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…
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 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 upvote a story compared to the average story. We think this provides more stable and meaningful comparisons between stories. We would propose it as an alternative to the simple upvote count (which is distorted by feedback loops) in the ranking formula. A Hacker News client called "Quality News" shows this metric for live Hacker News data (https://news.social-protocols.org/). And you can read about how we calculate this metric here: https://github.com/social-protocols/news#readme We hope for interest and support from the Hacker News community to encourage official ranking experiments on the Hacker News frontpage.
Does the same job
all alternatives →- 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.
- IMI made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of commentsJun 2026 · hackernewstrends.com · ▲822
- IMI made a tool to track the upvote/ranking history of HN submissions2021 · upvotetracker.com · ▲144
- HNHacker News Ranked by Comment/Score Ratio2017 · paradite.github.io · ▲54
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