HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can • Hacker News Board

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#111

Post by onion2k » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 1:18 PM UTC

petercooper wrote: post #95

pajju wrote: post #20

Good that someone raised this topic. 1. Many good articles & posts don't get upvoted. 2. There are pre-formed HN groups who game the system often. My Feedback 1. Some special users can be given special Front-Page-Post Button permission. Say, 3 Top Users have voted this Post for FP(Front Page) 2. Frontpage should not be the highlighting part of HN. At least it looks like that as of now. The other good parts of HN: new…

Many good articles & posts don't get upvoted. As someone involved in news delivery, I find this to be an opportunity. I frequently dig up stuff with only 1 or 2 votes here that I can share on and look like I found it - ha! :) As a long timer HNer, I think the main problem is there's little reason or motivation to monitor /newest so it's mostly visited by people being asked to vote up other people's posts. It'd be ver…

As someone involved in news delivery, I find this to be an opportunity. I frequently dig up stuff with only 1 or 2 votes here that I can share on and look like I found it - ha! :)

I really thought you'd have automated 99% of the information gathering for your newsletters based on something like that. :)

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#112

Post by lnanek2 » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 1:19 PM UTC

lhorie wrote: post #101

Maybe I'm just missing something, but what does one get by "cheating" the HN ranking algorithm? Just some karma points? IMHO, it's rare to see obviously gamed submissions, and the quality of front page articles has been pretty decent for something that rises out of hive behavior (although it's not as well targeted to my own interests as scanning-and-hand-picking-what-I-like, obviously). My own theory is that with the…

Most of the internet is funded by sites desperate for page views. All of the Gawker sites, for example, have content written by content authors who receive most of their pay based on how many views their content gets and fired if they are bad at it. HN is small compared to the real large social news sites like Slashdot and Reddit and Digg, but it is still 10s of thousands of page views if you get on the front page. Many startups are similarly desperate for press or talent so also consider it vital to get their content out there in front of people.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#113

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 1:20 PM UTC

reitanqild wrote: post #86

[deleted] wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

I guessed they were planning to use the github integration for something. Then I might be wrong and it might just be "cool, new feature, must have" but whatever the reason was I didn't question anyones intellect over it.

[deleted]

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#114

Post by krallja » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 1:20 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #92

sudioStudio64 wrote: post #88

I was always suspicious of the LISP articles. Just kidding. I think that the lack of down votes for normal people means that you end up seeing a lot of support for some things that are popular with the people who CAN down vote. Maybe I've got it wrong, but it seems that way.

Anyone with an account can upvote stories. It's probably a good idea to visit /new to upvote interesting submissions. Anyone with an account can flag a submission. Flagging should only be used for submissions that violate site guidelines. No-one can downvote a submission. Anyone with an account can upvote comments. (Click the timestamp to reveal the flag link.) Anyone with an account can flag comments - again flaggin…

I have 621 karma and downvote buttons on comments.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#115

Post by grey-area » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 1:22 PM UTC

petercooper wrote: post #95

pajju wrote: post #20

Good that someone raised this topic. 1. Many good articles & posts don't get upvoted. 2. There are pre-formed HN groups who game the system often. My Feedback 1. Some special users can be given special Front-Page-Post Button permission. Say, 3 Top Users have voted this Post for FP(Front Page) 2. Frontpage should not be the highlighting part of HN. At least it looks like that as of now. The other good parts of HN: new…

Many good articles & posts don't get upvoted. As someone involved in news delivery, I find this to be an opportunity. I frequently dig up stuff with only 1 or 2 votes here that I can share on and look like I found it - ha! :) As a long timer HNer, I think the main problem is there's little reason or motivation to monitor /newest so it's mostly visited by people being asked to vote up other people's posts. It'd be ver…

It'd be very cool if on the bottom of the homepage, you got a few items from /newest you were invited to vote on without actually going there.

Nice idea. This is HN's biggest problem I think - there is no real incentive to visit /newest and the vast majority of good stories slide off it without getting more than a few votes. Adding some new stories to the bottom of home would be an excellent way to get votes.

The other problem of course is that what is popular is not always what is good.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#116

Post by br3w5 » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 1:32 PM UTC

"With huge front page traffic, it’s hard to believe that a good story would only get 4 or 5 up votes in its 3 hour window on the front page, therefore, it makes the first 3 upvotes look very suspicious."

This article makes a BIG assumption about what constitutes a good story and about how HN users actually use the upvote feature. The least subjective way I could define a good story on Hacker News is by basing it on the only visible metric - number of upvotes. This doesn't mean I agree that the article is good from a subjective perspective.

Upvotes could be given for lots of reasons and the higher number of votes could just be because the article is about a subject that more people take an interest in (you also have to take an increase in casual visitors into account). An article about a niche subject, however "good" that article or product is, is less likely to get a higher number of upvotes because less people are interested in it. And posters need to ask themselves if their article or product really is of interest. Posters would also need to put effort into promoting their article elsewhere too (twitter, reddit, other social) and not just expect results from HN.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#117

Post by bootload » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 1:35 PM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #98

AlexMuir wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good points. On the comments:upvotes ratio - I think there's two types of submission. Blog or newsy stuff invites discussion and comments. But other things, like Show HNs, for instance, might be upvoted for being useful but without anyone commenting much. Both are fine.

Highly technical articles often get a lot of upvotes with few comments as well. I often find these good, so I usually do click if a post has a lot of upvotes, 0-3 comments, and seems to be on a technical subject.

"Highly technical articles often get a lot of upvotes with few comments as well."

I often wonder about this. Is it a sign, nobody reading it knows anything about it (noobs)? or is it a sign it's so specific there are few people who understand it. Either way you'd expect some questions and comments.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#118

Post by arikrak » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 1:35 PM UTC

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?

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#119

Post by shin_lao » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 1:44 PM UTC

In Steam there is something called "the review queue" to encourage you discover games you might like.

I think it would be possible to build review queues for user by listing stories positively correlated to stories you up-voted and even more correlated to stories you commented.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#120

Post by kcbanner » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 1:45 PM UTC

The way Slashdot worked when I last used it was cool. Regular visitors would be randomly granted 5 moderation points which could be used to either upvote, or downvote stories and comments. You had to give a reason for the vote (funny, interesting, off topic, etc)