Auto submission bots on Hacker News • Hacker News Board

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#51

Post by Tycho » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 11:32 AM UTC

It kind if seems like a false alarm if one of the botters was just RiderOfGiraffes (whose motives I don't suspect), and there was only one other person, possibly equally innocent.

One would hope nobody here is irrational enough to seek 'easy/automatic' karma ... I mean the nice thing about karma for submissions is it's basically a whole lot of smart people saying 'well done for finding this, it's definitely valuable.' If there's no real finding involved then what's the point? You're the only person your karma matters to.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#52

Post by redthrowaway » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 11:40 AM UTC

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #46

rbanffy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"The very best submissions get virtually no discussion."

I'm not sure I agree with you on that. The best stories produce a high volume of high-quality discussion. Your proposed algo punishes submissions that generate discussion, which seems to be the opposite of what's desirable.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#53

Post by _pius » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 11:42 AM UTC

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…

You haven't really contributed anything valuable, since good articles tend to find their way here on their own.

Most people submit articles in some part because they receive karma points for interesting submissions. It's not just by magic that good articles "tend to find their way here."

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#54

Post by lwhi » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 11:43 AM UTC

Maybe the problem is people upvoting uninteresting articles.

Without wanting to be mean, it's kind of crazy that this meta-discussion about someone's inability to remain off the HN scoreboard is number one right now.

Sycophantism and idle self-promotion are boring pursuits.

EDIT: I think we should be able to down-vote uninteresting articles.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#55

Post by Udo » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 11:46 AM UTC

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…

Submitting good articles is definitely of value, so HN should give out Karma for it. However, I believe because articles cannot be downvoted, there is no risk involved for spam bots and spammy humans alike. The solution seems simple: allow downvoting on articles that are younger than one hour. And add captcha for submissions.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#56

Post by jacquesm » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 11:47 AM UTC

jacques_chester wrote: post #30

A related idea I've been toying with is "karmic arbitrage": auto-submitting posts that have been upvoted at proggit and vice versa.

please don't.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#57

Post by Tibbes » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 11:49 AM UTC

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.

Indeed: to reward quality over quantity you'd need to use a function such as x^2, or probably x^2/C for some constant C.

Interestingly, Oxford University used to mark final exams for Mathematics and associated schools (such as Computer Science) in this way. Questions would typically start with parts that were largely "book work" and move on to parts that required more careful thought. In addition, you could answer as many questions as you like. Therefore, to avoid people getting lots of marks by just answering all the book work, the papers were scored by squaring the scores for each question and then summing those squares.

That is: overall_score = sum(q in Questions | score(q)^2)

This practice stopped in ~2003 (now you can still answer as many as you like, but the mark for the paper is the sum of your top 3 marks for individual questions, so it's only really worth answering 3 as well as you can).

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#58

Post by leon_ » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 11:49 AM UTC

Ironic. I always assumed jacquesmattheij.com would be such a bot submission. Every day a new post from that blog in the tops :)

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#59

Post by shrikant » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 11:49 AM UTC

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #26

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 syst…

I came here to this thread only to say this:

When reading Jacques' post on his blog, I immediately thought RiderOfGiraffes must be up to one of his social experiments with the community.

FWIW, I find your 'work' interesting and the chilled out approach to it, doubly so.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#60

Post by SeanDav » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 11:55 AM UTC

Would have been extremely ironic if this post had been submitted by a bot!

My vote/suggestion is to hide Karma from all users once it reaches a fairly low cap. I know I am in a minority here but to me personally Karma beyond the level needed to downvote and basic functionality is hardly an issue.