Auto submission bots on Hacker News • Hacker News Board

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#11

Post by mryall » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 10:18 AM UTC

swombat wrote: post #4

mryall wrote: post #3

Jacques, 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…

Ah yes, I had forgotten that resubmission counts as additional votes. I agree - it's not an ideal situation if posts get on the home page purely from automated submissions.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#12

Post by digitaltothem » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 10:18 AM UTC

ricefield wrote: post #6

Maybe its about time HN had a CAPTCHA on their submit form.

CAPTCHA sounds like a reasonable solution.

Submitting content for sake of karma is spamming, no matter who wrote the content. Why not share with others something you think they will find useful or noteworthy? People tend to ask themselves first WIIFM and if they find the benefit, they share. Let us remember that sharing is about others.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#13

Post by guelo » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 10:19 AM UTC

Didn't pg admit that he uses karma as a criteria in evaluating yc applications? If so that was just an invitation to a bunch of smart hackers to try to game the system.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#14

Post by martey » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 10:20 AM UTC

ricefield wrote: post #6

Maybe its about time HN had a CAPTCHA on their submit form.

Users do have to be logged in to submit articles, so action could be taken against people (or bots) that submitted too many articles that were made dead or did not receive a large number of points.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#15

Post by mryall » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 10:20 AM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #7

Why 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 wh…

Surfacing good links is part of the attraction of HN. Taking away the karma benefit for link sharing would lessen the incentive to share articles that don't actually need any discussion.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#16

Post by biot » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 10:21 AM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #7

Why 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 wh…

  > Any chance we can disassociate upvotes on articles from user karma?

Or consider making it logarithmic. Something like pi * log(x) is geeky and would reward a good submission without going overboard.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#17

Post by barrkel » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 10:23 AM UTC

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #5

I 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 re…

The karma matters precisely because it can't be bought (not in any ordinary way, at least). It represents peer acclaim (or conformity to groupthink). If it was bought and sold, the basis for its value would evaporate.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#18

Post by ricefield » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 10:25 AM UTC

martey wrote: post #14

ricefield wrote: post #6

Maybe its about time HN had a CAPTCHA on their submit form.

Users do have to be logged in to submit articles, so action could be taken against people (or bots) that submitted too many articles that were made dead or did not receive a large number of points.

This is true, but its also true that a lot of times these bots will get to these articles first, and then because they come from a well-known or respected domain, they just get tons of upvotes anyways.

There's two separate problems: too much dead content, which imo, is ok, because the good stuff will usually rise to the top - you need some junk to find the gems; and bots automatically picking up and submitting content - no human discernment as to whether the link is actually HN-worthy. I think the mindlessness is more the issue being addressed here

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#19

Post by gregschlom » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 10:26 AM UTC

guelo wrote: post #13

Didn't pg admit that he uses karma as a criteria in evaluating yc applications? If so that was just an invitation to a bunch of smart hackers to try to game the system.

No, he said that karma as nothing to do with YC application, but that if he sees an application from a user that he knows from HN to be a smart guy, he will look at it more specifically.

In other words, interesting, on-topic, and frequent comments are important, not your absolute karma number, even though of course you're likely to have a high karma if you're a frequent poster of good comments.

That's also why the average is more important than the absolute karma.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#20

Post by roel_v » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 10:27 AM UTC

edu wrote: post #8

It 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…

This is a lesson that was learned on Slashdot in 1999 already I think. A 'karma cap' makes perfect sense and the total karma wouldn't even have to be displayed to the user himself, to avoid karma whoring. What does it matter if someone has 1500 or 15000 karma? They've both proven to be contribute; maybe the one with the higher score just has more time, or a more popular opinion, or has been here longer.

In the same vain, it's not easy enough to lose karma. By being active here, you will in the end always have good karma, even if your contributions are bad; it's very rare to see comments with lower than -5 karma, but it's easy to get a +10 comment, even if it's nothing special (I mean I know I've had a lot of those...)