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Hacker News Data Analysis

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Re: Hacker News Data Analysis

#71

Post by awolf »

cm wrote: post #70
pg wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can never be certain about something like a voting ring detector, but I'm pretty sure not.

I work with robertjmoore. I, along with a few other colleagues at our small office, voted for his past three blog posts. Many of those votes probably came from our single office IP address. Many were probably also placed after clicking a direct link to the HN posting. There couldn't have been more than about 10 votes like this, because we don't have many employees. And, in the interest of full disclosure, I don't vot…

Just my opinions here:

>Is this the behavior that HN's vote ring detector is trying to discourage?

I hope so. It's great and all that you have 10 people to vote up an article as soon as its posted... but I don't. Shouldn't the content be voted up based on its own merits vs. how many people you know? An instant 10 votes is a huge unfair advantage.

> if so, it's too bad, because quality content like robertjmoore's last three posts is getting lost

If the problem is the content getting "lost" because you guys are voting up the articles... then stop doing that. If the content is vote-worthy it will get votes.

Additional comment: sure, I get that this wasn't clear to you guys... but come on. On some level you can see how this would be unfair- right?

Re: Hacker News Data Analysis

#72

Post by thaumaturgy »

cm wrote: post #70
pg wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can never be certain about something like a voting ring detector, but I'm pretty sure not.

I work with robertjmoore. I, along with a few other colleagues at our small office, voted for his past three blog posts. Many of those votes probably came from our single office IP address. Many were probably also placed after clicking a direct link to the HN posting. There couldn't have been more than about 10 votes like this, because we don't have many employees. And, in the interest of full disclosure, I don't vot…

I would like to continue seeing high-quality content on the front page too. However, upvoting submissions based solely on the author is poor form. Submissions should live or die on their quality alone.

Giving a "boost" to your friend or colleague, even though your intentions are good, is unfair to other submitters.

Re: Hacker News Data Analysis

#73

Post by javajosh »

I have to shake my head in admiration. What a powerful story - to start with not one failure, but three failures, and then to use the same tool you were trying to hock in those failures to figure out why you failed...and then, remarkably (at least for me) succeed wildly.

At least in this case, your tool provided some very valuable insight.

Re: Hacker News Data Analysis

#74

Post by Centigonal »

nealabq wrote: post #47
cs702 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be curious to see how 'meta-submissions' (i.e., posts about Hacker News itself, about Y-Combinator, and about YC-backed startups) rank in the charts versus the five categories shown in the rjmetrics blog post. (The blog post, which made it to the top of the HN front page, is itself a meta-submission!)

The HN Community is fascinated by the outside view of HN and eagerly gazes at the held-up mirror. One of our shared interests is emerging online social structure, of which we're an example. We're also attracted to self referential expression, such as HN comments about HN self-organization, HN self-policing, and HN self-referential comments.

People generally seem to be drawn in by meta-content, self-reference, recursion and the like. Remember how people went crazy about the central premise of "Inception?"

Self-referential comments do, however, have a tendency to derail conversation from that which is being discussed. In a threaded comment system, that tends to garner frustration after the initial novelty of the ideas has worn off. Case in point: Reddit has a weird attitude toward self-reference. Over the last year or so, there's been a (personally perceived) decline in self-referential memes, and redditors seem to see it as derivative now.

Re: Hacker News Data Analysis

#75

Post by capkutay »

These are excellent visualizations, I'm glad they put this together, showed it to the hn community while also demonstrating one of rj metrics use cases.

A note about the product. How do they differentiate themselves from other DW analytics companies like datameer? (http://www.datameer.com/) I can tell they specialize in e-commerce, but couldn't any DW analytics service give you that AND more?

Re: Hacker News Data Analysis

#76

Post by msellout »

jcr wrote: post #64
pg wrote: post #57

Actually the reason his posts stopped making it to the frontpage is that the last 3 before this all set off the voting ring detector. I don't know how accurate his other conclusions are, but it seems unlikely that new signups are down, considering the trend in traffic: http://www.archub.org/hntraffic-17oct12.png

I've never before gotten to see data like this from a popular website, so my questions might be a bit ignorant or naive. Do popular sites normally have the big (daily?/weekly?) swings seen in the HN traffic data? Have you done any research correlating the high/low days versus the submissions present on those days? (i.e. are the swings content driven?)

Most websites are busier during the week, while we are all procrastinating at work.

Re: Hacker News Data Analysis

#79

Post by Smcavinney »

capkutay wrote: post #75

These are excellent visualizations, I'm glad they put this together, showed it to the hn community while also demonstrating one of rj metrics use cases. A note about the product. How do they differentiate themselves from other DW analytics companies like datameer? ( http://www.datameer.com/ ) I can tell they specialize in e-commerce, but couldn't any DW analytics service give you that AND more?

I work at RJMetrics, thanks for the feedback. While we specialize in e-commerce, we have many clients that are outside of that industry. As robertjmoore demoed in the post, we can take almost any data you can throw at us, and help you find actionable insights in easy to understand charts.
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