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

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

#11

Post by JacobAldridge » Thu, Apr 17, 2008, 2:33 AM UTC

amichail wrote: post #7

JacobAldridge wrote: post #6

Does anonymity defeat the purpose of social bookmarking (and social networking in general)? I agree that it would be an interesting social experiment, though I'm not concerned if people are pandering to pg, nickb, or anyone else.

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

I agree - look past who posted something and judge it on merit.

If the pandering is a problem, you'll still get some of the same sites being voted up (paulgraham.com, techcrunch etc), but some other more interesting ones might break through.

Still, I would hope most of us look past those things anyway.

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

#12

Post by dangoldin » Thu, Apr 17, 2008, 2:38 AM UTC

An idea I just thought of would be to keep the poster anonymous until the post achieves a certain rating - after that show who the poster is.

If there actually is favoritism this might solve that issue somewhat and yet give people credit where it's due.

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

#13

Post by randomhack » Thu, Apr 17, 2008, 2:42 AM UTC

byrneseyeview wrote: post #2

It would be a good idea to quickly delete this and email pg directly about it, so few people are aware of the experiment.

aah .. too late for it now i guess. should have read your comment earlier.

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

#14

Post by icey » Thu, Apr 17, 2008, 2:44 AM UTC

Find a psychologist, or even a psychology major with enough classes under their belt, and they can tell you that there is most certainly a bias towards upvoting those with a familiar name.

I don't recall the name of the principle, but doing some googling around about Robert Cialdini's work should get you all the information you need.

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

#15

Post by attack » Thu, Apr 17, 2008, 2:49 AM UTC

It could be made so that a nickname is automatically selected per-page. This way threads he comments in could be followed. A small pool of 5 or so names could be reused so that he couldn't be exposed by finding the user that has just been created.

Example implementation:

     unames=['bob1','bob2','pg']
     lu=len(unames)
     secret_seed=309580435

     from binascii import crc32
     def hash_eq(number):
         return crc32(str(number),secret_seed)

     def get_uname(page_id):
         return unames[hash_eq(page_id)%lu]

A checkbox for manual override could also be added.

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

#16

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 17, 2008, 2:55 AM UTC

dangoldin wrote: post #12

An idea I just thought of would be to keep the poster anonymous until the post achieves a certain rating - after that show who the poster is. If there actually is favoritism this might solve that issue somewhat and yet give people credit where it's due.

[deleted]

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

#17

Post by rms » Thu, Apr 17, 2008, 2:55 AM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #3

"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.

Agreed -- there probably is something of a pg bias, but it's impossible to measure because his comments and submissions are better than the average anyways.

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

#18

Post by kirubakaran » Thu, Apr 17, 2008, 3:00 AM UTC

When browsing through http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg I notice that his comments won't make sense without knowing that it is pg who is making them.

Most are clarifications as Hacker News Maintainer and Furry Investor. (or Furry Capitalist?)

Knee jerk vote-ups I am guilty of are for: edw519, mixmax, rms, pg and nostrademons. But I'm very sure I'd have voted those comments up even if I didn't know the commenter's id. ID gives more context... it is like I hear it in a particular voice.

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

#19

Post by brett » Thu, Apr 17, 2008, 3:07 AM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #3

"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.

Being able to follow pg on his threads page is part of the bias too. He gets more votes because his comments get read by more people.

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

#20

Post by mechanical_fish » Thu, Apr 17, 2008, 3:10 AM UTC

I would hope that, if PG and I wrote exactly the same words about (e.g.) Lisp, his post would be upmodded an order of magnitude higher than mine. PG knows what he's talking about as a Lisp programmer, and we all know that. (The published books, the reputation, the history with Yahoo Store, and the existence of this site are big, big clues.) I don't know much about Lisp beyond SICP, and if I claimed I did you would have no way of knowing whether or not I'm telling the truth.

Context, in the form of background information about the author, makes a post more valuable. That's a no-brainer.