by jmyeet | 2025-06-04 12:44:42+00:00
The problem with analyzing HN comment and submission voting is we don't (AFAIK) have access to downvotes and that changes everything. We used to know the net votes for comments but that was removed years ago. Only submissions have net votes.

But what you find is that position matters, both for submissions and comments. There's a world of difference between being on the front page or not and being on the first page of cvomments (nad the higher on that page the better) for getting eyeballs (because people only scroll so far) and thus votes.

I mention this because both submissions and comments are heavily curated. It's more obvious with submissions where one post can stick around for 12 hours with 30 net votes on the front page while another will disappear within 15 minutes with 200+. Part of this is known. For example, the moderation team tends to dislike "political" submissions. I put that in quotes because what is and isn't "political" can be open to interpretation. Often on the Internet in general something is "political" if you don't agree with it and it's not if you are. You might even hear descriptions like "common sense" about the latter.

Comments are heavily curated too. Some of this is just rotating the top comments for freshness. Some of it is some sort of commenter rating where their comments will tend to be ranked high or low when fresh. And some of it is simply downranking certain comments.

On Reddit this would all be both more transparent and easier to visualize and analyze because we could sort by different critera, we could see total votes and we could see up/down vote breakdowns.

To be clear, no shade to the moderation team here. Just observing what happens.

One side note: I believe Shipwrecked isn't you but as a general observation to anyone, it reverses the mousewheel direction. Don't mess with scrolling.

Good work here. Just a few comments about your graph:

1. This may be personal preference but I would find the chart more reasonable if there was a horizonal line for where the cursor is. The way you have it, it feels a bit "disconnected" but maybe that's just me. I'm thinking of, say, how Google Finance does their charts;

2. You can probably compact the header into a single row/line;

3. I'm visually impaired and would like more contrast in the colours used accessibility-wise;

4. You have the submitter's name. That could be a link to their profilee;

5. This may just be preference but the tooltip feels "off" to me. This may be related to the above point about not having a line for the cursor maybe? But also the dark background doesn't seem to fit. Maybe it's the color too. I could just be nit-picking here;

6. Show number of comments maybe?

And the dashboard:

1. The cards themselves have a lot of wasted space. Again, you could link to the profile in them;

2. If you're scrolled down the page, when you click on a card you don't see the graph;

3. There's no hover over effects on the dashboard graphs. There easily could be I suspect;

4. I'm not sure a graph for raw score makes sense. It can only go up. Maybe show how many upvotes gained in that period?

5. The legend has different styling on the dashboard graph for some reason;

6. If you scroll down, click a card then scroll up you see the graph but you can't see what submission it belongs to. Maybe put some indicator on the graph or rethink how the layout works in general so you can see both the graph and selected card at the same time regardles of scrolling.

Anyway, good work.