Ask HN: Why dont my upvotes work?

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Remember that Paul Graham was a key leader in the early days of spam fighting using Bayesian filtering etc.

http://paulgraham.com/better.html

Spammers aggressively try to game email. Likewise, promoters aggressively try to game HN.

How do promoters try to game HN?

Voting Rings

If you're not familiar with that term, a voting ring is basically a group of people (or robot accounts) that collude to upvote certain stories.

It shouldn't be surprising that Paul Graham would take a similar approach to Voting Rings as he did to Spam.

In one of your comments, you said: "I know it doesnt work because I click upvote and it doesnt assign any points while a friend sitting right next to me could do the same thing and assign points."

If you and another account always seem to upvote the same stories, yet no one else seems to upvote them at the same rate, then it starts to look like a voting ring.

Just like with spam, there will be false positives. I've heard of this happening to folks who have an audience that are also largely HN users. When they send out a new post, then many of that audience upvotes the post, but since it's often the same people, the voting-ring protections get triggered and the post will quickly drop off the front-page.

There are probably many signals that pg uses to detect voting rings. I'm sure they're not perfect, but I'm glad they're there. Otherwise HN would be overrun by aggressive promoters and HN would quickly lose its usefulness.

Advice to promoters: 1) create valuable content that helps users be awesome (no one cares how awesome your brand is), 2) submit it to HN, and 3) don't ask your audience to upvote it

Many promoters just can't help themselves and will do #3 anyways. Just be forewarned that you will likely trigger the voting-ring protections and will be shooting yourself in the foot.

For help with #1, see http://shelby.tv/video/vimeo/54469442/kathy-sierra-building-...

Asked my gf to post two stories that she sent to me, because I found them interesting. When she did, I naturally upvoted them... from the same IP. Now I seem to have lost my voting privileges.

My upvotes also don't "count" anymore best as I can tell. I assumed it was either because A. I upvoted too much stuff and overflowed a counter somewhere, or B. accidentally getting flagged for spamming for upvoting too much.

The thing is, since HN doesn't have a separate "save" feature, upvoting something is the only way to "save" a link for later. And I'm an obsessive bookmarker, so I upvote anything that looks even vaguely interesting, if I don't have time to read it right now. shrug

It might be that the Karma system here depends on the validation of the user by the community. HN might keep a score of how many upvotes other users have given you and not allow your upvotes to count until you hit a certain threshold. Account age might be taken into account to limit new ones from upvoting each other for to grant privileges.