HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can • Hacker News Board

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#91

Post by pajju » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 12:38 PM UTC

Gustomaximus wrote: post #85

pajju wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additional feedback: 5. Use of better colors: For following keywords or topics & colors for users by active | top | influencers etc. 6. Verified accounts. 7. Use of on Demand Badges like: Trustworthy User Badge, Looking for(Badge), Looking for co-founder, Hiring, Remote jobs etc. All these can be grouped under a Paid plan? I would definitely pay for value & additionals, even a good mobile app experience is missing. 8…

With 5. I'd be inclined not to colour influencers or other user accounts. I'd be concerned it would exacerbate hivemind as 'these are the opinions I should upvote and follow'. I like in HN that I typically read a comment before I note someones username on this vs reddit type interface where the username is highlighted.

overall reputation he/she has earned in the HN ecosystem.

A light (grey shade)color underline can shown up as his overall reputation, function of his contributions, activity in HN etc.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#92

Post by DanBC » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 12:43 PM UTC

sudioStudio64 wrote: post #88

I was always suspicious of the LISP articles. Just kidding. I think that the lack of down votes for normal people means that you end up seeing a lot of support for some things that are popular with the people who CAN down vote. Maybe I've got it wrong, but it seems that way.

Anyone with an account can upvote stories. It's probably a good idea to visit /new to upvote interesting submissions.

Anyone with an account can flag a submission. Flagging should only be used for submissions that violate site guidelines. No-one can downvote a submission.

Anyone with an account can upvote comments. (Click the timestamp to reveal the flag link.) Anyone with an account can flag comments - again flagging should be restricted to comments that violate the guidelines.

People with karma over 750(?) 1000(?) can downvote comments. There's disagreement about when downvotig should be used. Some people feel it should only be used for posts that violate site guidelines[1]; others think that downvote to disagree is okay.

[1] that makes the flag redundant?

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#93

Post by cantankerous » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 12:44 PM UTC

Gustomaximus wrote: post #85

pajju wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additional feedback: 5. Use of better colors: For following keywords or topics & colors for users by active | top | influencers etc. 6. Verified accounts. 7. Use of on Demand Badges like: Trustworthy User Badge, Looking for(Badge), Looking for co-founder, Hiring, Remote jobs etc. All these can be grouped under a Paid plan? I would definitely pay for value & additionals, even a good mobile app experience is missing. 8…

With 5. I'd be inclined not to colour influencers or other user accounts. I'd be concerned it would exacerbate hivemind as 'these are the opinions I should upvote and follow'. I like in HN that I typically read a comment before I note someones username on this vs reddit type interface where the username is highlighted.

Agree with you. HN has been (seems to be) moving away from indicators that can influence upvoting (for example, folks upvoting a comment already substantially upvoted because its upvoted while downvoting dissenting views). Coloring influencers could assign undue heft to persons of a particular color over others and influence conversations in ways orthogonal to the dialogue.

Also I'm told that YC-Alums can see each other's user name on HN as a particular color and non-YC-Alums don't see this. So I guess that's already a thing.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#94

Post by enraged_camel » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 12:45 PM UTC

Equally suspicious are popular but controversial stories that disappear off the front-page within a very short amount of time despite having accumulated lots of votes and comments quickly. I've always gotten the feeling that there are groups of users who flag submissions to make them disappear.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#95

Post by petercooper » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 12:49 PM UTC

pajju wrote: post #20

Good that someone raised this topic. 1. Many good articles & posts don't get upvoted. 2. There are pre-formed HN groups who game the system often. My Feedback 1. Some special users can be given special Front-Page-Post Button permission. Say, 3 Top Users have voted this Post for FP(Front Page) 2. Frontpage should not be the highlighting part of HN. At least it looks like that as of now. The other good parts of HN: new…

Many good articles & posts don't get upvoted.

As someone involved in news delivery, I find this to be an opportunity. I frequently dig up stuff with only 1 or 2 votes here that I can share on and look like I found it - ha! :)

As a long timer HNer, I think the main problem is there's little reason or motivation to monitor /newest so it's mostly visited by people being asked to vote up other people's posts. It'd be very cool if on the bottom of the homepage, you got a few items from /newest you were invited to vote on without actually going there.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#96

Post by krapp » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 12:50 PM UTC

pajju wrote: post #20

Good that someone raised this topic. 1. Many good articles & posts don't get upvoted. 2. There are pre-formed HN groups who game the system often. My Feedback 1. Some special users can be given special Front-Page-Post Button permission. Say, 3 Top Users have voted this Post for FP(Front Page) 2. Frontpage should not be the highlighting part of HN. At least it looks like that as of now. The other good parts of HN: new…

I've felt for a while that HN would be much improved if vote count and karma were invisible. If you give users a stat, you're encouraging them to gamify and optimize for it. Personally, I would rather there was no karma at all, but that's not going to happen. It serves its purpose by affecting the sort order of the thread - it doesn't need to be visible to do its job.

The value of gaming the frontpage could be reduced by having random items from below the fold bubble up from time to time, and perhaps by also having popular items bubble down. Not only would this encourage worthy but not necessarily popular stories to be read, it would (more importantly to me) encourage users to notice that there is more than one page and those thirty slots to read. I believe lobste.rs does this.

It also occurs to me that some people find stories through /comments, and this page can also have an overcrowding problem when multiple comments for the same story take up most of the page. More stories would be discoverable there if comments were grouped by story instead of individually.

I think /active should replace or sit alongside /new. It would provide a nice contrast between the stories getting upvotes and stories getting comments.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#97

Post by driverdan » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 12:54 PM UTC

One of the open secrets of YC alumni is that many will vote brigade new posts by other YC companies when asked. This has been confirmed to me by multiple YC alumni and I've seen it in practice.

This isn't to say others don't do it to, they do, just that it's another "benefit" of going through YC.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#98

Post by _delirium » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 12:55 PM UTC

AlexMuir wrote: post #57

bootload wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't feel anything has changed over that time." Approaching 3000 days on HN. The things I notice most: * increase in users has increased the churn rate of new submissions. * the new page is dead because of the submission rate. good stories disappear off the stack quickly. * the up-click is not a good indicator of story quality. I now see stories with up to 80 votes sans one comment. I used to read the comments BE…

Good points. On the comments:upvotes ratio - I think there's two types of submission. Blog or newsy stuff invites discussion and comments. But other things, like Show HNs, for instance, might be upvoted for being useful but without anyone commenting much. Both are fine.

Highly technical articles often get a lot of upvotes with few comments as well. I often find these good, so I usually do click if a post has a lot of upvotes, 0-3 comments, and seems to be on a technical subject.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#99

Post by tormeh » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 12:56 PM UTC

JimmyM wrote: post #74

drpgq wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lately everything deep learning seems to get upvoted, even rather mediocre stuff. I like deep learning and certainly think it is interesting but it is getting ridiculous.

I think the mediocre stuff is often necessary for people on the outside of relatively specialist areas - like I am - to have a way in. Not that I've been upvoting much deep learning stuff, but I'm sure I've upvoted similar. I seem to recall that the same thing happened when HN had a fling with Bayesian statistics...last year? Two years ago? I think it's a necessary consequence of having a large, broad technical audie…

A shallow treatment of a topic can still be excellent, if it picks the right stuff to present and does so in a pedagogical manner.

Going by reputation, the dragon book would be an example of the opposite: Very in-depth, but with horrible writing.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#100

Post by mrmondo » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 12:57 PM UTC

adieu wrote: post #83

Sealy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you log into your Cloudflare you can perform a full cache flush very easily on your domain.

Maybe it's not cache that caused the problem. We host our website on Google Appengine which is global balanced. Maybe some cloudflare nodes just pick the wrong entrance.

Reporting back in that it's all working now. I managed to sign up, request an invite and I also sign up to your digests to try that out as well. Everything was very quick. Thank you.