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Auto submission bots on Hacker News

jacquesmattheij.com

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Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#81

Post by Udo »

bricestacey wrote: post #79
Udo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not enough. It's not enough to be able to kill a link, there should be a disincentive to having posted it in the first place.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#82

Post by mrduncan »

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #75
bm98 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

From the last release of news.arc (which may have been a while ago but should be somewhat close to what news.yc is running):

    ; Ignore the most recent 5 comments since they may still be gaining votes.  
    ; Also ignore the highest-scoring comment, since possibly a fluff outlier.
https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc#L2301

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#83

Post by bmelton »

Vivtek wrote: post #44
raquo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we just need a submission to cost X karma points to the submitter. Then people would think harder before submitting.

That wouldn't work for bot-submission of Jacques' posts, though. Unless it cost 50 or 100 points, which would make HNN a much, much quieter place.

Amen?

Perhaps you could implement a cost-refund system where it costs x karma to submit an article. If that article receives x number of upvotes, then you get them all back -- otherwise, they're gone.

For each subsequent article following a situation in which you did not get refunded, the cost doubles.

So, the scenario would be like this:

- new users can submit articles after they've attained 5 karma points, which are spent upon submission.

- If the article gets upvoted 5 times, the karma is refunded, and the cost is still 5 karma to submit.

- If the article does not get upvoted 5 times (or is flagged more than upvoted, or whatever) then the user loses the karma cost, and their next submission costs 10 karma. If the user doesn't have 10 karma, they can't submit.

There is a low entry cost, and good submissions aren't penalized, while bad or negative submissions are penalized progressively. There is no point at which the user is 'banned', but they have to earn progressively more and more karma to keep submitting. For high-karma users, this should allow them the luxury of gambling some karma on things they want shown, while lower-karma members have to be more mindful of whether they think this is worth gambling their karma on.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#84

Post by jarek »

gregschlom wrote: post #19
guelo wrote: post #13

Didn't pg admit that he uses karma as a criteria in evaluating yc applications? If so that was just an invitation to a bunch of smart hackers to try to game the system.

No, he said that karma as nothing to do with YC application, but that if he sees an application from a user that he knows from HN to be a smart guy, he will look at it more specifically. In other words, interesting, on-topic, and frequent comments are important, not your absolute karma number, even though of course you're likely to have a high karma if you're a frequent poster of good comments. That's also why the av…

> interesting, on-topic, and frequent comments

submitted early during a discussion's lifecycle

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#85

Post by Herwig »

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…

However the system relies on upvotes to see good articles from the bad ones. So the system would still rely on upvotes but perhaps not give karma? #my2cents

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#86

Post by silverskein »

bmelton wrote: post #83
Vivtek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wouldn't work for bot-submission of Jacques' posts, though. Unless it cost 50 or 100 points, which would make HNN a much, much quieter place.

Amen? Perhaps you could implement a cost-refund system where it costs x karma to submit an article. If that article receives x number of upvotes, then you get them all back -- otherwise, they're gone. For each subsequent article following a situation in which you did not get refunded, the cost doubles. So, the scenario would be like this: - new users can submit articles after they've attained 5 karma points, which ar…

The problem is that increasing costs for unpopular content doesn't necessarily mean that your content was bad, just that people weren't paying attention to it. If you're ahead of a tech curve, that doesn't mean your contributions are bad per se. It means that other people didn't appreciate them at the time.

So if you do implement a system like that you're basically codifying the herd mentality much more strictly than it probably should be.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#87

Post by raganwald »

I used to encounter what I thought might be bots auto-submitting my old raganwald blog to reddit. The only person losing karma was me, since I no longer got to submit my articles at a time when they were interesting to reddit's readership. Big whoop!

My thinking is that if I write and give my work away, it is no longer up to me to decide how it is to be used. That's because my words are free as in speech, not just free as in beer. Of course, copyright violations are a different matter, but I can't tell people whether to submit a post to HN, I can't tell people whether to bookmark it, or tweet it, or whether to use it as part of a corpus on guessing the sex of the author.

If there's a race for meaningless karma by bot authors, that is irrelevant to me as an author. IF it is a problem--and I do not grant that it is a problem--THEN it is HN's problem, not my problem as an author.

I give my words away. That inevitably means someone will use it in a way I didn't intend. That's the point.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#88

Post by krschultz »

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…

Also: why does anyone care about kharma? I look at votes on a comment or an article, but I don't really care how much kharma any person has. Do people really look at it as something to maximize?

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#89

Post by raganwald »

jacquesm wrote: post #50

Maybe a simple rule could be that if you run an undeclared bot on HN to auto submit stuff that you forfeit your account when you're detected, no matter who you are or what you've done. That way we only get really clever bots that are indistinguishable from really good submitters.

Why? I haven't read a good argument against bots. Your article doesn't present an argument that HN is harmed. I haven't read a good argument that anyone is harmed.

If a bot had its own novelty account, say "ragnawald_speaks" that submitted everything I wrote, what would be the harm to HN?

People keep talking about "spam." How is it spam if a bot submits an article that has an excellent chance of making it to the top ten? That's the opposite of spam, it's all signal and very little noise. If people think that a bot auto-submitting a feed with excellent signal is spam, then I have something very serious to tell them: humans are pattern-matching machines too.

Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News

#90

Post by jcdreads »

What happens if blogging tools become their own HN post bots?

The last few Dave Winer posts I've seen here have been submitted by davewiner. Since he's a dude who rolls his own blogging tools, I'd be not at all surprised to find that he wired up the ability to simultaneously publish and post a link to HN.

I can see good reasons for doing this for one's own blog, but if this practice were widespread or built into normal people's blogging tools then it would (among other things) cause the "new" page here to be useless.

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