Ask News.YC: Proposed experiment to test "The PG bias"

It has been frequently commented by people outside the news.yc community that news.yc is too pandering to PG. To test this, I propose the following experiment which requires PG's co-operation. I propose that PG also post comments / submissions etc under some other username and then compare the average upmods for posts under the "pg" username vs the random anonymous username. This can be started at an unspecified time in the future and run for lets say 1 month. Only PG will know what username he is using other than pg.

I also propose the same for nickb and other prominent users. It may turn out that people upmod stuff from more recognizable names when they might have left it at neutral if some other user had submitted the same content.

Well actually it may already be the case that they are posting under multiple names.

Might be an interesting social experiment.

edit : Or is it already underway? nickb is pg :P?

"Might be an interesting social experiment."

It's not an interesting experiment unless you learn something from it. There's virtually nothing that can be learned from this.

Plus, I like being able to follow the comments of pg and others on their threads page.

I admit I am guilty of this. Often I realize it after I clicked vote up, but alas, by then it is too late.

Submissions could be made anonymous for a few hours. I think you would get more interesting items on the front page.

Just because people upmod more recognizable names, it doesn't mean they are pandering.

For example, I will be more likely to read a comment if it was written by any user that I recognize. If I'm more likely to read a comment I'm more likely to upvote it as well.