Forgive my ignorance, but isn't this what Google Analytics is for?
Google Analytics is for giving Google the ability to track your users.
View Counting at Reddit
31–40 of 121 posts
Re: View Counting at Reddit
#32Forgive my ignorance, but isn't this what Google Analytics is for?
That would not help to prevent illegitimate views like those generated by spambots.
Re: View Counting at Reddit
#33Wouldn't it had been easier to simply increment a counter for each visit and then set a short lived cookie in the browser for that post? And put the spam detection system before the counter increment
How do you concurrently update a counter?
Re: View Counting at Reddit
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still don't understand what purpose this feature has - can you explain more?
You could have you bot upvote, then remove its vote, and monitor from another browser whether the score changes. Having the number be fuzzed makes it harder to confirm if your bot has been caught and it's votes discarded.
Funnily, reddits vote fuzzing is entirely useless.
They always fuzz equally relative to the actual score.
So, instead of monitoring once from another browser, you monitor from 100 browsers, and calculate the average before and after your bot votes.
Re: View Counting at Reddit
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Traditional forum style sorting just sorts for controversiality. Posts that generate heated discussion will continue to push their way to the top. This is okay but it means that non controversial stories will not make it to the top, which is honestly one of the largest benefits of news aggregator sites.
How about, here and on reddit, being able to mark threads you're interested in, and having a page where you can see those sorted by last reply. On HN, make that page refresh every 15 or 60 minutes or whatever. Heck, once every 24 hours would be enough... sometimes I just want to talk about the things that interest me, with the people that are interested in them. I would love to be able to think on something for a few…
Actually, reddit has that. You can save threads or comments, and sort by latest.
Re: View Counting at Reddit
#36Wouldn't it had been easier to simply increment a counter for each visit and then set a short lived cookie in the browser for that post? And put the spam detection system before the counter increment
How do you concurrently update a counter?
Redis writes are atomic - you just use the increment function
Re: View Counting at Reddit
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could have you bot upvote, then remove its vote, and monitor from another browser whether the score changes. Having the number be fuzzed makes it harder to confirm if your bot has been caught and it's votes discarded.
Funnily, reddits vote fuzzing is entirely useless. They always fuzz equally relative to the actual score. So, instead of monitoring once from another browser, you monitor from 100 browsers, and calculate the average before and after your bot votes.
Ok but multiplying a spammer's cost by 100 (or 3) isn't useless.
Re: View Counting at Reddit
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
A votebot suspects that it is being detected and filtered out of the final scores. Because the scores fluctuate, it is harder to determine if your vote had an impact.
But that doesn't "prevent spambots etc.", that merely prevents people from easily and instantly figuring out whether their bots are detected yet. It doesn't stop them from spamming votes, or from making their bots more elaborate regardless of whether they have been detected yet. I don't know all the motivations for spam bots or how people who make them tick, but I'd figure for a significant number the crucial bit is…
The point isn't to prevent them which is near on impossible but to get them to waste enough resources on non-visible actions regularly enough that it isn't economically viable to continue trying to spam the site.
Re: View Counting at Reddit
#39Wouldn't it had been easier to simply increment a counter for each visit and then set a short lived cookie in the browser for that post? And put the spam detection system before the counter increment
How do you concurrently update a counter?
I think the main problem is not concurrently updating the counter. After all updating the HLL must also be done concurrently.
The primary motivation on their part for using HLL is given in the intro.
>In order to maintain an exact count in real time we would need to know whether or not a specific user visited the post before. To know that information, we would need to store the set of users who had previously visited each post, and then check that set every time we processed a new view on a post. A naive implementation of this solution would be to store the unique user set as a hash table in memory, with the post ID as the key.
>This approach works well for less trafficked posts, but is very difficult to scale once a post becomes popular and the number of viewers rapidly increases. Several popular posts have over one million unique viewers! On posts like these, it becomes extremely taxing on both memory and CPU to store all the IDs and do frequent lookups into the set to see if someone has already visited before.
Re: View Counting at Reddit
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could have you bot upvote, then remove its vote, and monitor from another browser whether the score changes. Having the number be fuzzed makes it harder to confirm if your bot has been caught and it's votes discarded.
Funnily, reddits vote fuzzing is entirely useless. They always fuzz equally relative to the actual score. So, instead of monitoring once from another browser, you monitor from 100 browsers, and calculate the average before and after your bot votes.
Spamming is always cost vs. cost.
Fuzzing the votes like this is cheap for reddit, but makes it more expensive for the spammer.
The best spam-filter is tricked by a hand-crafted, personalized email that is well-targeted. However, the cost of these are insane compared to mailing the same thing to hundrets or thousands of users. So anything any spam-filter ever does is making spamming less lucrative for the spammer, and fuzzing does that.