111–117 of 117 posts
We can test your theory here if you like. Upvote this comment and I'll tell you if it counted. If you leave a comment I'll upvote it so you can see if you get upvotes. I'd be surprised if either of these didn't just work.
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…
I get why systems like that exists, I just dont understand how I got caught in that flag. If we are sitting in a coworking space and all come from the IP, does that flag us as a ring?
Quite probably. If you know a good way to distinguish between such a circumstance and a deliberate voting ring then let the site designers know!
I'd just avoid voting on your collegues/friends' stuff. HN is so highly trafficed that if it was going to get near the front page it would anyway without those few extra votes and if it wasn't it wouldn't anyway even with those few extra votes.
EDIT: Actually, cancel that last bit. I see some of the items on the front page currently don't seem to have many points so a few friends voting could make a difference. Though I'd still refrain as most major sites that include user voting will have this sort of voting ring detection so you will get nobbled at some point.
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…
I actually did a semi-controlled experiment a while back and submitted a series of blog posts I was writing, all on the same topic. There were seven of them all together. On four of them, I asked a small number (a single digit) of people to upvote the story. For the other three, I didn't. All four of the gamed stories ended up near the top of the home page. The other three didn't get a single upvote. If you do the math you will find that this is a statistically significant result. (And I have since submitted many other stories. Not a single one has gotten more than one upvote.)
The trick is to get enough upvotes early enough to get onto the home page. It doesn't take much, it just has to be fast. Once you're on the home page, people actually pay attention and you get a lot of organic traffic. But your odds of getting off the new page at all unless you game the system are extremely small.
Some changes that would help the situation:
1. Provide some incentive for people to read the new page. I'm not sure what this incentive would be, but the fact that very few people read the new page is the nub of the problem.
2. Incorporate the submitter's karma into the ranking of the new page to allow stories submitted by high-karma users to stay there longer. Depending on the time of day, a story typically has between 30 minutes and an hour before it drops off the new page, after which it will surely never be noticed.
3. Don't start the timer on a story when it is submitted. Instead, start it only after some time has elapsed (at least a few hours) or it gets its first upvote.
4. Make it cost something (like a karma point) to submit a story. Throttle the cost so that submitting a large number of stories in a short period of time costs more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I lost my flagging ability long ago. I habitually flagged political stories that others upvoted. Apparently going against the crowd flagged me for flagging. Heh. Not the way I'd design it to work, but then it's not my site.
Yeah I've wondered about that. I've flagged some BS political stories too and wondered if I was endangering my flagging privileges by disagreeing. I don't really care, but interesting to know.
I'm not sure that flagging is meant for shooting down topic matter you'd rather not see on HN. And that's why the ability is removed from those who overuse it. Flagging is for blatant spam or personal attacks or other abuses, it's not a content-selection mechanism. Upvotes select content.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I've wondered about that. I've flagged some BS political stories too and wondered if I was endangering my flagging privileges by disagreeing. I don't really care, but interesting to know.
Me too. Fun fact: if you downvote too many people, your downvote button is invisibly disabled for a short time.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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