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HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

porter.io

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Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#21

Post by iLoveApplePay »

I love abusing HN, and I do it all the time. Sometimes I almost feel guilty, but then I think - no. No I don't. I've been hellbanned so many times on HN for inexplicable reasons, that now I only want to manipulate it.

And therein lies the irony. Moderators have tried to surpress my honest views and insights by constantly hellbanning me, but I've only become more omnipresent on the site. It makes me laugh sometimes.

Karma and reputation is a trap. I'd much rather quietly and anonymously control the website's news agenda.

I know at least some of you can read this, so I'll leave this here.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#22

Post by mrmondo »

Joona wrote: post #10
mrmondo wrote: post #5

Trying to login to Porter.io via Github gives a Cloudflare error suggesting your server is down: Error 502 Ray ID: 1d351e9c19a519b6 • 2015-04-07 10:41:24 UTC Bad gateway

Here's an image of the post: http://i.imgur.com/zAbUck5.png

Thanks, that's helpful.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#23

Post by ledzep2 »

verroq wrote: post #17
chkuendig wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One Idea would be to increase the "gravity" effect on the frontpage: If it doesn't get the expected influx of votes in a short timeframe, drop it. Obviously still cheatable but would require more (i.e. easier to detect) votes.

What a great way of penalising posts that take a long time to read.

So maybe we should propose a new field which is the approx. time to finish reading when submitting a story.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#24

Post by AlexMuir »

(I have the 2nd story HN as I write this.)

I've had front page stories on HN maybe five or six times over the last couple of years. I don't feel anything has changed over that time. If you look at my submission history, you'll see about 90% of what I submit gets no votes. I once tried submitting a story a couple of times when I felt that it was getting less traction than expected - it made no difference.

I'm actually surprised at how well HN surfaces decent content (I'm quite happy to accept that my stuff which got no upvotes just wasn't of interest.) Whenever I put something up it gets about twenty eyeballs off the 'New' page so real people are looking at it.

I can say for sure that I don't have any friends with HN accounts (much to my disappointment!) and I've never tried to game it.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#25

Post by mintplant »

Lewton wrote: post #18

Most of these can be explained by the fact that submitting the same article as someone else counts as upvoting the first submission. It makes sense to me that submissions comes in waves (as several HN'ers could find articles they find HN worthy through other channels at the same time) I am sure that some manipulation happens (I imagine a lot of people use their network to ask for upvotes to their submissions if it's…

I also wonder if caching has some sort of influence. Maybe the spikes in the data are when the score is updated after a while of remaining static. The variation in this could have something to do with load levels on the site.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#27

Post by DigitalSea »

I honestly suspected some form of this happening to some extent. I did not realise the extent of the suspected cheating, but it does remind me of the old days of Digg.

I recall Digg had a massive "digg brigade" problem where certain groups of users and particular power users like MrBabyMan would make the homepage on what felt like a daily basis. Solving these kinds of problems is a lot harder than just analysing data and looking for patterns, because sometimes innocent users can get caught up in data.

If solving cheating on social link submission sites was easy, it would have been solved already. Even Reddit suffers from the same issues.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#28

Post by solve »

Alternatively - the votes aren't being manipulated, the rankings are. HN has the most manipulated rankings of any reddit clone. The rankings are changed for all kinds of reasons other than just points and spam flags.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#29

Post by drpgq »

tormeh wrote: post #19
zongitsrinzler wrote: post #13

This just in: You need a boost to get to HN frontpage!

Or your link could be about inequality, net neutrality, spying, self-improvement or a hot language/framework. HN has pretty predictable interests.

Lately everything deep learning seems to get upvoted, even rather mediocre stuff. I like deep learning and certainly think it is interesting but it is getting ridiculous.
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