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Auto submission bots on Hacker News

jacquesmattheij.com

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Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#111

Post by lwhi »

raganwald wrote: post #89
jacquesm wrote: post #50

Maybe a simple rule could be that if you run an undeclared bot on HN to auto submit stuff that you forfeit your account when you're detected, no matter who you are or what you've done. That way we only get really clever bots that are indistinguishable from really good submitters.

Why? I haven't read a good argument against bots. Your article doesn't present an argument that HN is harmed. I haven't read a good argument that anyone is harmed. If a bot had its own novelty account, say "ragnawald_speaks" that submitted everything I wrote, what would be the harm to HN? People keep talking about "spam." How is it spam if a bot submits an article that has an excellent chance of making it to the top…

The quality of HN would be harmed. We'd end up with a very tedious site.

People often behave like sheep - the fact that a lot of articles are voted up isn't a reflection of quality, it's a reflection of familiarity and unthinking, sycophantic behaviour.

A large majority of these articles aren't actually discussing anything interesting - and it seems that their main purpose is to generate buzz and self-promote.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#112

Post by lwhi »

jacquesm wrote: post #67
joubert wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this mean you're back on HN? ( http://jacquesmattheij.com/Tell+HN%3A+So+Long+and+Thanks+for... ) Or perhaps I missed something during the last few weeks?

Definitely not. I just figured that since I submitted this article myself it would be pretty silly to stay out of the comments. Don't take it as a religious thing, I've cut down the time spent on HN by over 90%, I have lots more time to write about other stuff now and I have more time for the people around me. On top of that my out-of-band contacts with HN'ers seem to have only strengthened. Win-win.

So quitting was partly a PR stunt? ;)

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#113

Post by bmelton »

knowtheory wrote: post #101
bmelton wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ha. Don't tell the guys at Lambda the Ultimate that ;) Incidentally, i submitted a link ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386915 ) about an hour ago, and after watching it depressingly fall off the first page of the new list, i think i'm giving up on ever submitting a link to HN again. What's so frustrating is that i can identify content that is good, and relevant (the link above is about open data, citizen acce…

I've had a number of submission woes that mirror yours. Just KNOWING that people would like it if they saw it (right or wrong,) but seeing how quickly things move from newest to gone is the big worry.

The only cure I know for that is to lower the signal to noise ratio, and I don't know a better way to do it than to make submissions harder, or at least, more chancy for the shotgun-submission approach.

If every submission is something that people care about, then I believe (again, right or wrong) that more people are going to be willing to hit the 'newest' page instead of waiting for things to hit the home page, and there should be far fewer submissions.

Of course, this is all predicated on the assumption that auto-post bots are dumb, and that they'll lose you more karma if it's penalized than you gain, but that's an assumption I can't really stand behind, not having seen the numbers.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#114

Post by datasink »

mhb wrote: post #80
RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #26

FWIW, I was one of the people running a bot to auto-submit. I've always been a big-iron algorithms programmer, and I've never done much web programming, and certainly never programmed an auto-submitter before. Since I figured most of Jacques' idle thoughts were worth more than half the things making it to the Front Page, I figured it was an ideal time to learn a little about the back-n-forth of a form submission syst…

When will we see the first high frequency posting (HFP) bots physically located near the ISPs of popular authors?

Especially with all the potentially karma-lucrative HFP arbitrage opportunities with up-trending submissions on different tech aggregators.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#115

Post by jschuur »

raganwald wrote: post #89
jacquesm wrote: post #50

Maybe a simple rule could be that if you run an undeclared bot on HN to auto submit stuff that you forfeit your account when you're detected, no matter who you are or what you've done. That way we only get really clever bots that are indistinguishable from really good submitters.

Why? I haven't read a good argument against bots. Your article doesn't present an argument that HN is harmed. I haven't read a good argument that anyone is harmed. If a bot had its own novelty account, say "ragnawald_speaks" that submitted everything I wrote, what would be the harm to HN? People keep talking about "spam." How is it spam if a bot submits an article that has an excellent chance of making it to the top…

The argument against bots would be that it makes it more difficult to go through the 'new' section and find quality posts to up vote if everyone did this.

In fact, I seem to recall Digg is going to/already has pulled back it's feature where you can register an RSS feed to post all your content for this very reason.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#116

Post by jschuur »

Are there indications that this is a wider spread problem beyond jacquesmattheij.com or the two individuals that have already been caught doing it with his site?

One is an anomaly, two independent occurrences is a trend?

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#117

Post by raganwald »

jschuur wrote: post #115
raganwald wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? I haven't read a good argument against bots. Your article doesn't present an argument that HN is harmed. I haven't read a good argument that anyone is harmed. If a bot had its own novelty account, say "ragnawald_speaks" that submitted everything I wrote, what would be the harm to HN? People keep talking about "spam." How is it spam if a bot submits an article that has an excellent chance of making it to the top…

The argument against bots would be that it makes it more difficult to go through the 'new' section and find quality posts to up vote if everyone did this. In fact, I seem to recall Digg is going to/already has pulled back it's feature where you can register an RSS feed to post all your content for this very reason.

The argument against bots would be that it makes it more difficult to go through the 'new' section and find quality posts to up vote if everyone did this.

If everyone wrote bots that auto-submitted feeds from authors who consistently get upvotes from HN readers? How is that a problem?

If the problem is submitting articles that HN readers don't find interesting--spam, not ham--banning bots is unlikely to help. How do you stop me from submitting every article I write?

There is a huge amount of content out there loosely relevant to HN readers. Bits overwhelming the new page are a symptom, not a disease. The disease is that the new page doesn't scale well to handle a large volume of submissions. As HN grows, the number of submission si going to grow as well, with or without bots.

Behind the scenes, there must be some changes to accomodate this, such as algorithmically showing users new stories they are most likely to find interesting, or showing users a random selection fo new stories from the last hour.

Bots merely accelerate the decline of the new page's usefulness. Banning bots that auto-submit high quality feeds isn't going to work if we allow HN to grow at its current rate.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#118

Post by kwantam »

raganwald wrote: post #104

Building a bot to win karma is a little like hiring a model to pretend to be your date. No, scratch that. We're hackers! Building a bot to win karma is a little like building your own replicant and taking it to the party as your date.

No. Building a replicant would be awesome.

Even more so if more of this audience were old enough to remember when Daryl Hannah was hot.

VVV ahh indeed! Why then we're in violent agreement!

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#119

Post by raganwald »

lwhi wrote: post #111
raganwald wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? I haven't read a good argument against bots. Your article doesn't present an argument that HN is harmed. I haven't read a good argument that anyone is harmed. If a bot had its own novelty account, say "ragnawald_speaks" that submitted everything I wrote, what would be the harm to HN? People keep talking about "spam." How is it spam if a bot submits an article that has an excellent chance of making it to the top…

The quality of HN would be harmed. We'd end up with a very tedious site. People often behave like sheep - the fact that a lot of articles are voted up isn't a reflection of quality, it's a reflection of familiarity and unthinking, sycophantic behaviour. A large majority of these articles aren't actually discussing anything interesting - and it seems that their main purpose is to generate buzz and self-promote.

People often behave like sheep - the fact that a lot of articles are voted up isn't a reflection of quality, it's a reflection of familiarity and unthinking, sycophantic behaviour.

If this is true, then the problem is with the users of the site, not with bots that correctly submit stories garnering upvotes. Remember, this post is not about bots that submit spamvertising for Rolex knock-off watches, it's about bots that accumulate karma by submitting stories that consistently hit the top of the page.

Why are we trying to game the behaviour of HN readers by artificially throttling the submission of stories they find interesting? Far better to take a step back and ask whether HN is in danger of experiencing its Eternal September.

If the behaviour of HN is such that posts can hit #1 while still being undesirable for some reason--like the 47th straight article slamming an overfunded startup--then there is an issue, but surely it isn't the bot's fault any more than it would be a person's fault if they submitted it by hand.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#120

Post by raganwald »

kwantam wrote: post #118
raganwald wrote: post #104

Building a bot to win karma is a little like hiring a model to pretend to be your date. No, scratch that. We're hackers! Building a bot to win karma is a little like building your own replicant and taking it to the party as your date.

No. Building a replicant would be awesome. Even more so if more of this audience were old enough to remember when Daryl Hannah was hot. VVV ahh indeed! Why then we're in violent agreement!

Building a replicant would be awesome

That was the intent of my post. Building a bot that earns 10,000+ karma ought to be an achievement. If for any reason it isn't particularly difficult, then it ought to be taken that earning 10,000+ karma as a human isn't an achievement either.

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