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Blindly submitting content to HN, good or bad?

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Re: Blindly submitting content to HN, good or bad?

#12
post #4

80+ stories a day is excessive. I would be in favor of PG rate-limiting submissions. If each article takes five minutes to read, it would take the submitter 6 hours 40 minutes(!) to read all the articles he submitted. This implies the submitter is not reading the articles before submission. This worries me because it is indicating submission by quantity, not by quality, and the thing I love about HN is the quality of…

Don't hog the karma.

For me, I don't even care so much about the Karma but if one person is submitting 80 stories then it either creates a one dimensional feed (if the user is actually reviewing those articles) or it is automated and there is no guarantee of quality. Either way, I believe that it can only serve to decrease the quality of the site. I would be in favor of submission caps. I mean I read maybe 5 articles a day, that are worth re-posting to a larger audience. So capping it at 5-10 I think would not hurt the site, but stands a chance of improving the new feed (which is where I hang out)

Re: Blindly submitting content to HN, good or bad?

#13

Check the source code for news.arc https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc to see what is already done about this. The account submitting so many stories may decide to be more selective after considering the implications of site algorithms.

If you're referring to the "oversubmitting" algorithm,

a) this appears to be turned off by default (line 1535)

b) if turned on it only applies to new users (lines 1539, 1540)

(Disclaimer: this is the first time I'm looking at the source, please correct me if I'm missing something.)

Re: Blindly submitting content to HN, good or bad?

#15
post #3

Ha. This is a classic community phenomenon. You can also notice this in Foursquare, Twitter, and almost every other community based site. I think us as a community need to start encouraging progressive and meaningful arguments, rather than just the top news. I would like to come to HN to have a conversation/ discussion about something new rather than a link to NYT. One idea would be to create separate sections for di…

And how would that discourage the behavior of autosubmitting? The speed in which new URLs are submitted by the same user should be limited according to their karma. (Assuming users with high points are trustworthy, which is the primary reason this metric is made for.)

New users could start with a 24 hour limit between submissions (86,400 seconds) and get 20 seconds removed for every karma point. Someone with 2000 karma would be able to submit every 12.8 hours. By 4000 you've probably learned that quality beats quantity.

Re: Blindly submitting content to HN, good or bad?

#16
I am not sure if limiting the submissions per day should be our goal. It's obstruction of freedom of speech- which is do not stand for. Even if we limit the user, how are we making the site productive? The real problem is not that someone has 100K karma, rather, it's that because of this excessive submissions real stories are lost in the mix.

How do we help good stories/discussions come to light? Karma is a vanity metric, let's look beyond it ya'll

Re: Blindly submitting content to HN, good or bad?

#18
post #15
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how would that discourage the behavior of autosubmitting? The speed in which new URLs are submitted by the same user should be limited according to their karma. (Assuming users with high points are trustworthy, which is the primary reason this metric is made for.)

New users could start with a 24 hour limit between submissions (86,400 seconds) and get 20 seconds removed for every karma point. Someone with 2000 karma would be able to submit every 12.8 hours. By 4000 you've probably learned that quality beats quantity.

That seems fair, though it might be better to use average story karma. The bots in question probably have a fair amount of karma just from the sheer number of stories submitted.

Re: Blindly submitting content to HN, good or bad?

#19
post #4

80+ stories a day is excessive. I would be in favor of PG rate-limiting submissions. If each article takes five minutes to read, it would take the submitter 6 hours 40 minutes(!) to read all the articles he submitted. This implies the submitter is not reading the articles before submission. This worries me because it is indicating submission by quantity, not by quality, and the thing I love about HN is the quality of…

Users should be rate limited based on the average score of their last x (say 100) submissions. If their last 100 submissions got an average of 1 (no points) then they should be rate limited to 3 a day. If their average score for the last 100 is above, say, 30, then it's obvious the user is providing real value to the community and their rate limit should disappear.

Re: Blindly submitting content to HN, good or bad?

#20
post #18
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New users could start with a 24 hour limit between submissions (86,400 seconds) and get 20 seconds removed for every karma point. Someone with 2000 karma would be able to submit every 12.8 hours. By 4000 you've probably learned that quality beats quantity.

That seems fair, though it might be better to use average story karma. The bots in question probably have a fair amount of karma just from the sheer number of stories submitted.

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