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Auto submission bots on Hacker News

jacquesmattheij.com

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Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#41

Post by wladimir »

bezidejni wrote: post #33
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…

I like the system on Reddit where link karma and comment karma is separated. That way, people whose main incentive to post links is to gain karma still get it, but it's also easy to see the karma gained on commenting. In my opinion, it's the best of both worlds.

That'd be ideal. Comment karma is so much harder to get than link karma. It makes sense to split the two.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#42

Post by Vivtek »

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…

I've discovered an elegant proof that HN is like Reddit, but ... oh, darn, that doesn't work online.

Maybe submission upvotes in a short time shouldn't front-page an item. I don't see why not putting these links on the news page should make a difference - if anything it would make it impossible to get non-bot upvotes, if I understand what you mean.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#43

Post by biot »

regularfry wrote: post #24
biot wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Someone who submits only for the karma can already make lots of mediocre submissions and boost their karma far more than under a logarithmic scale.

The only case I could see where your point is valid is if "karma abusers" withhold lower quality submissions in the hopes that they'll submit a really popular one. Do you know if they do this? Or am I misunderstanding the rationale?

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#44

Post by Vivtek »

raquo wrote: post #36
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…

Maybe we just need a submission to cost X karma points to the submitter. Then people would think harder before submitting.

That wouldn't work for bot-submission of Jacques' posts, though. Unless it cost 50 or 100 points, which would make HNN a much, much quieter place.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#45

Post by dhimes »

mzl wrote: post #34
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…

I seldom comment on HN, and when I do I typically do so in threads that are somewhat dormant, with little activity. I don't really care about karma/votes at all, I just say something when I think I have something of value to add. My comment average is 1.7, but I would still like to believe that I have yet to exhibit any behavior that I'm just angry at the world. I hope that I could still get yours or others attention…

Agreed. I find karma average of little interest. Unfortunately it does encourage a certain type of bad behavior in those who do. I can appreciate what pg is trying to achieve with it, but I don't think it's helped the site, and in fact has perhaps detracted from some conversations that "could have happened" except the people came late to the thread.

I personally sometimes won't bother commenting on a low comment simply because there is little chance of an interesting coversation happening there.

The other thing that's messed up now is duplicate submission. They should be forbidden again. Find a way to get the duped article to the front page if we're trying to make sure it's seen (maybe with a different decay constant), but allowing the resubmission takes away the original conversation.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#46

Post by RiderOfGiraffes »

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...

The very best submissions get virtually no discussion.

One measurement to make might be the votes divided by comments.

Let V = votes

Let C = comments

Let IT = 1.0

Let R = V/C

If R > IT then the article is "worth IT"

Let "the paper it's written on" be 0.1.

If R But all this is tinkering around the edges, and doesn't feel like it's significant. Perhaps a new model of how a site like this works at all is necessary.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#47

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#48

Post by roel_v »

roel_v wrote: post #20
edu wrote: post #8

It might be interesting to hide total karma score from users. I guess that if we don't know our total karma score the karma harvesting will stop but keep the points for submissions and comments so there's still the incentive to contribute good material (the pride of seeing your comment/submission being upvoted). What do you think? edit: the first version didn't make much sense, I got interrupted in the middle of the…

This is a lesson that was learned on Slashdot in 1999 already I think. A 'karma cap' makes perfect sense and the total karma wouldn't even have to be displayed to the user himself, to avoid karma whoring. What does it matter if someone has 1500 or 15000 karma? They've both proven to be contribute; maybe the one with the higher score just has more time, or a more popular opinion, or has been here longer. In the same v…

A small comment since people are upvoting and I did a rather meaningful edit: I wrote 'it's too easy to lose karma', but I meant (as was elaborated on in the rest of the sentence) that it's too hard to lose karma.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#49

Post by iwwr »

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #27
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.

If there's CAPTCHA, then submit an app that collects these images and sends them to your phone. Send back the answer to help the bot.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#50

Post by jacquesm »

Maybe a simple rule could be that if you run an undeclared bot on HN to auto submit stuff that you forfeit your account when you're detected, no matter who you are or what you've done.

That way we only get really clever bots that are indistinguishable from really good submitters.

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