Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

goorapid.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 117 posts

Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#101

Post by Zamicol »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #36

Site admins should "buy upvotes" a few times, at different hours of the day, and aggressively ban every account that's a repeat offender. But, really, upvotes are always easily exploitable and often lead to a sort of herd mentality among commenters. This is why Reddit is the definition of "echo chamber." HN is much better, but it would still be improved if upvotes and downvotes were done away with entirely.

I suspect Reddit's echo chamber is because of

1. "shadow moderation" (Robert Hawkin's term, see https://www.reveddit.com/#spread_word)

2. "The masses" entered. When the site was smaller, diversity was expected (as well as the average technical proficiency of the users). With larger numbers, diverse thought held by minorities is harder to hear.

Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#102

Post by 6510 »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #71
sokoloff wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m struggling to see how HN without voting would be anything other than a simple timeline of posts with comments. If you compare the level of “interestingness” of the front page and the first page of new, it’s night and day for me. I still go to new sometimes, but when I do, I feel like I’m doing community service to try to surface the most interesting items for the community.

I mostly meant "upvotes and downvotes on comments" -- as opposed to on topics -- but now I wonder if all upvotes and downvotes could be done away with. Perhaps there's a different way to gauge "interestingness," such as clickthrough rate and comment volume?

HN was originally looking for user entrepeneurialness. Interestingness is a poor goal, if it even is a goal. For what purpose are we looking for interestingness? "Why?"

I suppose we can start by splitting up introvert and extrovert brands of interesting. Entrepeneurialness for example comes in both pondering alone time and the gathering of crowds.

If we could succeed at creating or uploading a digital dang people would be able to bench their publications in advance and create the SEO click bait hell all over until eventually (like google) success has it that the only remaining signal of quality is how high it was ranked previously back when the algo still worked. Counting click-though is specially terrible there.

Only setting real goals and tuning against exploits could produce hard numbers. It's much easier if the goal is selling a product but even then there is the short and the long game.

Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#103

Post by version_five »

pleaselegalize wrote: post #83
version_five wrote: post #15

If you troll around in "New" for long enough you'll see threads where some version of this happens - though it's impossible to tell of they are bought upvotes, fake accounts made by the poster, or just friends that were asked to come and post. You'll see some mediocre SaaS thing that's posted here and on Product hunt and a bunch of comments from new users like "Wow so exciting, great job!". They usually get flagged q…

I worked for a YC company called Anima App [1] that begged us through multiple @here pings to "boost" their posts on HN, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc... It never really worked on HN, the posts would just get buried, but it did kinda work on Reddit. [1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/anima-app

Iirc HN has some kind if detection for suspect upvotes - I could guess at algorithms for that, but for obvious reasons I doubt they would share specifically how they do it. It would be a fun data science project to look at the distributions of votes as they come in on stories.

Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#105

Post by 6510 »

Mochsner wrote: post #74
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #36

Site admins should "buy upvotes" a few times, at different hours of the day, and aggressively ban every account that's a repeat offender. But, really, upvotes are always easily exploitable and often lead to a sort of herd mentality among commenters. This is why Reddit is the definition of "echo chamber." HN is much better, but it would still be improved if upvotes and downvotes were done away with entirely.

Decentralized hackernews/reddit of the future (which can't do this) will need some sort of weighted vote system...

This is actually the only challenge. Building a [say] p2p search engine is much easier than people think but ranking results is a pain.

Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#106

Post by 6510 »

paxys wrote: post #76
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #36

Site admins should "buy upvotes" a few times, at different hours of the day, and aggressively ban every account that's a repeat offender. But, really, upvotes are always easily exploitable and often lead to a sort of herd mentality among commenters. This is why Reddit is the definition of "echo chamber." HN is much better, but it would still be improved if upvotes and downvotes were done away with entirely.

Why do you think they'd use the same accounts every time?

They do what works, if using the same accounts works they will do it. If they can use new accounts they will do it. On fb, reddit, twitter, google etc they gradually develop accounts sometimes over years. If those are detected by the tens of thousands it would drive up prices.

Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#108

Post by handsclean »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #36

Site admins should "buy upvotes" a few times, at different hours of the day, and aggressively ban every account that's a repeat offender. But, really, upvotes are always easily exploitable and often lead to a sort of herd mentality among commenters. This is why Reddit is the definition of "echo chamber." HN is much better, but it would still be improved if upvotes and downvotes were done away with entirely.

It’s hard to attribute Reddit’s rot to voting when it’s had so many years of administration alternating between absentee and inept, and when HN gets such dramatically different results. I generally agree that the trivialization of sentiment is probably a bad thing, but there’s also a lot that works here and one should be careful not to break. I’d certainly be curious to see how it plays out. I wonder if one couldn’t disable voting for only some threads…

Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#109

Post by sokoloff »

6510 wrote: post #102
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly meant "upvotes and downvotes on comments" -- as opposed to on topics -- but now I wonder if all upvotes and downvotes could be done away with. Perhaps there's a different way to gauge "interestingness," such as clickthrough rate and comment volume?

HN was originally looking for user entrepeneurialness. Interestingness is a poor goal, if it even is a goal. For what purpose are we looking for interestingness? "Why?" I suppose we can start by splitting up introvert and extrovert brands of interesting. Entrepeneurialness for example comes in both pondering alone time and the gathering of crowds. If we could succeed at creating or uploading a digital dang people wou…

> HN was originally looking for user entrepeneurialness.

I don't know what the original site guidelines said, but the earliest version I could find in the wayback machine (July 2, 2014) starts exactly the same as the current content. [1]

  Hacker News Guidelines

  What to Submit

  On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#110

Post by CaptainZapp »

marak830 wrote: post #90
plugin-baby wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people tend to tell you why they disagree with you rather than vote you down I’m not sure I agree with this. HN is probably better than most sites, but I frequently see gray comments with no responses.

I'll agree with this. I'll generally downvote if I disagree, and hope someone with a better argument will say what I don't have time/verbage for.

I never downvote based on an opinion, even if I disagree violently, as long as the comment is well reasoned an in good faith.

On the other hand I reflexively downvote everything with even a slight wiff of shilling (especially crypto) or anything boot licking and fanboyism.

I may even upvote comments with which I disagree if I feel they're unfairly downvoted.

Post reply on HN