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social-protocols
quality-news
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social-protocols / quality-news

quality-news

Quality News - Towards a fairer ranking formula for Hacker News

Communication & Social
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
2Distinct people
18Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
92GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Quality News - Towards a fairer ranking formula for Hacker News

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month18 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2023-02-22 15:13:34 UTC to 2024-10-29 06:11:25 UTC.

0369122023-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 commentsFeb 20232023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 8 submissions, 4 comments2023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsDec 20232024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsOct 2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Feb 20232023-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC211
Mar 20232023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC1284
Apr 20232023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC101
May 20232023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20232023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Jul 20232023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Aug 20232023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20232023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20232023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20232023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20232023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20242024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20242024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20242024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20242024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20242024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20242024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20242024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20242024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20242024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

18 sources
manx·Oct 29, 2024
Very interesting! Identifying great new content is a big unsolved problem for HN IMHO. Unfortunately, scores are not a good metric to predict, because they are not comparable (see https://felx.me/2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking...). A better metric might be "upvoterate", defined as how much more or less likely users are to upvote a story compared to the average story. More about that here: https://github.com/social-protocols/quality-news?tab=readme-...
In Using reinforcement learning and $4.80 of GPU time to find the best HN post
jwarden·Jul 17, 2023
I think so. I work with a group that was researching ways to improve the hacker news ranking algorithm. We concluded that there were "false positives" and "false negatives" -- stories often did or did not make the home page based more on timing and luck than the actual content of the story. Read more here: https://github.com/social-protocols/news However, we concluded that the biggest problem is false negatives -- good stories that never made the home page -- because of submissions to /newest that simply don't get enough *attention*. There are too many stories and not enough eyeballs. As a result, there is not enough data to know if a story would do well if it were shown on the front page or not. You can see this from the fact that there are many stories that are submitted multiple times, and 4 out of 5 submissions get only 1 or two no up
Read the rest
votes, and then the 5th makes the front page and gets hundreds. Sometimes it's due to timing factors -- the story has become relevant for some reason -- but often its just luck.
In Ask HN: Do we need more users to browse /newest on HN?
manx·Mar 27, 2023Submission

Ask HN: Official Hacker News ranking experiments?

Recently, we published a problem analsysis and our approach to improve the HN ranking algorithm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35183317 As a follow-up, we'd like to ask if the community is interested in official experiments with approaches like this. We'd suggest having a second, experimental front-page on HN, which applies the upoteRate metric to the HN formula, as described here: https://github.com/social-protocols/news#a-proposed-new-formula To get a feeling how stories with a high upvoteRate look like, we prepared a page, where all frontpage stories are sorted by upvoteRate: https://news.social-protocols.org/best-upvoterate. What do you think?
3 points · Open discussion
manx·Mar 24, 2023Submission

Ask HN: Official Hacker News ranking experiments?

Recently, we published a problem analsysis and our approach to improve the HN ranking algorithm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35183317 As a follow-up, we'd like to ask if the community is interested in official experiments with approaches like this. We'd suggest having a second, experimental front-page on HN, which applies the upoteRate metric to the HN formula, as described here: https://github.com/social-protocols/news#a-proposed-new-formula To get a feeling how stories with a high upvoteRate look like, we prepared a page, where all frontpage stories are sorted by upvoteRate: https://news.social-protocols.org/best-upvoterate. What do you think?
4 points · Open discussion
manx·Mar 22, 2023Submission

Ask HN: Should HN officially experiment with improving its ranking algorithms?

Recently, we published our approach to improve the HN ranking algorithm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35183317 As a follow-up, we'd like to ask if the community is interested in official experiments with this or similar approaches. We'd suggest having a second, experimental front-page on HN, which applies the upoteRate metric to the HN formula, as described here: https://github.com/social-protocols/news#a-proposed-new-formula To get a feeling how stories with a high upvoteRate look like, we prepared a page, where all frontpage stories are sorted by upvoteRate: https://news.social-protocols.org/best-upvoterate. What do you think?
2 points · Open discussion
manx·Mar 17, 2023Submission

Ask HN: Should HN officially experiment with improving its ranking algorithms?

Yesterday, we published our approach to improve the HN ranking algorithm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35183317 As a follow-up, we'd like to ask if the community is interested in official experiments with this or similar approaches. We'd suggest having a second, experimental front-page on HN, which applies the upoteRate metric to the HN formula, as described here: https://github.com/social-protocols/news#a-proposed-new-formula To get a feeling, how stories with a high upvoteRate look like, we prepared a page, where all frontpage stories are sorted by upvoteRate: https://news.social-protocols.org/best-upvoterate. What do you think?
1 points · Open discussion
manx·Mar 16, 2023Submission

Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News

Hello 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 entirely on getting enough upvotes in the first hour or so to make the front page and get caught in this feedback loop. And getting these early upvotes is largely a matter of timing, luck, and moder
Read the rest
ator decisions. And so the best stories don't always make the front page, and the stories on the front page are not always the best. Our proposed solution is to use upvoteRate instead of upvotes in the ranking formula. upvoteRate is an estimate of how much more or less likely users are to upvote a story compared to the average story, taking account how much attention the story as received, based on a history of the ranks and times at which it has been shown. You can read about how we calculate this metric in more detail here: https://github.com/social-protocols/news#readme About 1.5 years ago, we published an article with this basic idea of counteracting 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). Quality News has been created based largely on this feedback. Currently, Quality News shows the upvoteRate metric for live Hacker News data, as well as charts of the rank and upvote history of each story. We have not yet implemented an alternative ranking algorithm, because we don't have access to data on flags and moderator actions, which are a major component of the HN ranking score. We'd love to see the Hacker News team experiment with the new formula, perhaps on an alternative front page. This will allow the community to evaluate whether the new ranking formula is an improvement over the current one. We look forward discussing our approach with you! Links: Site: https://news.social-protocols.org/ Readme: https://github.com/social-protocols/news#readme Previous Blog Post: https://felx.me/2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking... Previous Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28391659
140 points · Open discussion
manx·Mar 15, 2023Submission

Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News

Hello 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 entirely on getting enough upvotes in the first hour or so to make the front page and get caught in this feedback loop. And getting these early upvotes is largely a matter of timing, luck, and moder
Read the rest
ator decisions. And so the best stories don't always make the front page, and the stories on the front page are not always the best. Our proposed solution is to use upvoteRate instead of upvotes in the ranking formula. upvoteRate is an estimate of how much more or less likely users are to upvote a story compared to the average story, taking account how much attention the story as received, based on a history of the ranks and times at which it has been shown. You can read about how we calculate this metric in more detail here: https://github.com/social-protocols/news#readme About 1.5 years ago, we published an article with this basic idea of counteracting 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). Quality News has been created based largely on this feedback. Currently, Quality News shows the upvoteRate metric for live Hacker News data, as well as charts of the rank and upvote history of each story. We have not yet implemented an alternative ranking algorithm, because we don't have access to data on flags and moderator actions, which are a major component of the HN ranking score. We'd love to see the Hacker News team experiment with the new formula, perhaps on an alternative front page. This will allow the community to evaluate whether the new ranking formula is an improvement over the current one. We look forward discussing our approach with you! Links: Site: https://news.social-protocols.org/ Readme: https://github.com/social-protocols/news#readme Previous Blog Post: https://felx.me/2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking... Previous Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28391659
8 points · Open discussion
jwarden·Mar 7, 2023
Hello HN! TLDR; - We propose a new metric called upvoteRate that could be used to improve the Hacker News ranking score. - Quality News is a Hacker News client that shows the upvoteRate for each story, along with additional charts and stats. - Check it out at: https://news.social-protocols.org/ 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 entirely on getting enough upvotes in the first hour or so to make the front page and get caught in this feedback loop. And getting thes
Read the rest
e early upvotes is largely a matter of timing, luck, and moderator decisions. And so the best stories don't always make the front page, and the stories on the front page are not always the best. Our proposed solution is to use upvoteRate instead of upvotes in the ranking formula. upvoteRate is an estimate of how much more or less likely users are to upvote a story compared to the average story, taking account how much attention the story as received, based on a history of the ranks and times at which it has been shown. You can read about how we calculate this metric in more detail here: https://github.com/social-protocols/news#readme About 1.5 years ago, we published an article with this basic idea of counteracting 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). Quality News has been created based largely on this feedback. Currently, Quality News shows the upvoteRate metric for live Hacker News data, as well as charts of the rank and upvote history of each story. We have not yet implemented an alternative ranking algorithm, because we don't have access to data on flags and moderator actions, which are a major component of the HN ranking score. We'd love to see the Hacker News team experiment with the new formula, perhaps on an alternative front page. This will allow the community to evaluate whether the new ranking formula is an improvement over the current one. We look forward discussing our approach with you! Links: Site: https://news.social-protocols.org/ Github Readme: https://github.com/social-protocols/news#readme Previous Blog Post: https://felx.me/2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking... Previous Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28391659
In Show HN: Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News

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