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Auto submission bots on Hacker News

jacquesmattheij.com

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Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#21

Post by DanielBMarkham »

barrkel wrote: post #17
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #5

I had somebody recently launch into me with a vitriolic attack on HN (they deleted the comment almost immediately) which started with something like "I know you probably think you're special, what with 18K karma and all, but..." People take this karma thing waaaay too seriously. I know I find the site dangerously distracting, and a large part of that is watching the up or downvotes on my comments -- it's kind of a re…

The karma matters precisely because it can't be bought (not in any ordinary way, at least). It represents peer acclaim (or conformity to groupthink). If it was bought and sold, the basis for its value would evaporate.

Maybe so.

Or maybe it just represents "points" -- little cookies -- for the user. You can never have too many cookies.

I don't know. That's why I suggested the experiment.

I think the idea that it represents peer acclaim is not very useful, at least to me. I've heard other high karma folks say (and I agree) that probably more than anything it just represents spending too much time online.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#22

Post by oreilly »

mryall wrote: post #15
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…

Surfacing good links is part of the attraction of HN. Taking away the karma benefit for link sharing would lessen the incentive to share articles that don't actually need any discussion.

Change the ratio - rather then 1:1, give less points for an article submission and more for meaningful comments.

Jasonkeste's idea for tying reputation to comments could be done with an icon. Our (New Zealand's) equivalent of ebay does this quite well.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#23

Post by rbanffy »

oreilly wrote: post #22
mryall wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surfacing good links is part of the attraction of HN. Taking away the karma benefit for link sharing would lessen the incentive to share articles that don't actually need any discussion.

Change the ratio - rather then 1:1, give less points for an article submission and more for meaningful comments. Jasonkeste's idea for tying reputation to comments could be done with an icon. Our (New Zealand's) equivalent of ebay does this quite well.

Lately, I see we don't give points for meaningfulness more than for popularity.

Perhaps we could measure meaningfulness by the size of the tree of replies and assign karma according to that. That would even solve the post-to-upvote ratio problem.

I just don't know what to do with the downvote-for-disagreement thing. Not everyone regard it as a problem, but I'm not sure I agree.

Maybe Slashdot-style metamoderation...

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#24

Post by regularfry »

biot wrote: post #16
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…

> Any chance we can disassociate upvotes on articles from user karma? Or consider making it logarithmic. Something like pi * log(x) is geeky and would reward a good submission without going overboard.

That would reward making lots of mediocre submissions more than few good ones. I know which way round I'd prefer.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#25

Post by yuvadam »

oreilly wrote: post #22
mryall wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surfacing good links is part of the attraction of HN. Taking away the karma benefit for link sharing would lessen the incentive to share articles that don't actually need any discussion.

Change the ratio - rather then 1:1, give less points for an article submission and more for meaningful comments. Jasonkeste's idea for tying reputation to comments could be done with an icon. Our (New Zealand's) equivalent of ebay does this quite well.

Stack Overflow does this nicely - 5 points for a question upvote, 10 points for an answer upvote.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#26

Post by RiderOfGiraffes »

FWIW, I was one of the people running a bot to auto-submit. I've always been a big-iron algorithms programmer, and I've never done much web programming, and certainly never programmed an auto-submitter before. Since I figured most of Jacques' idle thoughts were worth more than half the things making it to the Front Page, I figured it was an ideal time to learn a little about the back-n-forth of a form submission system with cookies, and to see (a) what I could learn, (b) how quickly I could learn it, and (c) how little code it took.

So it was an interesting experiment, I'm glad I did it, I'm pleased I learned something from it, and I'm sorry it seems to have caused Jacques some grief.

For that I apologise unreservedly. We have had a chat off-line and I believe there's no on-going problem. I have, of course, disabled the bot.

But the questions raised are interesting. I suggest that the "first submitter gets all the karma" situation means that people submit without thinking, worried that unless they do so they will miss out on that one item that earns gobs of karma, that they saw first, but didn't submit quickly enough.

Just sharing the karma between submitters won't work, because then if someone sees something gaining traction they just submit it themselves and share in the imaginary profits. Simple, clean, clear solution that's wrong.

No solutions, just problems.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#27

Post by RiderOfGiraffes »

ricefield wrote: post #6

Maybe its about time HN had a CAPTCHA on their submit form.

A CAPTCHA? In a forum for Hackers?

Hmm ... interesting ...

ADDED IN EDIT: HN voting makes me laugh sometimes - I have no idea why this got a downvote. Thank you - made my day.

This is not, let me hasten to add, a request for more. Some things are funny just the once. More than that and I'll really start to question my understanding of the world, let alone just the HN community.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#28

Post by robryan »

jacquesm wrote: post #10
mryall wrote: post #3

Jacques, perhaps you could configure your blog so you can choose to submit your own posts automatically to HN when you post them? That might reduce the tendency of people to try to rush and post them first, assuming the majority of posts are actually suitable for posting here. I don't think you should worry too much about it either. Your posts seem to keep gathering a high number of votes whenever they appear on HN,…

I understand your intentions but I don't think that's a good solution because it will still submit items to the 'news' page that are not always 'up to standards', giving them at least one upvote. That's roughly 25% of what's needed to get an item to the homepage, so only 3 more (bot)votes and it's done, once an article hits the homepage it is likely to stay there for a while. All this would do is add one more bot to…

It is interesting that you have the reverse problem of most people that want to draw attention to things on HN. Maybe you should start selling guest spots on your blog :P

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#29

Post by wladimir »

rbanffy wrote: post #23
oreilly wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Change the ratio - rather then 1:1, give less points for an article submission and more for meaningful comments. Jasonkeste's idea for tying reputation to comments could be done with an icon. Our (New Zealand's) equivalent of ebay does this quite well.

Lately, I see we don't give points for meaningfulness more than for popularity. Perhaps we could measure meaningfulness by the size of the tree of replies and assign karma according to that. That would even solve the post-to-upvote ratio problem. I just don't know what to do with the downvote-for-disagreement thing. Not everyone regard it as a problem, but I'm not sure I agree. Maybe Slashdot-style metamoderation...

Judging meaningfulness by the size of the tree won't work. Looking at which threads have a large number of replies, that's more of an indicator of controversialness.
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