Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–258 of 258 posts

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#251

Post by [deleted] »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #232
kbenson wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering too. The only thing that comes immediately to mind is adjusting your pants in the crotch area, which, well, sometimes it's uncomfortable without there being any sort of excitement, and it's just a matter of comfort. Like pulling your underwear out of your but. If that's an example of what's being referred to, it's really, really unfortunate, because it's a matter of one party acting totally innocently (…

That's not what I was thinking, no, and it's a little weird that you immediately guessed it was something that you don't believe is an actual problem. Like, you didn't even wait for me to answer the question before deciding my answer was likely to be something bogus.

[deleted]

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#252

Post by deanCommie »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #224
amitdeshwar wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "men are psychologically torturing women just by enacting common male body movement patterns in the workplace" ?

This will probably be detached for being off-topic, but until then... Men and women move in very different ways due to gender policing. Things like how much you are allowed to/required to move your hips side to side are different for men and women. Sometimes in the workplace women are put in positions of less influence and less pay. They experience repeated instances of being passed over, thwarted, harassed, etc, whi…

I'm a man, and I'm a feminist. This isn't controversial, regardless of what large swaths of the internet thinks it is. I believe in equal pay, I believe that we should work into our compensation culture new ideas to make sure that women who are societally conditioned to ask for less don't end up making less just because their equally qualified coworkers are more aggressive. I believe that we have a rape culture in western society because to this day rape victims are questioned and second guessed, and to some of those same areas of the internet a man falsely accused of rape is considered a worse problem than actual rape. I also believe that "Social justice" is inherently an important problem, and it pisses me off that "social justice warrior" is a derisive insult.

I'm also an ally - I call out male coworkers who talk over or interrupt my female coworkers. And if a group of male coworkers get too "bro-y", even without women around, I'm the villain to say "yo dude, don't be sexist", and not back down from the "It's just a joke" defense. I'm a software engineer and I regularly introspect about how I can take active steps to make my environment more welcoming to women engineers.

I say all this to give you SOME of my beliefs before I say the next thing as un-insultingly as I possibly can.

The stuff you are talking about is a step too far, and it actively actively harms the cause of progressive feminism by making it seem frivolous, and immature. There is real harassment going on all around us, active/aggressive, and passive/insideous. But the way people WALK? Are you kidding me right now? I am an ally with my words and my actions. I will not change the way I walk because it signifies my maleness to a sensitive little wallflower who apparently feels powerless in front of 50% of the visible population?

I hate the "#notallmen" hashtag because it was reactionary and distracting from women who were at the time trying to speak real truth about their experiences. It misses just as much of the point as "All Lives matter".

But in the case of your example, a woman who is being harassed at work surely does not assume that all men in her workplace are against her by default, on account of their maleness. If she does, it has more to do with how they treat her, and not how they walk through the office.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#253

Post by rfrank »

Terr_ wrote: post #250
rfrank wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So every sub is vote manipulating by nature of being a group that votes together on specific posts? I see. Don't break the site from the sidebar would have been a better option.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his internet-ego depends on his not understanding it." If you refuse to see the distinction between vote-manipulation and organic vote behavior, then I think we're done here.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his internet-ego depends on his not understanding it."

If you refuse to see that I simply disagree with the fact their stickying constitutes vote-manipulation, and assume I'm arguing in bad faith because I don't hold the same viewpoint as you, then I think we're done here.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#254

Post by talmand »

eli wrote: post #243
talmand wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would one PGP sign their post that prevent malicious editing after the fact?

If someone else edited your post, the signature would no longer be valid. So the attacker could remove the signature or sign it with a different key or leave it alone and hope no one notices, but they couldn't re-sign with your key since they wouldn't have access to your private key file. Public key cryptography is really neat if you haven't played around with it before. I was being half-facetious, but if you want to…

I still don't understand. If the edit left the public key as I left it, how would anyone know the difference?

Are you meaning a feature of the site that let's you sign your post with your key as opposed to pasting your public key in the post?

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#255

Post by eli »

talmand wrote: post #254
eli wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone else edited your post, the signature would no longer be valid. So the attacker could remove the signature or sign it with a different key or leave it alone and hope no one notices, but they couldn't re-sign with your key since they wouldn't have access to your private key file. Public key cryptography is really neat if you haven't played around with it before. I was being half-facetious, but if you want to…

I still don't understand. If the edit left the public key as I left it, how would anyone know the difference? Are you meaning a feature of the site that let's you sign your post with your key as opposed to pasting your public key in the post?

You don't just post your public key next to your comment, you use your private key to create a cryptographic signature of the contents of your post. Anyone with your public key can check that the signature is valid. Altering the text will cause that signature check to fail.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#256

Post by Nadya »

eli wrote: post #255
talmand wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't understand. If the edit left the public key as I left it, how would anyone know the difference? Are you meaning a feature of the site that let's you sign your post with your key as opposed to pasting your public key in the post?

You don't just post your public key next to your comment, you use your private key to create a cryptographic signature of the contents of your post. Anyone with your public key can check that the signature is valid. Altering the text will cause that signature check to fail.

The issue here is that almost nobody actually checks the signature. Some people edit their messages to invalidate them just to see if they'll get called out on it - they almost never are.

So in theory, yes. But in practice - people are too lazy to validate or check the key (if the attacker replaces it with their own signed message) for every single post. This is a bigger issue the more users you have signing messages - as users begin getting lazier with checking each and every signed message.

Unless they are under a lot of eyeballs from people who do care. If Wikileaks "signs" a message and it doesn't verify or wasn't with their key - a lot of people will call it out. If I "sign" a message or use a different private key (very possible that I sign with the wrong key when I have multiples) - I doubt anyone would call me out on it.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#257

Post by mzw_mzw »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #224
amitdeshwar wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "men are psychologically torturing women just by enacting common male body movement patterns in the workplace" ?

This will probably be detached for being off-topic, but until then... Men and women move in very different ways due to gender policing. Things like how much you are allowed to/required to move your hips side to side are different for men and women. Sometimes in the workplace women are put in positions of less influence and less pay. They experience repeated instances of being passed over, thwarted, harassed, etc, whi…

Somebody so unstable they get "triggered" by how ordinary human beings walk needs professional help. At some point, you have to acknowledge that certain complaints are not reasonable.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#258

Post by mullingitover »

jonlucc wrote: post #159
mullingitover wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the users Spez trolled with his edits decided to leave reddit forever, it would only make reddit a better place.

I agree, but there are other users who might not trust that their comments won't be invisibly altered. The specific incident is not very troubling, but the fact that it occurred at all is.

1. The altered comments were of zero value to the community 2. I've been on reddit for over ten years, and I have zero concern that reddit admins are altering r/askhistorians or other non-dumpster fire subs.
Post reply on HN