HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can • Hacker News Board

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#61

Post by kyrra » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 11:50 AM UTC

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…

Another good part of HN is active[0] which is not linked on the top bar. It shows the most active topics by comment count. Useful for finding topics with lots of discussion.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/active

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#62

Post by dhimes » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 11:56 AM UTC

jsnell wrote: post #9

The mysterious case is probably manual moderator intervention to re-surface good articles that got lost in /newest. So basically a one-time 5 point boost (just to the article score, not to submitter karma), enough to give it a second chance on the front page for half an hour or so. (I might be wrong on this, but it definitely should not be taken as a sign of cheating. It happens way to often, with links that have no…

It could also have surfaced in a different media outlet, prompting many to see it for the first time. For example, some article comes out and gets submitted, but the submission dies out. Then a blogger or news site mentions is, and people re-submit the article to HN all in a short time (but much later than the original submission)- which counts as an upvote.

Also, the first abnormal result the OP was talking about 3 votes. I don't think we can worry about a handful of people voting for their own startup submission. The first, "normal" graph had hundreds of votes.

I think my takeaway from all of this is that, like other statistics, with small numbers the values have little meaning. Now if we had seen evidence of, say, 25 or 50 people working together (a few people with multiple accounts each, for instance), then that would be more actionable evidence. But my guess is that pg has already dealt with that problem, and apparently pretty effectively, because it's not showing up here.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#63

Post by danmaz74 » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 11:56 AM UTC

elmin wrote: post #40

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've had your experience, but I've also had the experience of content which has been posted multiple times suddenly skyrocketing to the frontpage. I wouldn't be so quick to think that the fickleness you experience is your content's fault. In my experience so few people visit the /newest page, and so few in general vote, that there is a disturbing amount of chance involved.

I can attest to the chance factor - some times I reposted a story that wasn't picked up, and the second time it got picked up.

That was long enough ago though, don't know how much has changed since - and I submit stories very rarely.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#64

Post by reitanqild » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 11:58 AM UTC

butwhy wrote: post #58

adieu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How much compute power do you need to add an email address to a database?

I guess this would be a good example of the "gratuitous negativity" that was on the frontpage the last few days?

While there seems to be something funny going on it is most likely something more than just adding an email address to a database.

When I was younger this was how I though. After maintaining and interfacing a few applications over the last few years I am a whole lot less annoying I hope.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#65

Post by aunty_helen » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 11:59 AM UTC

6 of the top 10 articles at the time of writing are corporate news sources (sciencedaily, nytimes, washingtonpost, cbc, bbc, medium).

I don't have any data but I would be interested to know if these companies are gaming the system. It sure would be in their best interest and I can't help but shake the feeling that they are after looking at the front page sometimes.

It would be good to get a 'hail corporate' button / profile setting that could toggle some of these domains from your front page.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#66

Post by danmaz74 » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 12:02 PM UTC

> This chart looks perfectly normal since the green line is smooth and the blue line is relatively stable.

The first chart goes to over 1,000 votes. The other ones stay one or two orders of magnitude lower. Cheating or not, it's absolutely normal that a stochastic phenomenon looks smooth when there are many events, and not smooth when there are few of them.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#67

Post by DanBC » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 12:05 PM UTC

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…

There are a few people who make very many submissions. Some people submit more than 2 stories per day, every day. And those are often duplicates-but-different source of other articles already on HN.

Better enforcement of the deeply interesting guideline would help but stories that are intensely interesting get many upvotes so it's unlikely to change.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#68

Post by reitanqild » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 12:07 PM UTC

waterlesscloud wrote: post #60

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 accu…

> on the theory that someone is flame warring in the comments.

... one mans flamewar seems to be another mans: it takes a few tries to explain this.

I'm find HN is very civilized. On other forums I see people talking about nuking entire counties, calling each other names etc all while posting under a full, real life names.

The thing that bugs me at HN (except interesting content disappearing like this post describes) is anonymous downvotes, - and mostly not because they hit me (usually they don't do : ) but because so often they are so obviously a result of political correctness and groupthink that it hurts.

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#69

Post by inthewoods » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 12:08 PM UTC

"These two stories are submitted at almost the same time. The first one failed to reach front page even after more than 10 upvotes. And the second one got on front page after 2 upvotes. This indicates the first one is very likely to be a failed attempt to cheat which got detected by the system."

Why does it indicate cheating? Couldn't it just mean that there is a variable that you are not accounting for in the ranking algorithm?

Re: HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

#70

Post by freefromgoogle » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 12:09 PM UTC

Any story about Google on HN or reddit will be heavily manipulated.

Just look at the abnormal vote patterns on stupid stories concerning Google...they've mastered the art of getting their shit on social media.

Unfortunately the masses are too stupid to tell and Google continues to destroy freedom on the WWW by curating the WWW and controlling what is seen and what is not.

Google killed the free(libre) WWW and now it's their ad crap box.