The obvious connection to HN is that people read and upvote the popular articles, so there's (probably) a lot more randomness in what makes it to the front page than people suspect. This matches my experience, where one of my blog posts will sink without a trace on HN, and then get reposted later and shoot to the top.
Perhaps a more apt comparison would be how certain blogs (37signals, marco.org, Svbtle, etc) rocket to the front page based off of their TLD alone. I don't think this is a particularly bad thing -- this is how branding works, after all -- but I would definitely be interested to see an experiment that throws everything on Readability and hides the URL to see if things change.
I suspect there's also a "cumulative advantage" effect on comments, with popular members getting way more upvotes. Some high-karma member could quantify this by posting half their comments from a new account and A/B testing.
I could be incorrect, but I recall reading that part of the ranking algorithm is based on the commenter's average karma.
As I remember it, there was a feature implemented where leaders (veteran accounts with high vote averages) do get something of a boost when they comment, at least within the sequencing of the comments in any one thread. I think this was done to help improve the quality of the conversation, even before the removal of the vote totals next to each comment.
Definitely! This is especially a big issues with focus groups (I had to run a bunch for a few semesters for part of my marketing degree, and one of the first things you learn is how to disrupt an echo chamber: if X and Y say two very positive things about a widget, than Z is suddenly very disincentivized to say anything negative and everyone else is more inclined to join the echo chamber).
But I don't think that's whats being brought up with the article. Literary critics are more or less the 'first voters' on new books: and yet, the correlation between critical successes and commercial successes are tentative at best (while the first few votes on an article are always an indicator of future votes.)
This is mainly, I think, a function of accessibility: you see the rating of a link on HN before you even click on the link, while most (I'd say 90%+) of the people buying books do so unaware of what everyone before them thought about the book.
Comments
The obvious connection to HN is that people read and upvote the popular articles, so there's (probably) a lot more randomness in what makes it to the front page than people suspect. This matches my experience, where one of my blog posts will sink without a trace on HN, and then get reposted later and shoot to the top.
Perhaps a more apt comparison would be how certain blogs (37signals, marco.org, Svbtle, etc) rocket to the front page based off of their TLD alone. I don't think this is a particularly bad thing -- this is how branding works, after all -- but I would definitely be interested to see an experiment that throws everything on Readability and hides the URL to see if things change.
I suspect there's also a "cumulative advantage" effect on comments, with popular members getting way more upvotes. Some high-karma member could quantify this by posting half their comments from a new account and A/B testing.
I could be incorrect, but I recall reading that part of the ranking algorithm is based on the commenter's average karma.
As I remember it, there was a feature implemented where leaders (veteran accounts with high vote averages) do get something of a boost when they comment, at least within the sequencing of the comments in any one thread. I think this was done to help improve the quality of the conversation, even before the removal of the vote totals next to each comment.
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Definitely! This is especially a big issues with focus groups (I had to run a bunch for a few semesters for part of my marketing degree, and one of the first things you learn is how to disrupt an echo chamber: if X and Y say two very positive things about a widget, than Z is suddenly very disincentivized to say anything negative and everyone else is more inclined to join the echo chamber).
But I don't think that's whats being brought up with the article. Literary critics are more or less the 'first voters' on new books: and yet, the correlation between critical successes and commercial successes are tentative at best (while the first few votes on an article are always an indicator of future votes.)
This is mainly, I think, a function of accessibility: you see the rating of a link on HN before you even click on the link, while most (I'd say 90%+) of the people buying books do so unaware of what everyone before them thought about the book.