Hacker News, a simple link aggregator owned and operated by Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator, has had many positive effects on SV startups and engineers as a whole. On Hacker News, users receive Karma whenever another user upvotes a submission or comment they made, which incentives positive contributions to the community.
However, in maintaining its simplicity, many new features and behaviors added over the years on Hacker News are not fully documented other than the occasional comments from staff. This list details some of the hidden norms about Hacker News not otherwise covered in the Guidelines and the FAQ, along with a few bonus features outside of typical HN usage. If there is anything missing/incorrect from this list, feel free to file a GitHub issue/PR.
This list has no affiliation with Hacker News, Y Combinator, or any YC-backed company.
Hacker News currently has two full time moderators: Dan Gackle (dang) and Scott Bell (sctb). Their comment replies provide a pseudo-log of Hacker News moderation.
Both are very responsive when contacted at hn@ycombinator.com, and is the best option for resolving any issues on Hacker News.
All comments start with a score of 1 point (but in order to prevent bandwagoning, the comment score is not visible to users other than the author). After users reach 500 Karma, they gain the ability to downvote another comment. Downvoted comments (i.e. with a score < 1) reduce their placement on the comment thread and will appear desaturated to other users deemphasize them. There is no upper limit on the score of a comment, but the minimum score is -4 points.
Complaining about being downvoted is discouraged and usually results in even more downvotes.
If the comment desaturation makes Hacker News difficult to read, you can install the CSS extension discussed here.
If a user has 30 Karma, they can flag submissions. Although submissions cannot be downvoted, flags act as a "super" downvote and enough flags will strongly reduce the rank of the submission, or kill it entirely (flagging is supposed to be used for submissions which are spam/off-topic, but that isn't always the case in practice). A submission that's flagged to death will have a [flagged] tag. Comments behave similarly.
In contrast, a [dead] submission is either killed by a moderator or by the software.
If a user has 30 Karma, they can also vouch for a [flagged] or [dead] submission/comment. A vouched submission/comment has its rank restored, but it can be [flagged] again at which point it can't be re-vouched.
If a user has 250 Karma, they can set the color of the top bar in their profile settings. The default is #ff6600. Here's the complete set of colors users have set.
Hacker News encourages a single discussion on a given story. All others are marked as a [dupe] and will be killed without the ability to vouch. This includes articles which are insubstantial variations of an earlier widely-discussed submission.
The FAQ states "users should vote for a story because they personally find it intellectually interesting, not because someone has content to promote." Indeed, Hacker News utilizes a voting ring detector which will prevent caught submissions from hitting the front page. Due to sites like Product Hunt normalizing the asking for upvotes or other engagement via social media, the implicit asking of upvotes is also done for Hacker News, usually due to ignorance of the Hacker News rule against it. There are very few good reasons to draw attention to a Hacker News submission immediately after it has been submitted.
One popular "trick" for obfuscating voting manipulation on Hacker News is to link to the Hacker News's /newest page of new submissions (instead of a direct link which would otherwise make voting manipulation obvious), and asking friends to upvote the submission from that page. This trick doesn't actually work.
The FAQ notes that submission rank is impacted by "software which downweights overheated discussions." A good rule of thumb for this effect is when the number of comments on a submission exceeds its score. Moderators can overrule the downranking for appropriate, not-actually-a-flame-war discussions.
Moderators will sometimes rescue a post which didn't receive a lot of upvotes and reset the submission time on the post.
Relatedly, moderators can also invite users via email to resubmit a post which didn't get much traction.
After a post or comment is made, it can be edited by the author within 2 hours. A post/comment can be deleted by the author within those two hours, but only if it has no replies, in order to prevent discussion from being lost. In that case, the post/comment cannot be deleted (This can result in a fake [deleted] edit if a person wants to remove their comment in the limit but can't).
If you need something deleted but you can't, you'll have to message hn@ycombinator.com.
Comments can be collapsed by clicking the [+] icon to improve readability.[flagged] comments are collapsed by default, and moderators can set a comment to automatically be collapsed if necessary (e.g. meta-discussion).
Both users and domains can be shadowbanned, where all posts/comments by that user / submissions to that domain will be instantly [dead] and cannot receive votes/comments (but can still be vouched). A good way to tell if a user/domain is banned is to either have another user with showdead enabled check for a series of [dead] content from that source, or view those submissions in Private Browsing/Incognito mode to see if they appear.
Users/domains are usually shadowbanned for breaking HN rules/spam. If you feel you are unfairly shadowbanned, contact hn@ycombinator.com.
Accounts which are less than 2 weeks old will appear with a green username.
The Guidelines state that political discussion is off-topic. However, as of recently, the line between technology and politics has become extremely blurred. Most tech related submissions with a hint of political partisanship will quickly be flagged to death by users (or die a slow death due to the inevitable flame war).
Likewise, topics around diversity and inclusion in tech have gained lots of visibility over the past few years. However, despite these discussions not being off-topic, they tend to be flagged to death by users regardless. Unfortunately. (Moderators occasionally unkill such threads if they see it in time, although it rarely sticks).
Many news websites have started implementing a paywall for their content, which has caused conflict with Hacker News's "original source" rule. The web button next to submissions (that does a Google search for the given title) was partially intended to serve as a paywall workaround; however, recent changes to the paywall implementations have closed that loophole.
As a result, submissions which link to paywalled sites tend to get many comments complaining about paywalls.
YC Companies get two notable benefits on Hacker News; they can post jobs ads to the front page (which start of at Rank #6, cannot be voted/commented on, and have a fixed decay rate), and the ability to do a Launch HN when their startup launches out of a YC batch.
Currently, there is no evidence that non-job submissions about a YC startup receive preferential treatment on the front page, or kill submissions critical of a YC startup. In fact, the moderators have stated that they explicitly avoid killing controversial YC posts when possible.
Additionally, founders of YC companies see each other's usernames show up in orange, which--although not an explicit benefit--does allow fellow YC founders to immediately identify one another in discussions.
Hacker News allows people to use the old front page ranking algorithm. This results in different (and occasionally better) content.
Hacker News allows users to see what the front page looks like at any point in time. You can also do a wayback view for any user at their registration date by clicking their registration date in their profile.
If you want to gather large amount of Hacker News data for data analysis/machine learning, you should use the Hacker News dataset on BigQuery, which is updated daily and is much more pragmatic to use than manually scraping data from the Hacker News API.
Hacker News maintains a list of useful links that allow for primitive filtering by certain types of content. These currently include:
- /leaders -- View a list of users with the most karma
- /front -- Filter front page submissions for a given day (e.g. 2016-06-20), ordered by time spent there
- /best -- View the highest-voted recent links
- /active -- View the links with the most active current discussions
- /bestcomments -- List the highest-voted recent comments
- /noobstories -- Show submissions from new accounts
- /noobcomments -- List comments from new accounts
Want to catch-up on the best submissions over the last few days? Filter out all posts below a certain threshold with over?points=100. Examples:
- Add more images/citations
Max Woolf (@minimaxir, minimaxir on Hacker News since 2012)
Max has no affiliation with Hacker News, Y Combinator, or any YC-backed company.