Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

porter.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 176 posts

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#51

Post by Sealy »

Karma to me is my score. How well I'm doing and how respected I am in the community. At the moment I'm (proudly) on 517.

If my contributions are valuable. I will get upvotes. If they are not, then I won't. Without gaming the system, I believe this was by design (PG also shared this in a few of his earlier posts).

In reality. I'm always sharing links with the community of things I find interesting. My experience is that rewards for sharing links (upvote karma) seems to be very random, with stories I think are genuinely fresh, conceptually challenging and interesting getting far fewer upvotes then stories which I consider to be relatively dull.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#52

Post by SSLy »

digi_owl wrote: post #38
DigitalSea wrote: post #27

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…

Reddit is fudging displayed votes and shadowbanning (the poster can't tell he has been banned) for similar reasons, iirc.

The shadowbanned poster can tell he has been banned, sut by trying to view their profile as an logged out user. It will give a 404.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#54

Post by S4M »

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…

> 4. Users Gaming the system, be strictly banned for X Days and shown in different colors.

I don't think users gaming the system can be spotted so easily. Let's take an example: let's say both of us like Astronomy and post sometimes articles about spatial exploration. It is only natural that we would end up upvoting each others' submission, especially if we both like to check the new submissions and tend to read HN approximately at the same time. Users like I described could easily be mistaken by a voting ring detector.

By giving harsh penalties like you suggest to users who are gaming the system, you take a big risk to alienate people who simply have shared interests. I think the ranking algorithm of HN takes voting ring into account, so if you and I are part of a voting ring, our upvotes will impact less the standing of a page - I think I read about that somewhere but can't find the exact source.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#55

Post by Sealy »

mrmondo wrote: post #48
adieu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm...I'm running out of ideas. Which country are you in?

Australia - you could contact Cloudflare and let them know - they can shuffle the CDN if there is a dodgy node.

If you log into your Cloudflare you can perform a full cache flush very easily on your domain.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#56

Post by vacri »

For patterns like the last case in the article, all it takes is one browser-of-the-depths to link a story in an IRC chat, and a few more people to check it out and like it. It sounds like a standard pattern rather than cheating.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#57

Post by AlexMuir »

bootload wrote: post #49
AlexMuir wrote: post #24

(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…

"I don't feel anything has changed over that time." Approaching 3000 days on HN. The things I notice most: * increase in users has increased the churn rate of new submissions. * the new page is dead because of the submission rate. good stories disappear off the stack quickly. * the up-click is not a good indicator of story quality. I now see stories with up to 80 votes sans one comment. I used to read the comments BE…

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.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#59

Post by tux1968 »

bootload wrote: post #49
AlexMuir wrote: post #24

(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…

"I don't feel anything has changed over that time." Approaching 3000 days on HN. The things I notice most: * increase in users has increased the churn rate of new submissions. * the new page is dead because of the submission rate. good stories disappear off the stack quickly. * the up-click is not a good indicator of story quality. I now see stories with up to 80 votes sans one comment. I used to read the comments BE…

Excellent point. One (or two?) submissions per day for each user would be a reasonable restriction. Good stories will find their way here via someone else if my submission limit has already been reached..

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#60

Post by waterlesscloud »

There's a few factors other than vote totals and submission age at play, any/all of which could skew the results a fair amount.

1- Some source sites are penalized heavily. Sites with a history of low quality articles have built in negative modifiers (ie Gawker)

2- Posts with more comments than upvotes are penalized, on the theory that someone is flame warring in the comments. This actually seems to work out more accurately than you'd expect.

3- Flagging, which you don't see as a visible indicator until a story is dead. However, there's some threshhold beneath which it affects a story's ranking, but it hasn't yet killed the story.

And the mods sometimes manually tinker with stories they feel are / are not what they want on the site.

Post reply on HN