Auto submission bots on Hacker News
jacquesmattheij.com
Auto submission bots on Hacker News
1–10 of 172 posts
Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News
#2Karma harvesting bots. I thought of it a while back and I was sure it already existed.
Thanks for proving it! I do like the term of "harvesting karma".
In reel life, that would be a good deed automatically actioned based on a set of inputs? Such as grabbing the mail of the neighbour on the way in?
Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News
#3Jacques, perhaps you could configure your blog so you can choose to submit your own posts automatically to HN when you post them? That might reduce the tendency of people to try to rush and post them first, assuming the majority of posts are actually suitable for posting here.
I don't think you should worry too much about it either. Your posts seem to keep gathering a high number of votes whenever they appear on HN, so this is a sign that they are useful and relevant to the community. If an irrelevant link gets posted and it only gathers a few votes on the new page, then what have you lost? What has the community lost?
Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News
#4Jacques, perhaps you could configure your blog so you can choose to submit your own posts automatically to HN when you post them? That might reduce the tendency of people to try to rush and post them first, assuming the majority of posts are actually suitable for posting here. I don't think you should worry too much about it either. Your posts seem to keep gathering a high number of votes whenever they appear on HN,…
The problem is that if just 3 people auto-submit the post in the first minute, it's immediately at the top of the front page. Often, many people will reflexively upvote something by jacquesm, so the result is that a top slot on the front page is taken up for some time, perhaps by something that's not really worthy of discussion. This takes away attention from other, more worthy posts. There are only 30 slots on that front page.
This used to happen with 37signals too - I'm glad to see it stopped happening there. Time to stop autosubmitting jacquesm as well!
Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News
#5I had somebody recently launch into me with a vitriolic attack on HN (they deleted the comment almost immediately) which started with something like "I know you probably think you're special, what with 18K karma and all, but..."
People take this karma thing waaaay too seriously.
I know I find the site dangerously distracting, and a large part of that is watching the up or downvotes on my comments -- it's kind of a realtime indicator of whether I have my finger on the pulse of the community. So I'm as much to blame as others.
I've said a few times that somebody should monetize this karma nonsense. Set up an auction clearing house where karma can be auctioned off for cash.
It probably wouldn't amount to much, but it's just the kind of out-of-the-box thing that HN should be messing around with. I'm just trying to guess a number, but I think you could pull 5 percent off each trade and make a nice bit of chump change, without changing the look and feel of HN at all. (If it bothers purists or interferes with the running of the board, then simply keep a separate list of "natural" karma hidden from everybody and use that for the system stuff)
Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News
#6Maybe its about time HN had a CAPTCHA on their submit form.
Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News
#7Why does HN give karma points for submitting articles?
That's never made any sense to me. All it does is encourage this kind of behavior, where you submit everything you can find in the hopes of gaining points. You haven't really contributed anything valuable, since good articles tend to find their way here on their own.
Karma for comments makes sense. You can look at somebody's average and it gives you a sense of what sort of things they're posting. It actually measures something.
If somebody posts a cheap attack on one of your comments, you can click their username, notice that they have a 1.9 average, and go about your day knowing that they're probably just angry with the world in general. On the other hand if they have an average score of 8.6, you might want to read what they said again and see if they were actually right.
Karma from article submissions, on the other hand, tells you nothing useful about the submitter. Any chance we can disassociate upvotes on articles from user karma?
Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News
#8It might be interesting to hide total karma score from users. I guess that if we don't know our total karma score the karma harvesting will stop but keep the points for submissions and comments so there's still the incentive to contribute good material (the pride of seeing your comment/submission being upvoted).
What do you think?
edit: the first version didn't make much sense, I got interrupted in the middle of the message
Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News
#9The bots are doing nothing 'wrong' as such. There are certain feeds from where >90% of the material ends up on HN. If somebody writes a bot to auto-submit items from that feed, it's helping HN be faster in accessing new and (mostly) relevant posts. What is not relevant should (in principle) not reach the home page.
The problem is that submission is winner takes all, i.e. first submitter reaps all the upvotes. Also, HN does not reward finding new sources of material more than posting from the predictable sources.
The logical endpoint of these two facts is auto-submission bots rising to the top of the Karma tables. If Karma is used as a way of anti-gaming (need karma threshold to downvote, etc.) then this is a way to circumvent that for a sufficiently motivated manipulator. They can make a bot that auto-submits from the known sources, and use it to build up an arbitrary number of accounts, from which they can then boost the articles they want (or bury the comments they don't like). For all we know, this could already be the case.
I have two suggestions that can sidestep this problem to a certain extent:
1. Reward articles from predictable sources less than articles from rare sources.
2. Split the karma benefit between the first submitter and the people who upvoted the article early (of course, this needs to take into account how selectively and successfully the user upvotes to avoid blanket upvoting 'just in case').
This all is still gameable, but probably not as easily.
Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News
#10Jacques, perhaps you could configure your blog so you can choose to submit your own posts automatically to HN when you post them? That might reduce the tendency of people to try to rush and post them first, assuming the majority of posts are actually suitable for posting here. I don't think you should worry too much about it either. Your posts seem to keep gathering a high number of votes whenever they appear on HN,…
I understand your intentions but I don't think that's a good solution because it will still submit items to the 'news' page that are not always 'up to standards', giving them at least one upvote. That's roughly 25% of what's needed to get an item to the homepage, so only 3 more (bot)votes and it's done, once an article hits the homepage it is likely to stay there for a while. All this would do is add one more bot to the race and thus increase the problem.
Not having those items on the 'news' page would seem to be the best solution.
Really, people should at least read the articles they submit and judge them for content before submitting them to HN, especially when they're associated with the better known (ex)HN'ers.
Probably Sivers, Patio11, Tptacek or any one of the people that seem to be featured a lot here could write an article about 'Condé Nast acquiring HN' (in a desperate move to re-acquire Reddits' audience that has left for HN, thereby realizing the fears of all true Hackers, the proof that this would make 'HN more like Reddit' is left for the reader) (there goes my April 1 post ;)) and it would get upvoted without much consideration.
One possible (technical) solution would be to let the karma boost be dependent on the average of all posts from a domain, submit a 'below average' link and your karma will drop!