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Even if you implement this experiment, I bet there will still be an inherent bias for PG-related material, most notably his essays. I really don't have a problem with it... that's what this community is all about. Hacker News is PGs world, and if you don't like it, then go somewhere else.
I don't think this is true. I certainly don't want it to be true.
Here are the users with the top median comment scores: ("pg" 4) ("theoneill" 3) ("mechanical_fish" 3) ("garbowza" 3) ("kkim" 3) ("paul" 3) ("cperciva" 3) If there is a difference, it's not huge.
Having said that, a community attracts people like the people it already contains. The more it grows, the greater variety of interests it contains, and therefore the greater number of people with certain, but now differing, interests it attracts.
If you think of it like ripples on a pond, if I'm way out on one edge, I'd likely be vastly different to a user on another edge, though we'd both find some common ground toward the centre. The closer you are to the centre the more you have in common to a greater number of people.
PG is the centre of the pond, so you would expect more people to be more 'like' him, which would lead to more votes. Not bias. Just community.
If PG knows before hand what name his content is going to show up under there is a high likelihood of a bias on his part which he would be _unable_ to ignore even if he consciously tried. This is standard psych experiment stuff.
"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.
If the quality is the same but the points are different (between his real acct and anon acct), then you've found a bias.
"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.
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But voting like this is screwing up the entire merit system we have here and enforcing group-think. It's like movie stars getting elected to political office just because they are more recognizable...
No, it's like movie stars being paid more based on past performance. People go with brand names and things they recognize whether it's clothes, fast food, detergent or people. Always have and always will.
The heuristic is something we evolved through evolution to help us make choices quickly and survive better. For example we know to just trust whatever the group leader says when there is danger rather than having an open debate every time he speaks because that could get us killed.
In the case of HN, does it matter if we have to fully evaluate the content every time before we vote (w/o knowing who wrote it)? I don't know. I think there are probably cases on HN where that heuristic is still to our benefit. I don't think theres black or white here, the costs on both sides just need to be weighed...
Also I think everyone should realize there is a small parallel with the ad hominem attck which is DH1 from PG's post about how to disagree with people (http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html). In this case it's exactly the opposite, vote up because of who it is instead of based on the merit, as opposed to vote down (or attack) based on who it is as instead of based on merit.
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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.
How is it impossible to measure? It has nothing to do with how his content quality ranks compared to other people. Since he is writing both the content under his name and the content under a different name, given that he doesn't know which one he's writing under until after he writes it, the quality should be at the same level (on average). If the quality is the same but the points are different (between his real acc…
Persistent identity is an important building block in community formation. Clay Shirky goes into some detail on this in "A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html "If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in. [...] It's pretty widely…
But the other is that, people who are followed will naturally get more votes, just because they get more views. Is that a bad thing? I dunno. But what if it got to a point where there were enough different people being followed that the only way onto the first page is by being one of them. That kindof sounds like a problem too.
Persistent identity is an important building block in community formation. Clay Shirky goes into some detail on this in "A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html "If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in. [...] It's pretty widely…
I think you raise an interesting point. There are actually TWO problems here. One is that there is possibly a bias based on the content submitter/creator. But the other is that, people who are followed will naturally get more votes, just because they get more views. Is that a bad thing? I dunno. But what if it got to a point where there were enough different people being followed that the only way onto the first page…
My (similarly limited) understanding of the HN ranking system is that it's more a factor of time and votes - ie, the question of who contributed is not relevant to the ranking system, only to all of us users who decide which articles to read and vote on, which brings us back to the original question.
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Yeah, lets forget careful thinking and just support whoever had a good record previously regardless of what they say today.
The experience of reading a comment knowing the commenter's id makes up (a little bit at least) for the lack of face2face. For example, based on a previous discussion, I know that mixmax had sex with a porn star :) When I read his comments now, my brain does some signal processing magic using this. Please note that I don't give him a +1 coz of this history. But this knowledge puts warmth in an otherwise cold place (c…