Hacker News Undocumented Features
Hacker News, owned by Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator, is a link aggregator where users can submit tech-related posts. it's not as simple as it looks, with numerous hidden features and rules deciding if and how your post will be shown. There's a moderator named Dan who also could impact your post's visibility. Getting upvoted earns you 'karma,' with a single karma point for every upvote, while having over 501 allows you to downvote other posts.
If you have 31 karma, you can flag, or 'super downvote,' a post. But gaining 251 karma can let you change your profile color. There's also an anti-voting system to prevent upvote requests, which might lead to a shadow ban on your domain or user account.
Hacker News puts time limits for editing and deleting posts and comments, and there are measures in place that may downrank specific posts tied to politics, diversity or paywall links. Favoritism is also shown towards posts connected with Y Combinator companies. Adding to this, Hacker News has additional features such as the 'Classic' mode for the original ranking system and a 'Way Back' mode to surf old posts.
The site also offers public access to its dataset for machine learning analysis and provides options for customizing your news feed with specific sections and ranking modes.
