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Who actually votes stuff onto the front page of Hacker News?

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Re: Who actually votes stuff onto the front page of Hacker News?

#11

Post by jacalata »

pedalpete wrote: post #8
Stal3r wrote: post #7

The actual answer is that insider networks are used to upvote stories. If you don't have a network of people you know on HN to upvote your article, it is very unlikely to ever get seen or noticed. This is a wart of HN that people don't want to talk about. Traffic isn't organic; it's a popularity contest at best. It would be naive to think that people wouldn't game a system that can drive so much traffic to any site.

This is true, but shouldn't it be fairly easy to develop a system that looks for these groups of voters and discounts the total volume of their votes, rendering their gaming of the system as moot? Also, seeing as discussion is so important to HN, I assume that active discussion is just as valuable as votes. I'll often comment on an article but forget to upvote it.

Actually, hn has a "controversy" penalty that automatically downgrades posts with more comments than votes (kicks in at 40 comments) and pushes them down or off the front page.

Re: Who actually votes stuff onto the front page of Hacker News?

#12

Post by japhyr »

Well, one advantage of looking at the new page is that you can kick off the discussion for an article. It's kind of fun to have the top-level comment once in a while. It's nothing I seek out, but it's fun when it happens.

You can also catch some things that relate to one of your interests, but don't have enough immediate appeal to make it to the front page.

Re: Who actually votes stuff onto the front page of Hacker News?

#13

Post by MattBearman »

Stal3r wrote: post #7

The actual answer is that insider networks are used to upvote stories. If you don't have a network of people you know on HN to upvote your article, it is very unlikely to ever get seen or noticed. This is a wart of HN that people don't want to talk about. Traffic isn't organic; it's a popularity contest at best. It would be naive to think that people wouldn't game a system that can drive so much traffic to any site.

HN does have a vote ring detector (or so I'm told) but I have a theory on how people avoid it:

You only need 4 or 5 quick votes to get to the front page, from there the submission will probably get organic traction.

So you need a network of 100 or more people who upvote each others submissions, but won't upvote if the submission already has enough votes to hit the front page. This way it's unlikely it will be the same subset of your network upvoting your story each time, making it much harder to catch.

Having said that, I have no such network, but have a few submissions reach the front page, one even spent a day at the top, so it is possible to get to the front page with out cheating

Re: Who actually votes stuff onto the front page of Hacker News?

#15

Post by adventured »

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe when multiple people submit the same link, it generates an upvote automatically.

So if ten people submit the same story, it gets ten upvotes. For plenty of stories I imagine that eliminates the need to derive upvotes from people browsing "new."

Re: Who actually votes stuff onto the front page of Hacker News?

#19

Post by gus_massa »

Me. I usually read the newest page after reading the front page. There’s a lot of crap and I flag the worst. But from time to time I found an interesting story and upvote it, it makes me happy to find them before they disappear, and I’m happier when they later get more upvotes.

Re: Who actually votes stuff onto the front page of Hacker News?

#20

Post by ScottWhigham »

I do. I go through new 1-2x a day, usually the first page or first two pages so that I can "do my part". It's our community thus it's up to us to flag/vote up stories that we would like to see in our community. pg + team have been great at making new better and better w/ less junk.
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