popularity based on term, that is 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, or 1 year.
- HNHacker News Ranked by Comment/Score Ratio2017 · paradite.github.io · ▲54
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Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
