(Sometimes I forget that so many people joined this site so recently that this kind of knowledge is new so I apologize if I come off as snarky. I'm still very curious why this site suddenly hit popularity in the last few years but I suppose peering into the void of eternal september will yield nothing fruitful.)
HN doesn't have a concept of engagement really. It has a controversy downranking algorithm which downranks a story if it has a low vote:comment ratio, but this is what happens on Reddit as well (you can sort by Controversial on old Reddit to surface those threads.) There's no such downweighing to comments which is why the comments that float to the top are inevitably the ones that hit the site's common in-group ("circlejerk") opinion.
The downranking helps the front page to not be overwhelmed by flamebait but that's it really. As HN has gotten more popular, more and more of it gets dominated by its in-group opinion, and most of those opinions are all negative ones. Social networks are bad, crypto is bad, finance is evil, big tech is bad, enshittification, etc. It's almost impossible to have any conversation on those topics as you'll just get downvoted if you disagree and if you agree, even if your agreement is incoherent, you'll get upvotes.
The rest of the site's "algorithm" is usually through hand moderation by the professional mod team (dang, tomhow, et al, who get paid to moderate aka they are professionals) and that's a pretty big distinction from most of the other big social media sites which mostly rely on automated systems or volunteers.
So I mean "it's imperfect" is a stretch. HN is often just as bad as most of the other sites, if not worse. If you're going to advocate for banning social media if you end up using any rigorous definition of an "algorithm" HN will end up banned as well. In my experience though the people that want to ban other social media seem to resonate with HN and so they think that it's "better" along some axis that's not measurable. To me that smells of in-group bias.
HN doesn't have a concept of engagement really. It has a controversy downranking algorithm which downranks a story if it has a low vote:comment ratio, but this is what happens on Reddit as well (you can sort by Controversial on old Reddit to surface those threads.) There's no such downweighing to comments which is why the comments that float to the top are inevitably the ones that hit the site's common in-group ("circlejerk") opinion.
The downranking helps the front page to not be overwhelmed by flamebait but that's it really. As HN has gotten more popular, more and more of it gets dominated by its in-group opinion, and most of those opinions are all negative ones. Social networks are bad, crypto is bad, finance is evil, big tech is bad, enshittification, etc. It's almost impossible to have any conversation on those topics as you'll just get downvoted if you disagree and if you agree, even if your agreement is incoherent, you'll get upvotes.
The rest of the site's "algorithm" is usually through hand moderation by the professional mod team (dang, tomhow, et al, who get paid to moderate aka they are professionals) and that's a pretty big distinction from most of the other big social media sites which mostly rely on automated systems or volunteers.
So I mean "it's imperfect" is a stretch. HN is often just as bad as most of the other sites, if not worse. If you're going to advocate for banning social media if you end up using any rigorous definition of an "algorithm" HN will end up banned as well. In my experience though the people that want to ban other social media seem to resonate with HN and so they think that it's "better" along some axis that's not measurable. To me that smells of in-group bias.