zlacker

The post this morning, "Ask HN: What kind of side projects are you working on?"* got a lot of great responses and was killed because of it. There was nothing "controversial" about the post; it was merely popular with comments of what people are working on. This algorithm needs to be tweaked or HN risks losing its base.

*https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799694

>>david9+(OP)
The number of links within it probably drags it down. Though I am ambivalent whether it's good or bad, I sort of see the point...there's not much discussion or analysis in the comments.

>>brudge+e
It's bad because this is exactly the kind of thing that many on HN come here to see. I hate sifting through the "YC startup raises $50" news, but I love to see what people are working on, and I'm not alone.

>>david9+n1
I think the issue is that it's mostly just links, and not much meaningful feedback. People are mostly talking past one another and there was [when I looked] very little dialog.

It was more like the monthly job thread and HN might have legitimate reasons for discouraging analogous threads for everyone's side projects.

It is also possible that the thread's pattern of growth triggered some heuristic.

>>david9+(OP)
Yes, with 82 comments and 52 upvotes (currently), that post will get a fairly substantial penalty.

For the most part you don't need to be "afraid" of comments - an article is only penalized if it has more than 40 comments AND more comments than upvotes. Most articles have considerably more upvotes than comments, so commenting won't hurt them at all. But you might want check the upvote and comment numbers before adding a comment just in case...

>>david9+(OP)
Note that Ask HNs have their own tab. They often get comments way after they disappeared from the front page.