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HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

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Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#151

Post by Tiksi »

pajju wrote: post #91
Gustomaximus wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reputation is a great judge of quality and for certain things, and absolutely awful for others. For things that take a great deal of base knowledge to properly evaluate, like cryptography, quantum physics, etc. relying on reputation is generally the best bet unless you've studied the topic for years. There is simply no way to objectively and properly evaluate them for a significant majority of people. On the other hand, on topics that are inherently subjective, or topics that most people understand and end up having conflicting, subjective viewpoints, reputation is an awful way to evaluate the quality of content.

Most of the time on HN, reputation only contributes to the problem. Comments and posts should be evaluated based on their content, not on the person posting them. Reputation only fans the flames of "groupthink", "the hive mind", or whatever you want to call the inevitable tribalism that exists in every sufficiently large community. Reputation has a way of turning subjective opinions into de facto truths, even on things that are unrelated to the source of the reputation, and how could you possibly have an dissenting opinion on the truth ? Giving a popular, well known, "reputable" name priority has a chilling effect on discussion, since going against them is a surefire way to catch some heat from the rest of the community. If reputation and the popularity of a name didn't affect people's views, celebrity endorsements wouldn't be a thing.

The best system I know of is the one 4chan has. Everyone is anonymous, previous comments have no influence on current ones, and the only thing there is to evaluate is the content of your post. Since posts are ranked by time, not by score, every post has an equal opportunity, and it's incredibly difficult to cheat. Obviously that system also has problems, and a lack of threading is annoying at best, but at least it doesn't suffer from stifling discussion and punishing anyone who dissents.

The ideal system would be one where users have a per-topic reputation score, and the poster's handle isn't shown. This way eg. an expert on crytography doesn't have any sway in a discussion about marketing. The fact that someone is revered for their knowledge of networking says about the validity of their thoughts on economical issues, and should have no weight in those discussions. However I imagine this would be incredibly difficult to actually implement in a reasonable way, and could probably still be gamed, though it would be better than what we currently have.

Side Note: I didn't (and can't) downvote you, and I'm not sure why people feel your comment doesn't deserve to be seen.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#152

Post by krapp »

Loughla wrote: post #147
krapp wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reduce…

I believe that the incentive to optimize votes/Karma has very little to do with the actual Karma count. I believe it is mostly about driving a narrative or page-views for income. Focusing on Karma as the outcome is vastly underselling the power of sites like HN (and especially reddit). Those who want to warp the system don't just want numbers on this site. They want power over crowds or money for their business.

Nevertheless, having actual numbers there provides (by design) a form of operant conditioning, intended to encourage posters to want their numbers to go up, not down, and to associate a posters' credibility with their karma score. It might be a minor issue overall (as the effect of karma would be the same either way) but not having the numbers there at least makes the forum less obviously gamified.

As an obvious example, tptacek is sitting on 200k+ karma right now. What purpose does that number serve to anyone? How does it make the site better? I don't think it does at all.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#153

Post by krapp »

aout wrote: post #149
krapp wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reduce…

Well, if you hide Karma but still use it in the ordering of the thread then Karma could be derivated. In a day you could extract the data from the posts and build a kind of karma-book with top users etc etc...

Roughly, perhaps - you could obviously tell that one thread is more popular than another because it's on top, and maybe in some cases determine that one poster has more karma relative to another based on the way a thread reacts when it's known that they downvoted (since I believe but may be wrong that downvotes from higher karma posters are weighted more._ But factors other than just karma determine the sort order of the threads, and where stories wind up on the front page. How much can you really determine on a site with as much direct moderation as here?

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#154

Post by dang »

_delirium wrote: post #102
jsnell wrote: post #9

The mysterious case is probably manual moderator intervention to re-surface good articles that got lost in /newest. So basically a one-time 5 point boost (just to the article score, not to submitter karma), enough to give it a second chance on the front page for half an hour or so. (I might be wrong on this, but it definitely should not be taken as a sign of cheating. It happens way to often, with links that have no…

Yes, when this came up about 9 months ago, 'dang acknowledged that they occasionally manually promote stories: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8313505 Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8122290

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9086614 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#155

Post by dang »

driverdan wrote: post #97

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.

They do, but it ends up backfiring because those posts typically get hit by HN's voting ring detector. It's definitely not a "benefit" of going through YC. We tell YC alumni over and over not to do this, that the rules are the same for everybody, and that the way to get on the front page is by posting something intellectually interesting. Many, being human, try for shortcuts anyhow. But in this they're no different from the general population.

I've thought about this a lot and believe that the way for us to help YC startups make HN's front page is by giving them our best advice about what the community finds interesting vs. what tends not to work—and then sharing the same advice with everybody. In other words, do for HN what PG did with advice about startups. Everything he tells YC startups to do and not do, he published in essays that anyone can read.

That approach makes even more sense for HN, since it's in all our interests to have better stories, regardless of who posts them. I hate to see startups (YC or not) put a ton of effort into content that is unlikely to resonate with the community. There is much to say about this. Unfortunately, I am a slow writer.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#156

Post by dang »

xai3luGi wrote: post #137

I've experienced the same thing which made me wonder whether there are any control by the admins deciding which stories that should end up in the front page. For example a magic button for admins or moderators that will boost a story to the front page irrespective of the votes or time the stories have been submitted. Because some older stories with little number of votes come up to the front page where new stories wi…

Please see the links at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9333611 and in my reply for a description of our experiments and longer-term intentions.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#157

Post by Loughla »

krapp wrote: post #152
Loughla wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that the incentive to optimize votes/Karma has very little to do with the actual Karma count. I believe it is mostly about driving a narrative or page-views for income. Focusing on Karma as the outcome is vastly underselling the power of sites like HN (and especially reddit). Those who want to warp the system don't just want numbers on this site. They want power over crowds or money for their business.

Nevertheless, having actual numbers there provides (by design) a form of operant conditioning, intended to encourage posters to want their numbers to go up, not down, and to associate a posters' credibility with their karma score. It might be a minor issue overall (as the effect of karma would be the same either way) but not having the numbers there at least makes the forum less obviously gamified. As an obvious exam…

So, is your argument that, because tptacek has 200k+ karma that its comments and submissions are upvoted more?

I would argue that the content of submissions stands on its own compared to the total; I've not once checked a user's overall karma before voting.

And it's still not on point. The point is that for the people we really need to worry about, it's not about karma at all. Get rid of karma, I agree with you. It serves no real purpose.

But, the problem of gaming the system will still exist - it's all about money. I can drive views to my site or product without karma.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#158

Post by dang »

hawski wrote: post #44
Joona wrote: post #4

So how do you fix it? I don't really see another way to rank large amounts of stories other than points. Sure, you can try to detect cheating, but you want a minimal amount of false positives, too. Edit: missing word

Few options: make system more complex, add randomization, increase moderation effort or make it less open. I am fan of adding randomization. It was previously proposed: show few random new items on a front page in random places, maybe with a little threshold. I was thinking about community page destined to fork. After community reaches certain threshold (size, activity) there is automatic fork and 2nd generation comm…

> I am fan of adding randomization. It was previously proposed: show few random new items on a front page in random places, maybe with a little threshold.

We tested this idea (though we didn't roll it out for everyone) and the results were terrible. The median story is too low in quality for randomness to add value here. You just end up planting junk on the front page and annoying people. From that we concluded that there needs to be additional filtering, be it by algorithms, humans, or a combination.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#159

Post by dang »

arikrak wrote: post #118

Is there also a reverse issue, where posts that should reach the front-page are downvoted or prevented from reaching it for some reason? I.e. how many posts are there that fit with what HN is for and are popular on similar forums online (such as /r/programming), but still do not reach the front page?

A lot of posts. The overwhelming reason is simple neglect. We've been working on this problem for a while. If you're curious about what we're doing, see the links at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9333611 and in my reply. They're a bit out of date now, but the intentions remain the same.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#160

Post by dang »

elmin wrote: post #37

To me the easiest solution is to expose more users to the /newest page. When more eyes are on the new stories, legitimate ones will have more of a shot.

Yes, except that users just don't do it. It's a tragedy of the commons: sifting through the story stream to find the interesting ones is not, itself, interesting enough. The reason people come to HN (to read interesting things) is a reason not to do that.

Our current idea for the solution is twofold: create a new review mechanism for stories (not to replace /newest but to live alongside it), and reward users with karma for participating. But we're a fair way away from having anything worth rolling out.

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