zlacker

>>modele+(OP)
What happened with the ranking? Were there people who flagged all the stories, even the first (obviously newsworthy) one?

>>r721+4T
The 30 or so submissions of this story all set off a bunch of software penalties that try to prune the most repetitive and sensational stories off the front page. Otherwise there would be a lot more repetition and sensationalism on the fp, which is the opposite of what HN is for (see explanations via links below if curious).

The downside is that we have to manually override the penalties in the case of a genuinely important story, which this obviously is. Fortunately that doesn't happen too often, plus the system is self-correcting: if a story is really important, people will bring it to our attention (thanks, tkgally!)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

>>dang+pT
Sometimes I wish you'd prune the users (at least from submission privileges) who can't be bothered to search first, which is how you get these n-fold submissions.

>>SilasX+FV
That's impossible. We'd have to prune human nature.

>>dang+9W
Sorry, I'm confused. Is there some clever joke I'm missing here? And is there a reason you don't make that clever joke or objection to any other preference for how HN is moderated?

>>SilasX+Ut3
I wouldn't say it's clever, or much of a joke, but when people ask us to change things on HN that are humans-doing-what-humans-do, I do think that's setting the bar too high.

I've made this point in response to many posts over the years:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...