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Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

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Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#71

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

sokoloff wrote: post #60
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #36

Site admins should "buy upvotes" a few times, at different hours of the day, and aggressively ban every account that's a repeat offender. But, really, upvotes are always easily exploitable and often lead to a sort of herd mentality among commenters. This is why Reddit is the definition of "echo chamber." HN is much better, but it would still be improved if upvotes and downvotes were done away with entirely.

I’m struggling to see how HN without voting would be anything other than a simple timeline of posts with comments. If you compare the level of “interestingness” of the front page and the first page of new, it’s night and day for me. I still go to new sometimes, but when I do, I feel like I’m doing community service to try to surface the most interesting items for the community.

I mostly meant "upvotes and downvotes on comments" -- as opposed to on topics -- but now I wonder if all upvotes and downvotes could be done away with. Perhaps there's a different way to gauge "interestingness," such as clickthrough rate and comment volume?

Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#72

Post by drumhead »

You also see it with certain companies that have a very active presence on HN. Any negative comment is downvoted aggressively. Downvoting on HN is rather uncommon, people tend to tell you why they disagree with you rather than vote you down. When it happens with some of these companies you never see that.

Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#74

Post by Mochsner »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #36

Site admins should "buy upvotes" a few times, at different hours of the day, and aggressively ban every account that's a repeat offender. But, really, upvotes are always easily exploitable and often lead to a sort of herd mentality among commenters. This is why Reddit is the definition of "echo chamber." HN is much better, but it would still be improved if upvotes and downvotes were done away with entirely.

Decentralized hackernews/reddit of the future (which can't do this) will need some sort of weighted vote system...

Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#75

Post by LexiMax »

sokoloff wrote: post #60
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #36

Site admins should "buy upvotes" a few times, at different hours of the day, and aggressively ban every account that's a repeat offender. But, really, upvotes are always easily exploitable and often lead to a sort of herd mentality among commenters. This is why Reddit is the definition of "echo chamber." HN is much better, but it would still be improved if upvotes and downvotes were done away with entirely.

I’m struggling to see how HN without voting would be anything other than a simple timeline of posts with comments. If you compare the level of “interestingness” of the front page and the first page of new, it’s night and day for me. I still go to new sometimes, but when I do, I feel like I’m doing community service to try to surface the most interesting items for the community.

> I’m struggling to see how HN without voting would be anything other than a simple timeline of posts with comments.

I feel like voting for the content itself but keeping the comments section flat and sorted by time would lead to less gamified and much better comments sections than what we have now.

Maybe keep upvotes around as a positive reinforcement without having an effect on the position of a comment, and obviously mod flagging for things that break rules, but upvoting and downvoting being equivalent to "I agree" and "I disagree" leads to users gaming the system to hide things they disagree with.

Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#76

Post by paxys »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #36

Site admins should "buy upvotes" a few times, at different hours of the day, and aggressively ban every account that's a repeat offender. But, really, upvotes are always easily exploitable and often lead to a sort of herd mentality among commenters. This is why Reddit is the definition of "echo chamber." HN is much better, but it would still be improved if upvotes and downvotes were done away with entirely.

Why do you think they'd use the same accounts every time?

Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#77

Post by plugin-baby »

drumhead wrote: post #72

You also see it with certain companies that have a very active presence on HN. Any negative comment is downvoted aggressively. Downvoting on HN is rather uncommon, people tend to tell you why they disagree with you rather than vote you down. When it happens with some of these companies you never see that.

> people tend to tell you why they disagree with you rather than vote you down

I’m not sure I agree with this. HN is probably better than most sites, but I frequently see gray comments with no responses.

Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#78

Post by SilasX »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #71
sokoloff wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m struggling to see how HN without voting would be anything other than a simple timeline of posts with comments. If you compare the level of “interestingness” of the front page and the first page of new, it’s night and day for me. I still go to new sometimes, but when I do, I feel like I’m doing community service to try to surface the most interesting items for the community.

I mostly meant "upvotes and downvotes on comments" -- as opposed to on topics -- but now I wonder if all upvotes and downvotes could be done away with. Perhaps there's a different way to gauge "interestingness," such as clickthrough rate and comment volume?

HN doesn't have downvotes on topics/submissions, which IMHO is part of the problem. You can only flag. But there are a lot of stories that don't rise to the level of "this is totally inappropriate/spam", but also aren't very good either.

In any case, I don't get the hate for comment up/downvotes: yes, some people will try to game it, but overall, it tends to get good stuff to the top, and is better than having to wade through comments randomly.

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