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Auto submission bots on Hacker News

jacquesmattheij.com

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Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#91

Post by kmfrk »

barrkel wrote: post #17
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.

You can easily get karma, if you know how to game HN and the users.

If you post anything in a thread with a clear bias towards something, you can just post something in the same vein, and, depending on the popularity, people will upvote the hell out of you.

Another is to just post something in a very popular thread, and you're bound to receive a lot of upvotes. Even people who would normally have been downvoted through the floor would wind up with a lot of karma. (EDIT: The same applies to popular comments: that's why you see so many people responding to it, because they'll earn some extra karma by piggy-backing on the specific comment.)

I think people take karma way too seriously. There isn't any perfect solution except to change your mind set about what the karma is and does. Compared to reddit, HN is much more rewarding, because there aren't idiots who keep downvoting you for no reason other than latent misery and hatred towards mankind, or whatever may possess them. Downvoting sends very bad signals and stifles the incentive to participate in the community a lot, so the comment would need to be very inappropriate to warrant a negative karma score.

The only suggestion I'd like to make is to make per-thread karma inversely proportional to the popularity of the number of thread upvotes, so the comment karma (quality) isn't a function of the number of views in the thread. (Perhaps the same with child comments versus parent comments.)

If pg can do this retroactively, I think we'll already see some interesting changes for the better - albeit no end-all solution.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#92

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Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#93

Post by bmelton »

silverskein wrote: post #86
bmelton wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amen? Perhaps you could implement a cost-refund system where it costs x karma to submit an article. If that article receives x number of upvotes, then you get them all back -- otherwise, they're gone. For each subsequent article following a situation in which you did not get refunded, the cost doubles. So, the scenario would be like this: - new users can submit articles after they've attained 5 karma points, which ar…

The problem is that increasing costs for unpopular content doesn't necessarily mean that your content was bad, just that people weren't paying attention to it. If you're ahead of a tech curve, that doesn't mean your contributions are bad per se. It means that other people didn't appreciate them at the time . So if you do implement a system like that you're basically codifying the herd mentality much more strictly tha…

Well, the hope would be to reduce the signal to noise ratio, so, in the event that something less popular comes up, it should have more time to be seen and appreciated.

I would also venture that 'cutting edge' is HN's bailiwick, and therefore, it's really hard to get ahead of the tech curve here.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#95

Post by RiderOfGiraffes »

redthrowaway wrote: post #52
RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very best submissions get virtually no discussion. One measurement to make might be the votes divided by comments. Let V = votes Let C = comments Let IT = 1.0 Let R = V/C If R > IT then the article is "worth IT" Let "the paper it's written on" be 0.1. If R But all this is tinkering around the edges, and doesn't feel like it's significant. Perhaps a new model of how a site like this works at all is necessary.

"The very best submissions get virtually no discussion." I'm not sure I agree with you on that. The best stories produce a high volume of high-quality discussion. Your proposed algo punishes submissions that generate discussion, which seems to be the opposite of what's desirable.

I think those good stories that generate good discussion still get more points than comments. With the really good stories, no matter how many people comment, more people upvote, because there are lurkers.

It's not perfect, but I'm finding it a pretty good predictor.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#97

Post by Sukotto »

Udo wrote: post #55
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…

Submitting good articles is definitely of value, so HN should give out Karma for it. However, I believe because articles cannot be downvoted, there is no risk involved for spam bots and spammy humans alike. The solution seems simple: allow downvoting on articles that are younger than one hour. And add captcha for submissions.

Articles can be flagged though. Perhaps a heavy penalty per flag?

I think this is actually a pretty complex issue (social dynamics, reputation, incentives) so let us keep Mencken's Law firmly in mind

  For every complex problem there is an answer that is
  clear, simple, and wrong.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#98

Post by veyron »

markkat wrote: post #72
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…

I've built a HN-based site that uses karma as a currency, which I submitted a week ago, to little fanfare :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2359935 In the scheme I'm trying, it costs you karma to upvote or downvote, which gets converted to non-spendable clout. You get a small portion of karma everyday, which increases as you have more clout (and followers, another aspect I added). If you have spent all your karm…

This sounds similar to the Stack Overflow model [you take a penalty when you downvote]

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#99

Post by regularfry »

biot wrote: post #43
regularfry wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would reward making lots of mediocre submissions more than few good ones. I know which way round I'd prefer.

Someone who submits only for the karma can already make lots of mediocre submissions and boost their karma far more than under a logarithmic scale. The only case I could see where your point is valid is if "karma abusers" withhold lower quality submissions in the hopes that they'll submit a really popular one. Do you know if they do this? Or am I misunderstanding the rationale?

The maths is backwards. To take an example, if I submit two stories under a log2-scaled points system which get four upvotes, then if you submit a single story, that story needs to get 16 upvotes for you to match my karma.

Assuming that people are chasing karma (let's leave why to the side for a second, because I don't understand it either), then it's far more efficient to submit lots of low-scoring stories than to even bother thinking about high-scoring ones.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#100

Post by scott_s »

raganwald wrote: post #87

I used to encounter what I thought might be bots auto-submitting my old raganwald blog to reddit. The only person losing karma was me, since I no longer got to submit my articles at a time when they were interesting to reddit's readership. Big whoop! My thinking is that if I write and give my work away, it is no longer up to me to decide how it is to be used. That's because my words are free as in speech, not just fr…

I got the impression that jacquesm wasn't so concerned with how his work was being treated, but with how HN was being treated.
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