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Ian's Tech Notes
Personal blog · technotes.iangreenleaf.com/postsprogrammingweb
Ian's Tech Notes is a personal blog at technotes.iangreenleaf.com about programming and web. Since 2013, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 11 times, most often “Reddit’s empire is founded on a flawed algorithm”. The last post was in 2015, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked for its analysis of Reddit's vote-based ranking, including the log of vote counts and how early votes shape visibility. The author also posted a follow-up with corrections.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Reddit’s empire is founded on a flawed algorithm3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-12-10
What Hacker News says?
Author here. I posted a quick follow-up with some corrections and other items of interest that came out of the discussion: http://technotes.iangreenleaf.com/posts/2013-12-10-the-reddi... . And of course, if you would like more articles written by me and an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio (because I post so rarely...), consider subscribing: http://technotes.iangreenleaf.com . RSS is not dead, dammit.
Comment linking /
on “Reddit’s empire is founded on a flawed algorithm”Submitted Reddit’s empire is founded on a flawed algorithm as a story · 278 points
HN discussion`ups` and `downs` are whole numbers, so `abs(s)` will usually be >= 1, like 2654 or something. The log is there to reduce the influence of additional votes after a certain level of popularity. See footnote ^2: http://technotes.iangreenleaf.com/posts/2013-12-09-reddits-e...
Comment linking /posts/2013-12-09-reddits-empire-is-built-on-a-flawed-algorithm.html
on “Reddit’s empire is founded on a flawed algorithm”Submitted Fix your Ruby environment problems as a story · 10 points
HN discussionI think sites like reddit just want engagement, even over quality. It's been known forever that reddit's algorithm leaves much to be desired but it's too risky to change. IE the following (since patched) bug: http://technotes.iangreenleaf.com/posts/2013-12-09-reddits-e...
Comment linking /posts/2013-12-09-reddits-empire-is-built-on-a-flawed-algorithm.html
on “How Not to Sort by Average Rating (2009)”Submitted Reddit’s empire is founded on a flawed algorithm - Ian's Tech Notes as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> More broadly, the algorithm reddit uses is not only known wrong/buggy: > http://technotes.iangreenleaf.com/posts/2013-12-09-reddits-e... . Reading that article, I get sent to https://github.com/reddit/reddit/pull/583 which contains https://github.com/reddit/reddit/pull/583#issuecomment-35440... which notes that the issue discussed has actually been fixed.
Comment linking /posts/2013-12-09-reddits-e..
on “Reddit's Favorite Scientist Just Got Banned for Cheating the Site”Submitted Reddit has no idea how their front page works as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWhy this matters: Visibility on Reddit is essentially predicated on early votes. Get a few upvotes and even mediocre comments will often remain at the top due to momentum. Less than -4 and it's doomed to oblivion (ie. downvote the competition). One of the most popular linked sites on reddit (quickmeme) got to where it was with only a few strategically placed votes for each link, and it took ages for them to be found…
Comment linking /posts/2013-12-09-reddits-empire-is-built-on-a-flawed-algorithm.html
on “Reddit's Favorite Scientist Just Got Banned for Cheating the Site”While experts are present (and since the notes on security in the readme are refreshing), I'd like to ask a general question about securing OAuth 2 tokens. My use case is to have a server that uses the explicit OAuth flow (redeeming a code obtained from the user in order to get permission to operate on the user’s behalf) but also have a front end client that uses the implicit flow (retrieving an access token for dir…
Comment linking /posts/closing-a-nasty-security-hole-in-oauth.html
on “Show HN: Fosite – OAuth2 framework for Go”