minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

This repository is a community-maintained reference document that fills the gaps in Hacker News's official documentation. Hacker News is a link-sharing and discussion forum run by Y Combinator, the startup accelerator. Its official guidelines and FAQ cover the basics, but many features and site behaviors have never been publicly explained. This list collects those hidden norms in one place. The undocumented features range from voting mechanics to moderation tools. For example, the ability to downvote comments is only unlocked after a user reaches 501 karma points. Flagging submissions is available at 31 karma. Customizing the color of the site's top navigation bar requires 251 karma. There is also a flame-war detector that automatically reduces the visibility of comments in heated threads, a second-chance pool that gives overlooked submissions another shot at the front page, and a shadowbanning system that makes a user's posts invisible to others without notifying that user. The document also covers implicit site behaviors that are not written rules but are enforced in practice. Posts about politics, diversity and inclusion topics, and submissions without URLs are all quietly downranked by the site's ranking algorithm. Tutorials tend to perform worse than other content types. There are also notes on how the site handles paywalled articles and perceived favoritism toward Y Combinator portfolio companies. A bonus section covers public features that are easy to miss. These include an older visual style called Hacker News Classic, a wayback view for browsing historical front pages, a public BigQuery dataset of all submissions and comments, official RSS feeds, and a way to filter the front page to only show posts above a certain score threshold. The repository has no official affiliation with Hacker News or Y Combinator. It is maintained through GitHub issues and pull requests, with contributions from the community when information turns out to be wrong or incomplete.