hacker-news-undocumented

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors 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 incentivizes 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. Table of Contents A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors Undocumented Features Moderators Downvoting Comments View Most Recent Thread Comments First Flagging/Vouching Top Bar Color Merry Christmas! Anti-Voting Manipulation Flame-War Detector Second-Chance Pool Edit/Delete Time Limits Unvote Time Limits Comment Collapsing Shadowbanning Hidden Reply Links Green Usernames Thin Black Bar Behaviors Implicit Downranking of Politics Implicit Downranking of Topics Around Diversity and Inclusion Implicit Downranking of Posts Without URLs Paywalls Perceived Favoritism Toward YC Companies Downranking of Tutorials Bonus Features Hacker News Classic Hacker News Wayback Hacker News on BigQuery Hacker News Lists Public URLS with user-generated content Official RSS feeds Hacker News Search Filter Out Posts Below X Points To-Do Maintainer Undocumented Features Moderators Hacker News has two full time moderators: Dan Gackle (dang) and Tom Howard (tomhow), and formerly Scott Bell (sctb). Their comment replies (dang, tomhow, sctb) provide a pseudo-log of Hacker News moderation. Dan and Tom are very responsive when contacted at hn@ycombinator.com. It is the best option for resolving any issues on Hacker News. Downvoting Comments 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 501 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. Additional downvotes after that still subtract points from the user's Karma, but the comment won't go below -4. You cannot downvote comments which are direct replies to your own comment, and you cannot downvote 24 hours after the original comment was made. 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 click on the comment's timestamp to go to its page where the comment will no longer be faded, or you can install the CSS extension discussed here. View Most Recent Thread Comments First If you are following the conversation on a thread it can be useful to see the most recently added comments first. You can do this using the undocumented /latest?id= endpoint. For example, for the thread /item?id=42009039 you can see comments in reverse chronological order at /latest?id=42009039. This works for whole threads and also for nested replies to a sub-thread, using that comment's ID. Flagging/Vouching If a user has 31 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 break the site guidelines, but that isn't always the case in practice). A submission that's flagged to death will have a [flagged] tag. Comments behave similarly. A [dead] submission (that does not also show [flagged]) is killed by a moderator or by the software. They will only be shown to users who have showdead enabled in their profile. A submission can simultaneously be [flagged] and [dead]. If a user has 31 Karma, they can also vouch for a [dead] submission/comment. A vouched submission/comment has its rank restored (and potentially improved as the vouch can counteract the effects of flags). Top Bar Color If a user has 251 Karma, they can set the color of the top bar in their profile settings. The default is #ff6600. The Y Combinator logo will change its color to match the top bar. Here's the list of colors from users who have recently posted. Merry Christmas! During Christmas (December 25th) UTC, the Hacker News front page will have a Christmas theme, with a dark red top bar, and alternating red and green submission ranking numbers. Anti-Voting Manipulation 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. Flame-War Detector The FAQ notes that s