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Auto submission bots on Hacker News

jacquesmattheij.com

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Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#71

Post by jacquesm »

lwhi wrote: post #54

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.

Multiple submissions of the same link have the same effect as upvoting and once a thread is on the homepage it will gain a lot more views instantly, if only a small number of people on the homepage then gives it another upvote it is likely to hang around for a long time.

These are artifacts of the way the 'new' and the 'news' page work, the cumulative effect of those is larger than the actual quality of the submissions.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#72

Post by markkat »

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've built a HN-based site that uses karma as a currency, which I submitted a week ago, to little fanfare :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2359935

In the scheme I'm trying, it costs you karma to upvote or downvote, which gets converted to non-spendable clout. You get a small portion of karma everyday, which increases as you have more clout (and followers, another aspect I added). If you have spent all your karma, you cannot submit stories until you earn some. Here I was trying to limit the effect of users that are new, and of those that have not contributed appreciated content or comments.

That said, you've got me rethinking the idea of karma for submissions... It might be better to have submissions only increase clout. -Therefore, it will only slightly increase a user's karma-earning rate. Good comments will be the best way to get karma. Yes. I am going to try that. Thanks!

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#73

Post by mzl »

bm98 wrote: post #68
mzl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

OK, now I'm confused. The average karma on my HN profile is blank. After reading "hey, the average karma score is gone"[1] I thought that HN had done away with it, but now I see that pretty much everyone has an average karma except me. Could it be because I have only comments but no submissions? [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1944871

I don't have any submission either, so the presence of an average score shouldn't be affected by that.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#75

Post by RiderOfGiraffes »

bm98 wrote: post #68
mzl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

OK, now I'm confused. The average karma on my HN profile is blank. After reading "hey, the average karma score is gone"[1] I thought that HN had done away with it, but now I see that pretty much everyone has an average karma except me. Could it be because I have only comments but no submissions? [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1944871

It's limited by time and other factors. If you haven't commented on anything for a considerable time then there aren't enough values to average.

I think it works like this: Take the last N values from the last T time, discard the largest (and perhaps the smallest) and compute the average of what's left. If there aren't enough, don't bother.

For more details, read the code. It's available here somewhere ...

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#76

Post by gvb »

ricefield wrote: post #6

Maybe its about time HN had a CAPTCHA on their submit form.

Please, no.

a) It is hard enough to submit from a smartphone already. Much of my news browsing is on my phone while cooking and eating my breakfast.

b) Adding a CAPTCHA at this point seems like a big hammer to solve an small problem, one that was solved by jacquesm (at least this time) via a little detective work and personal contact (thanks for the deft handling of the situation, Jacques).

c) PG already does voting ring detection, it seems like autosubmitbots should be detectable too if this becomes a problem again.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#78

Post by mzl »

jasonkester wrote: post #40
mzl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

First, I hope my upvote just gave your average a bit of a boost. Second, you'll need to produce a bit more anger and irrationality before anybody starts labeling you as a troll :) Frankly, the only time I ever check anybody's profile is when they say something really valuable or really obnoxious. So by the time I get there I've pretty much made up my mind about the character of the individual in question. I can't ima…

Thanks. That comment was my biggest hitting one ever, so my average will probably jump quite a bit. Funny that it should be in a meta-karma thread.

I do see what you mean, I didn't think you were discarding comments from low karma commenters. I mostly wanted to bring up a point that is often missed in these discussions, that karma points might be very dependent on not only participation and quality, but on timing.

Given that using average karma as a filter is so blunt, an alternative way to express your method would be "I might see a high average karma as a reason to re-evaluate a comment that I initially discarded". Then it would be even harder to misconstrue into something sinister and karma elitist as I did :)

* Edit: from the comment below by mrduncan that shows how average calculation is done, my previous comment will not affect my average a lot. The max comment is sensibly ignored as a potential outlier.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#79

Post by bricestacey »

Udo wrote: post #55
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.

You can flag just about anything.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#80

Post by mhb »

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…

When will we see the first high frequency posting (HFP) bots physically located near the ISPs of popular authors?
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