Auto submission bots on Hacker News • Hacker News Board

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#101

Post by knowtheory » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 1:46 PM UTC

bmelton wrote: post #93

silverskein wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that increasing costs for unpopular content doesn't necessarily mean that your content was bad, just that people weren't paying attention to it. If you're ahead of a tech curve, that doesn't mean your contributions are bad per se. It means that other people didn't appreciate them at the time . So if you do implement a system like that you're basically codifying the herd mentality much more strictly tha…

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 access to data, and information management), which are obviously relevant to the hacker news community.

But the only ways i can think to remedy this would be to either lobby my friends hard to vote up the link (something i'm loathe to do), or start pimping the links on other sites, in the hopes that people will try to submit it, see the existing link, and vote it up.

There's just no way i can do better than a piece of content like this. Oh well. I guess i'll stick to commenting.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#102

Post by RiderOfGiraffes » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 1:47 PM UTC

Tycho wrote: post #51

It kind if seems like a false alarm if one of the botters was just RiderOfGiraffes (whose motives I don't suspect), and there was only one other person, possibly equally innocent. One would hope nobody here is irrational enough to seek 'easy/automatic' karma ... I mean the nice thing about karma for submissions is it's basically a whole lot of smart people saying 'well done for finding this, it's definitely valuable.…

  > the nice thing about karma for submissions is it's
  > basically a whole lot of smart people saying 'well
  > done for finding this, it's definitely valuable.'

That doesn't really seem to be the case any more. There's a lot of stuff coming up on the Front Page now that I, personally, think is not valuable at all. It's not spam, so I feel disinclined to flag it, but I can't downvote it either. I think there are a lot of older hands who are starting to despair that so much trivial material makes it to the Front Page, and there seems to be no way of stopping it.

There is no doubt in my mind that the community has been diluted in its intent, purpose and interest. Often the new people have insightful and interesting things to say, but the focus is largely gone as compared to what attracted people in the first place.

One can no longer assume that just because an item has a high score, it must be of value. The interesting thing is that this is true of the Classic page as well.

And I've checked my snapshots from 2 years ago, and it really does seem to have changed.

People are upvoting things not because they are valuable, but because they are entertaining.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#103

Post by raganwald » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 1:48 PM UTC

scott_s wrote: post #100

raganwald wrote: post #87

I used to encounter what I thought might be bots auto-submitting my old raganwald blog to reddit. The only person losing karma was me, since I no longer got to submit my articles at a time when they were interesting to reddit's readership. Big whoop! My thinking is that if I write and give my work away, it is no longer up to me to decide how it is to be used. That's because my words are free as in speech, not just fr…

I got the impression that jacquesm wasn't so concerned with how his work was being treated, but with how HN was being treated.

Good point, thanks!

FWIW, I think there is a problem if multiple bots attempting to autosubmit end up inadvertently creating a voting ring. But that can and should be fixed by changing the way HN treats submitting an article that has already been submitted.

Other than that, I only think bots are a problem for HN when submitting spam rather than ham. I am in favour of bots provided they don't play fast and loose with accounts. I would be ok with each bot having its own account, or all bots using their creator's accounts. I would consider it fraudulent to create bots that periodically give themselves new accounts to evade filtering.

If bots all used a stable account, pg could throttle or ban those that submit too much spam. But if a bot is constantly submitting articles that are upvoted by humans.... I'm happy to see it seed the new page.

JM2C, I don't make the rules, I just play by them.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#104

Post by raganwald » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 1:49 PM UTC

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.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#105

Post by lwhi » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 1:52 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #71

lwhi wrote: post #54

Maybe the problem is people upvoting uninteresting articles. Without wanting to be mean, it's kind of crazy that this meta-discussion about someone's inability to remain off the HN scoreboard is number one right now. Sycophantism and idle self-promotion are boring pursuits. EDIT: I think we should be able to down-vote uninteresting articles.

Multiple submissions of the same link have the same effect as upvoting and once a thread is on the homepage it will gain a lot more views instantly, if only a small number of people on the homepage then gives it another upvote it is likely to hang around for a long time. These are artifacts of the way the 'new' and the 'news' page work, the cumulative effect of those is larger than the actual quality of the submissio…

But these articles generally have many more votes than just a couple - this article has 149 at current count.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#106

Post by elliottcarlson » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 1:53 PM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #88

jasonkester wrote: post #7

Why does HN give karma points for submitting articles? That's never made any sense to me. All it does is encourage this kind of behavior, where you submit everything you can find in the hopes of gaining points. You haven't really contributed anything valuable, since good articles tend to find their way here on their own. Karma for comments makes sense. You can look at somebody's average and it gives you a sense of wh…

Also: why does anyone care about kharma? I look at votes on a comment or an article, but I don't really care how much kharma any person has. Do people really look at it as something to maximize?

The only time I have taken karma in to consideration is when I disagree with someone either in principle or in technical merit. If I were to even respond to such a post, I want to know if I am dealing with a troll or someone who is a highly regarded member of the community because they have earned their karma. Basically, I let it influence how I might approach someone to a certain extent. Other than that, I could care less what my or anyone else's karma is.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#107

Post by extension » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 1:53 PM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #7

Why does HN give karma points for submitting articles? That's never made any sense to me. All it does is encourage this kind of behavior, where you submit everything you can find in the hopes of gaining points. You haven't really contributed anything valuable, since good articles tend to find their way here on their own. Karma for comments makes sense. You can look at somebody's average and it gives you a sense of wh…

Rather than karma/comments I'd like to see karma/uniques. Keep count of the logged in users that have seen the comment. Use a little Javascript to figure out which comments have been visible in their browser window long enough to read them.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#108

Post by gjm11 » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 2:05 PM UTC

Proposal:

1. When a link is submitted, it doesn't actually appear on HN until a certain (fixed?) time T has elapsed after its first submission.

2. Everyone who submits it within that time is noted.

3. Karma from article upvotes is shared equally between all those users. (Or perhaps unequally in a way that weights earlier submitters slightly more highly -- but not winner-takes-all as at present.)

4. If the same link has been submitted N times before time T elapses, the delay is truncated at that point.

Effects:

1. There's very little incentive to submit something super-quickly. Therefore, there's more incentive to read it carefully first. (Good.)

2. Super-quick submitters don't hurt slower submitters' karma so much. (Good.)

3. Submissions no longer have hugely higher potential karma gain than comments, as they do at present. (Good.)

4. "Obvious" submissions probably no longer give anyone very much karma. (Good.)

5. Breaking news doesn't appear on HN as quickly as it does now; but if lots of people are submitting it, it still gets in pretty fast. (Maybe good, maybe bad.)

I think that with suitable choices of T and N -- perhaps 1 hour and 20, or thereabouts -- this would be a considerable improvement on what we have now.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#109

Post by BCM43 » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 2:10 PM UTC

raquo wrote: post #36

jasonkester wrote: post #7

Why does HN give karma points for submitting articles? That's never made any sense to me. All it does is encourage this kind of behavior, where you submit everything you can find in the hopes of gaining points. You haven't really contributed anything valuable, since good articles tend to find their way here on their own. Karma for comments makes sense. You can look at somebody's average and it gives you a sense of wh…

Maybe we just need a submission to cost X karma points to the submitter. Then people would think harder before submitting.

The problem with this is what it will do to the comments on the article. There have been many times where I have an idea for a comment that I know will get me karma, but I don't think that it really belongs on HN, so I don't submit it. Since I don't have that much karma, if this system was in place I very possibly submit the comment so I could submit more articles later.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#110

Post by Tycho » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 2:12 PM UTC

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #102

Tycho wrote: post #51

It kind if seems like a false alarm if one of the botters was just RiderOfGiraffes (whose motives I don't suspect), and there was only one other person, possibly equally innocent. One would hope nobody here is irrational enough to seek 'easy/automatic' karma ... I mean the nice thing about karma for submissions is it's basically a whole lot of smart people saying 'well done for finding this, it's definitely valuable.…

> the nice thing about karma for submissions is it's > basically a whole lot of smart people saying 'well > done for finding this, it's definitely valuable.' That doesn't really seem to be the case any more. There's a lot of stuff coming up on the Front Page now that I, personally, think is not valuable at all. It's not spam, so I feel disinclined to flag it, but I can't downvote it either. I think there are a lot of…

From a top-down perspective the karma vote are less meaningful, as certain topics and sources get up voted ad nauseum. But from the bottom-up perspective, it's still great when you pluck an academic article or technical blog from obscurity and thousands of people read it, sending the karma from 1 to hundreds. And there are other people trying to do the same thing. You can usually avoid the chaff just by reading the title or domain (personally i skip the 'motivational' type blogs and try to resist the 'hot topic' ones and contentious debates, but there's still so much good technical content that crops up, and fairy high maturity among commenters).