This post provided interesting reading, and I think the focus on protecting the credibility of the karma system from fraud is an important one. I don't think those charts show any evidence at all of cheating. I also don't think the "outing" idea will work.
Is it likely that there are people upvoting their own posts? Of course. It's likely because of the risk/reward ratio, which the post points out, likely reflects the reality: ie, easy to do, hard to detect, big pay off.
That argument is convincing.
I don't see any evidence in the supplied charts for cheats. The features identified in the charts could have been produced by many other factors, and even if they were produced by cheats, the features themselves are not that convincing: "the rough shape of a graph". It reminds me of people who have systems for Forex investing based on the shape of a graph. Compelling indeed, and yet probably doesn't work. More extensive study and testing would be required to validate the method.
My impression is this argument is fitting data to conclusion already assumed, rather than discovering a conclusion from the data.
If the proposal is then to administer a sort of "justice" via this approach, it's really no different than a kangaroo court.
Far more importantly, if some kind of analysis from rank and votes were able to identify cheats, I think those capable of doing so should really think through, go slowly, and work with HN/YC before deciding to "out" them.
Self-anointed vigilantes outside of the system almost never work as a way to create justice, because they end up wielding a power for destruction, which the community itself has not organically decided to give them. By holding power to decide who is a member of the community and who is not, without also shouldering the responsibility for building and constructing that community, they have an outsized ability to reshape the community away from the forces that built it.
In some cases, like when a community’s culture is so toxic to people’s common good, this kind of dramatic shift from equilibrium works as a way to restore an order more suited to people.
I don’t feel HN is in need of such treatment.
Sure, there's likely pain if a post doesn’t get upvoted, and that doesn’t mean that there is anything that doesn’t work about HN. It also, as the article points out, doesn’t meant there is anything wrong with that post. I haven’t noticed a limit on the number of times someone can submit new stories, so if a post doesn’t succeed at first, it can always be tried again.
The response to the upvote-pain could be to say, "What can I learn?" or it could be to say, "Who can I blame?" I think the implicit assumption that “the HN voting system is flawed” is incorrect. For a poster it’s a compelling idea to “explain” a post's lack of desired upvotes, because then I doesn’t have to take responsibility for ways they I have iterated and improved my post. I choose to blame an external system, in this case “the voting system.”
It’s a very compelling story because then whenever I post something that doesn’t get upvoted as much I want, I can say, “It’s not my responsibility, the system is flawed, and other’s successes are fake.” That can make me feel better. Except, it’s fake because I’m not actually feeling better because I created something of value, only by diminishing the value of something in comparison, and thereby elevating something which otherwise may not warrant elevation outside such straw-man comparisons. Secondly, it doesn’t work for me because then instead of learning from that experience, and iterating, I effectively reduced my learning to zero. Instead of saying, “what can I do that works?” I said, “The system doesn’t work. Now I will prove that is true.”
If we put all that aside and assume that the system really is flawed and a method really can identify fraudulent post elevation, then I still disagree that “outing” HN members is something which will work. Trust amongst HN members, the sort-of anonymous quality of it, even the unspoken “sacredness” of the voting system as a way of bringing us content, all contribute to social harmony here. This place has been shaped by the forces on HN and YC that sweated to build and unite it. If suddenly an asymmetric power arises outside this system that can identify cheats, and publicly outs them, this divisive force, used without the same care for the sacred harmony of community that the people who built it have invested in it, there will be a lack of harmony. This vigilante power would erode the trust and bonds between HN members.
It doesn't work trying to simultaneously mend the social fabric by breaking it. The threads are the laws and the people who protect and respect them. An entity which, outside of the fragile fabric of justice, decides which members are "good" and which are "bad" is eroding the lawful links that connect people, which were decided by the gestalt. Those laws, and unspoken codes and culture, were not created by one fell swoop of a powerful tech. They were created by sedimentary deposit of 1000s of man years of collaborative time and interaction, whether on HN or in other communities. This is how these bonds are shaped and the harmony they create is precious. It works that the ones who create this order in a community, with the members themselves, are the same ones who should wield the power to exclude members to protect some values, rather than an asymmetric power self-granted to some external self-anointed "authority". This seems unlikely to create harmony, because it is an external force imposed rather than one that arose and was guided skilfully by highly-invested and integrated community maintainers.
In this case the values to be protected are the credibility of the karma system, which is certainly an important aim. I don’t think public naming and shaming is the way that works to do so. And if it turns out it is, then it works to be based on a solid evidentiary process.