Blindly submitting content to HN, good or bad?

#1

Post by benologist » Sun, Jan 22, 2012, 4:40 PM UTC

I've noticed an account that's submitting 80+ stories a day all from generally liked sites.

I think it's bad, at the least it automatically pushes everyone else a 1/2 a dozen spots further down when another batch is dumped making it that much more unlikely someone else has a fair chance. It also reminds me of digg's 'power users' where a handful of people ended up dominating the site, this isn't happening right now but when you're submitting 10% of stories the front page will reflect that eventually.

But on the other hand some of the submissions would have been made regardless by other people.

Thoughts?

Re: Blindly submitting content to HN, good or bad?

#2

Post by collegeportalme » Sun, Jan 22, 2012, 4:48 PM UTC

Ha. This is a classic community phenomenon. You can also notice this in Foursquare, Twitter, and almost every other community based site. I think us as a community need to start encouraging progressive and meaningful arguments, rather than just the top news. I would like to come to HN to have a conversation/ discussion about something new rather than a link to NYT.

One idea would be to create separate sections for discussions, news, blog links, at all.

Re: Blindly submitting content to HN, good or bad?

#3

Post by pestaa » Sun, Jan 22, 2012, 4:52 PM UTC

collegeportalme wrote: post #2

Ha. This is a classic community phenomenon. You can also notice this in Foursquare, Twitter, and almost every other community based site. I think us as a community need to start encouraging progressive and meaningful arguments, rather than just the top news. I would like to come to HN to have a conversation/ discussion about something new rather than a link to NYT. One idea would be to create separate sections for di…

And how would that discourage the behavior of autosubmitting?

The speed in which new URLs are submitted by the same user should be limited according to their karma. (Assuming users with high points are trustworthy, which is the primary reason this metric is made for.)

Re: Blindly submitting content to HN, good or bad?

#4

Post by gvb » Sun, Jan 22, 2012, 5:07 PM UTC

80+ stories a day is excessive. I would be in favor of PG rate-limiting submissions.

If each article takes five minutes to read, it would take the submitter 6 hours 40 minutes(!) to read all the articles he submitted. This implies the submitter is not reading the articles before submission.

This worries me because it is indicating submission by quantity, not by quality, and the thing I love about HN is the quality of the submissions.

If some of the submissions would have been done by other people, that's fine. IMHO...

a) Don't hog the karma.

b) As pointed out by benologist, the weaker submissions would not have been submitted by others. The weaker submissions are therefore competing against other submissions that are more deserving of our attention, contributing to the dreaded "deterioration of HN quality."

Re: Blindly submitting content to HN, good or bad?

#5

Post by willdamas » Sun, Jan 22, 2012, 5:07 PM UTC

Agreed; surely there must be a limit on submissions per day?

Re: Blindly submitting content to HN, good or bad?

#6

Post by tokenadult » Sun, Jan 22, 2012, 5:08 PM UTC

Check the source code for news.arc

https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc

to see what is already done about this. The account submitting so many stories may decide to be more selective after considering the implications of site algorithms.

Re: Blindly submitting content to HN, good or bad?

#7

Post by brackin » Sun, Jan 22, 2012, 5:09 PM UTC

I definitely disagree with auto submitting but don't believe that Hacker News should be more locked down.

There is always a lot of complaints about content but there is an inherent system allowing posters to know what the mass wants rather than one commenter and making sure the best content rises.

Don't vote up anything you believe doesn't deserve to be on the front page or flag anything that deserves to be flagged. If there are very strict content guidelines some of the most interesting and obscure content won't be recommended for posting.

Re: Blindly submitting content to HN, good or bad?

#8

Post by benologist » Sun, Jan 22, 2012, 5:18 PM UTC

brackin wrote: post #7

I definitely disagree with auto submitting but don't believe that Hacker News should be more locked down. There is always a lot of complaints about content but there is an inherent system allowing posters to know what the mass wants rather than one commenter and making sure the best content rises. Don't vote up anything you believe doesn't deserve to be on the front page or flag anything that deserves to be flagged.…

Voting or not only addresses the person submitting a ton of content, it does nothing for all the stories prematurely bumped down to page 2 or 3 of the new section where they are effectively dead.

Re: Blindly submitting content to HN, good or bad?

#9

Post by Lewton » Sun, Jan 22, 2012, 5:29 PM UTC

I can't see any obvious disadvantages to having a set limit of, for example, 10 article submissions a day.

Re: Blindly submitting content to HN, good or bad?

#10

Post by SudarshanP » Sun, Jan 22, 2012, 5:33 PM UTC

tokenadult wrote: post #6

Check the source code for news.arc https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc to see what is already done about this. The account submitting so many stories may decide to be more selective after considering the implications of site algorithms.

Can some arc hacker explain the algorithm for the rest of us here. As far as I know the rank of post declines exponentially over time and improves with upvotes. Does the decay also depend upon the rate of submission and the points earned by previous submissions?