Ask HN: Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1035206

by jacquesm • 17 years ago

60 111 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

It seems a rethorical question, but apparently it needs asking because it seems to be that this is not clear to some.

Because it isn't mentioned in the guidelines this is looked upon as a 'loophole' and some people use this to boost submissions to the new page.

So, what is your take on this?

mixmax• 17 years ago

I would say absolutely not.

Submissions should be voted up based on their own merits, not on how many friends you happen to have on HN to help you. This, as far as I know, is an ongoing problem at sites like Digg where it is reportedly almost impossible to get on the frontpage without being a member of some kind of voting ring, or having the right connections.

I hope we're above that.

icey5• 17 years ago

I've mentioned this a few times before, but I really wish votes here were public information.

Mark_B2• 17 years ago

While a public voting record may work for members of congress, I can't see how that would help. If anything else, I would be strongly discouraged from voting on any submission if it might result in my being judged because of it.

icey5• 17 years ago

I never really thought about people getting judged based on the submissions they've voted for - are you concerned about people coming back with "Mark_B, you voted up that posting by Arrington, so I think you're a talentless hack" or something like that?

angelbob• 17 years ago

Seems like a bad idea to encourage such things.

Panoramix• 17 years ago

I agree. I used to think that this kind of behavior had no place in this forum. I was scared yesterday, when I noticed that hn had 4 front-page stories in common with reddit. Perhaps limiting the number of votes a user gets would make a difference?

adityakothadiya• 17 years ago

Ideally it's not. But I've seen all YC alumni and founders upvote all other YC company related posts within very short amount of time. Just add (YC Year) in subject line, and it gets an upvote from other YC fellow.

I guess everything is fair in love, war and marketing (your startup or you). :)

wgj• 17 years ago

How do you know who's upvoting those submissions?

wglb• 17 years ago

Well, I am not YC alum nor applicant, but those headlines catch my eye, because they are invariably good and worth the read. They are the core of the content that I look for when I come to HN. And quite often I like them enough to give them a vote.

Perceval4• 17 years ago

This kind of behavior is exactly what made Digg the useless oligarchy of content promotion that it is.

I think asking other people to vote your favored story to the front page is really an exercise in egotism, and it kinda misses the point. If other people are interested, your story will make it to the front page on merit.

If other people aren't interested, why would one force it to the front page? For what? So that people can see it and skip over it and not discuss it and wish something more interesting were on the front page?

I hope it doesn't come to the same measures that Digg tried (and mostly failed) to implement, with algorithmic detection of rigged voting and banning of people doing scripted submissions and votes.

lincolnq• 17 years ago

Hang on, though. What if I don't even have to ask?

I know that I tend to upvote people more often who I know (even without them asking). Is that bad / immoral?

If you say yes, then it's very important to come up with an answer for "what's an upvote supposed to mean?" If you don't think I should be allowed to upvote people because I know them, you can no longer say that the rule is "I was interested in this story" but instead "I think the HN community would be interested in this story".

But that's asking for trouble, because everybody has their own crazy views on what HN should be (see the periodic threads on how HN is offtopic, or too big, or not as cool as it used to be).

alanthonyc• 17 years ago

Upvote based on the content of the link, not the person/persona behind it.

If we focus on quality (regardless of your specific definition of quality), then it can only improve the site.

If a personal friend of mine submitted a crap comment, I would downvote. Crap site, flag.

EDIT: And I upvoted you because you asked a useful question that would bring up good conversation, although obviously I disagree with your stance.

sophacles5• 17 years ago

This sort of brings up an interesting idea: perhaps anonymous story posting is something to consider? I have no problem voting comments up based on the strength/personality of the commenter, past discourse colors current interpretation of the comment. However with stories, maybe upvoting on a person's character is not so wanted/warranted?

Edit: The more I think on this, the less I'm sure it would fix anything -- those who want their story upvoted because it is to their own site would not care about credit. Also it opens up various gaming opportunities not previously present.

josefresco• 17 years ago

The guidelines don't address upvotes in particular but if we are to assume that on-topic generally equals upvote then I think the guidelines spell it out well. I don't see an "I" in there anywhere or reference to submitter.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mace• 17 years ago

I wonder what would happen if the username of the submitter hidden or obfuscated for a few days?

My guess is that more interesting stories would end up on the homepage for a little while.

Splines• 17 years ago

That doesn't really solve the problem of rigged up-voting (it does solve the problem of blind up-voting of celebrity submissions).

I think removing permalinks from new submissions could help - the only way you could upvote new submissions would be to have them organically show up on your list. Still could be gamed though.

Might be too much trouble for what it's worth, though. It turns into a cat-and-mouse game.

tjic• 17 years ago

> If other people are interested, your story will make it to the front page on merit. > > If other people aren't interested

Just a point of information: this is basically the "efficient market hypothesis" in another form.

I agree that the market is more efficient than any other alternative, but I do not think that the market is perfect, or that HN upvotes/downvotes are perfect.

In general, markets are better the more liquid they are, and the more people are involved.

I think that NEW topics submitted to HN are viewed by very few people, and the result from the first few people upvoting a new topic can be HUGE, in that there's a feedback effect - they are exposed to new viewers the higher they rise.

It would be quite interesting to do an A/B test at HN, where some topic that is of middlin' interest is introduced: half the viewers seen version A of HN where the topic is introduced at a karma of 1, and the other half of the viewers see version B of HN where the same topic, under a different name, is introduced at a karma of 10.

If you ran this test 20 times I'd be amazed if the highest karma that the article got was similar even 70% of the time.

olalonde• 17 years ago

An interesting solution would be to randomly chose which stories a given user sees in the New section.

sophacles5• 17 years ago

I've done some experiments, it seems to me that the first vote is critical, and that it should occur w/in 10 - 20 minutes of posting a story. Otherwise the story just won't get noticed. I've seen this with submissions many time, and in fact have intentionally voted up a "worse" version of a story to test this. Turns out the upvoted version gains the momentum most of the time, even when the other story is better written or has more detail, or whatever.

Now whether or not it is ethical is different, but it seems to me that this general behaviour of how stories go would suggest a single "friend vote" at the right time carries more weight than having friends cheat anyway. So the question becomes: if I post something to HN, then link a friend to my HN posting, instead of a direct link, is it ethical since I know he will probably vote up the HN post.

Edit: another question that arrises... many of my freinds and I link each other constantly in private communications, does moving part of this to HN constitute an ethical dilemma since there is now voting and a larger audience invovled? Part of me says no, as those articles are interesting to us anyway, hence the linking, and the upvote is just a formalization of that...

jxcole• 17 years ago

I have visitor tracking on my site and I have submitted several articles that no one has even glanced at.

There are two ways to over step this problem: One is to get an immediate upvote to your story. This will at least get you noticed.

The other is to title your article with something that seems to defy reality or be very unlikely. "Google sucks at search", no matter what the argument, is sure to get a lot of clicks. My theory is that people want to read the article to refute it (there are also a lot of google bashers around).

alain94040• 17 years ago

We all agree that merit should be the ultimate judge. And I have experienced it myself: great posts I submit will rise on their own, not so good ones will linger.

However: without the initial boost of making it to the home page, great posts tend to die off and don't even get a chance to win on merit.

Some data to confirm my point: my submissions typically either get 1 vote (mine), no matter how good they are, or get from 10 to 30 votes, based on their merit. There is no middle ground.

So I find it a little bit naive to believe that merit alone will win the day. On the other hand, as everyone else said, I don't want HN to turn into guild of ringers...

mcantor3• 17 years ago

It does seem to me that those vital first 10 minutes disproportionately affect a submission's life expectancy.

hugh_• 17 years ago

Perhaps solutions should be aimed at slowing down the churn rate on the "new" page, then? What if everybody were limited to submitting, say, one article per day?

astine• 17 years ago

On the other hand, (Or on the same hand; I'm not sure if it matters,) If having a single 'luck' vote is the minimum is required for getting a story a fair hearing and everyone compensated by getting their friends to vote, then two votes would quickly become the minimum. If this is really a problem (and it seems like it might be) then new mechanisms for getting new entries exposure would be the proper solution.

chrischen• 17 years ago

Maybe we can mix in new submissions with top rated ones on the front page.

Alex3917• 17 years ago

I have a proposal. What if you could enter the URL of your blog(s), and that way any self-submitted content would start at 2. This would encourage more people from HN to write and answer comments, and would hopefully make the site better overall.

And probably you wouldn't be allowed to do this until 30 days after creating a new account, or else there would be some minimum karma. Or perhaps your blog needs at least 100 karma on its own before the URL is accepted. Either way, I think it would generally make the community better if some variant of this were enabled.

barrkel2• 17 years ago

I find the most interesting content (to me) comes from sources I don't already read and follow. If a blog comes up twice or more on HN, I'll have subscribed already (assuming it's full feed and is only updated occasionally - blog interestingness is inversely proportional to posting frequency IMHO).

barrkel2• 17 years ago

The few times I have tried submitting (what I thought were) really interesting links, I have found that they were already submitted, perhaps a day ago, or a week ago, or even many months ago, but I never spotted them - they had died with a handful of upvotes and a single comment at best.

rms5• 17 years ago

If you're going to do it, there's a big difference between giving a story 1 or 2 extra points and 5 or 10.

axod6• 17 years ago

1 or 2 extra points within the first few seconds of a posts existence makes it shoot to the top 5 at least. I think the algorithm could do with some modification for that sort of case.

jacquesm15• 17 years ago

That's still game-able.

Personally I'm pretty angry about this, also the fact that people seem to think that there are justifications for behavior like this.

rms5• 17 years ago

If it makes it that high it won't be there for more than a minute or two anyways. However I agree that the algorithm is probably weighted too extremely for upvotes during the first minute or two of a story's existence.

abstractbill• 17 years ago

Right. An extra 1 or 2 points soon after submission gets you onto the front page, even if only briefly. That's enough to get your post in front of a lot of eyeballs and then it can be judged on its own merits. Whereas if you don't get those critical early votes, you're stuck on the new page in front of just a small handful of eyeballs, and you're "judged" more by randomness than by merit.

axod6• 17 years ago

I've seen it happen...

The other 'quirk' which makes it a little worse, is that if someone submits something, and just asks a couple of friends to upvote it immediately, it pretty much goes to #1.

Maybe the ranking algorithm should have some protection against that.

I think really, articles should rise and fall on their own merits, but I don't think there's any reason not to tell friends about a cool submission. They should then use their judgement as to if they upvote it.

blhack3• 17 years ago

I'd say that for HN, absolutely not.

One of the problems that I have with most moderation systems (reddit, digg, HN, etc.) is that everybody has got unlimited mod-power.

I can only speak for myself, but when I get slashdot moderator points, I make sure that I use them correctly; it feels like a privilege to get them.

Now, I don't think that that is the best way of doing things, but I think it is good.

The way I did it on my website (which is small, so I haven't really gotten to see if it works or not) is that you have to earn your mod points by submitting things and then having others upvote them. Points also expire after 24 hours. To me, encouraging your friends to upvote your stories is okay with my mod system because if they upvote on thing, it means that they can't upvote another.

I guess what I'm saying is yes, it is bad...but only because you don't lose anything by upvoting something. If mod points were limited, I don't see a problem with it, at least not as much of a problem...it would be a bit like encouraging your friends to use a product that you make, but still charging them for it.

(my website is: http://www.gibsonandlily.com if you want to see the mod-system I'm talking about).

jacquesm15• 17 years ago

That sounds really clever what you have built there.

blhack3• 17 years ago

Thanks :). Now if only I can figure out how to get people to actually use it, haha.

Perceval4• 17 years ago

I think that you've identified an important problem, but I disagree with your approach to solving it. I think you're right that scarcity is a good way to make voting (especially approval-style voting) into something more meaningful.

One of the problems with Digg is not just the unlimited amount of voting that one can do, but also the unlimited amount of submitting one can do. As a result, you have people running scripts to submit tons and tons of articles scraped from RSS feeds. Literally one article every few seconds. What your system would do (making people earn mod points through submissions) is simply encourage users to submit as much as possible in order to gain more points. Crapflooding the queue then destroys the signal to noise ration irretrievably.

I think the better way to implement scarcity, apart from your method and Slashdot's method, is to weight users' votes according to the number of votes they've distributed in a given period (say 24 hours). So a person who votes for under 10 things might have each vote count as a full 1 point. But a person who votes for 20 things might have their vote count as only 1/2 a point. You might put a lower bound on it, so that a vote will never be worth less than 1/10th of a point, but you get the idea.

It's not scarcity by number, so much as scarcity by dilution. The best part of this is that it's invisible to the user. When you have a system that's visible ("You've got 5 Modpoints, Use 'em or Lose 'em!"), you encourage gaming the system. When you have a system that's invisible, users can behave normally or badly and the system can compensate without giving them clues as to how to game it.

jacquesm15• 17 years ago

This is all in response to this exchange:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1035080

kyro3• 17 years ago

Yes and no. Yes in that submissions do not rise solely based on their quality and merits. But no in that I have seen many many submissions, specifically Ask HNs, fall right through the 'new' page without an upvote. So I'll upvote them after reading the title, and not clicking through. If it's something I can help them out with, then I'll click through; if not, I upvote in hopes of someone else answering. I'll admit, I've asked many times for an Ask HN of mine to be upvoted because it seems that only when it hits the front page do people come of out of the woodwork.

For some reason, many more submissions are slipping through the cracks. I don't know if it's the algorithm that needs to be tweaked again or what. Stories will skyrocket to 150+ points while others are left unnoticed. I'm getting sick of seeing the same story on the front page for 2 consecutive days while Ask HNs and other interesting submissions are falling through on an hourly basis. That's why I'm ok with asking friends for upvotes.

jacquesm15• 17 years ago

So, you and your friends are free to make your own site then, where you play according to your own ruleset. Where bringing your friends along to rig the vote is an accepted part of the game. But to use some backchannel to manipulate HN in order to have a louder voice than those that refuse to cheat is really beyond the pale.

If you think that there is stuff that ought to change you can petition PG about it and maybe he'll listen to you, maybe he won't, it is his site after all.

Essentially you and your buddies are hijacking the site for your own gratification.

How many times do you do this?

Do you really think that because the end justifies the means it is ok to cheat?

kyro3• 17 years ago

Let's relax a bit and cut the dramatics.

I do it mostly, and not all that often, to increase the turnover rate on the front page. And when I say 'I do it mostly', I mean upvote others' submissions without giving them a proper read. Stories sit there for days in a row with 100s of points and so many comments while others asking for help aren't given any attention. What I loved about HN was that I could visit it in the morning and read and engage in one set of submissions, then log in at night and jump into a completely different one. That's not the case now.

I've been here 3 times longer than you have, although I haven't quite engaged as much, so to accuse me of trying to hijack the site for my own gratification is kind of offensive given how long I've stayed here, which should show how much I enjoy the community. I care about the quality here as much as you do.

mcantor3• 17 years ago

I'm surprised that there are no voting systems which simply detect cliques, and make your votes weaker when you're voting for someone in your clique.

That is, the more you vote for someone's submissions, the less "power" your votes have when voting on them. As long as you balanced it correctly, you would maintain the theme of compelling submissions hitting the front page while removing clique-based vote problems.

If someone is so awesome that everyone upvotes every single submission they have, and are thus part of their "clique," it still wouldn't be a problem, because there would be enough people upvoting their submissions to counteract the juice being removed from their individual votes.

sophacles5• 17 years ago

The ultimate problem with this is there is it invites more gaming, which invites more rules.... and so on.

mcantor3• 17 years ago

True, but it doesn't invite any more gaming than the existing system. That is, you could game the "clique" system by registering new accounts, but you could game the existing system that way, too.

Perceval4• 17 years ago

There are voting systems which attempt to detect cliques or rigged voting. These are called "sybil attacks." There is a good deal of academic literature that you can find on the subject, and attempts to reduce the weight of en masse voting by tying it to a probability distribution.

I wrote a diary on this subject with some links if you're interested: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/12/8/01628/8328

prodigal_erik• 17 years ago

In an attention economy, this is shoplifting. An upvote should mean "I genuinely think this is interesting and worth reading". If I can manipulate you into upvoting for any other reason, that's scarcely better than cracking your account and pushing the button myself.

I want "how marketing works" to remain on topic here, but why must that always attract the unscrupulous?

scott_s• 17 years ago

Asking your friends to look at something you posted is fair and expected. They will do so because they're your friends. But then further leveraging your social standing with them and explicitly asking for a vote is, I think, detrimental to HN.

JoelMcCracken• 17 years ago

How about a page that shows posts that are "about to die"?

Or, even, the ability to resubmit/revise one of your own almost dead posts?

axod6• 17 years ago

Also, related question - is asking your friends to flag a 'flaggable' article ok.

jacquesm15• 17 years ago

I've seen that happen too but it is much much harder to prove.

And if it were only the real flaggables that got flagged I'd not have a problem with it but it is also used to bury stuff actively that is in principle as good or better than things that are left untouched.

axod6• 17 years ago

Harder to prove? :/ This is a community. Seems like you're taking this all a little seriously.

The bigger threat IMHO is things like the "OMG! This is a funny picture about how programmers see each other ROTFL!". That got something like 80 upvotes (Think it got killed evertually, but still). That's a far bigger worry than people asking friends to lend a vote or 2 to their submissions. IMHO

Perceval4• 17 years ago

Digg has the phenomenon as well, which they termed the 'bury brigades.' Organized groups of users would bury stories from certain sources/submitters or on certain topics. It ended up engendering a great deal of ill-will.

ankeshk• 17 years ago

Ideally should not be done. But disclosure: I've done it before. And I've done it before because the first 10 minutes of submission seem to be very very important for the life of the submission.

Ideally: it would be awesome if we could hide the entries we've already read from the front page. And these entries are replaced by "new" entries. This would give the new entries a fair chance - and people wouldn't resort to gaming the system.

Also - giving points to people to visit the new page is a good idea.

ivankirigin• 17 years ago

Yes. But don't be annoying about it.

A nice way to do it is to link to hacker news to comment. If they upvote, good.

rjurney• 17 years ago

Most of my high up-vote links were seeded with my friends, and on twitter. Its not necessary to ask for votes, they just happen. The first few friend votes got the thing to the main page, after that they took off.

If its JUST friends, it doesn't stay on the main page. The algorithm works.

petercooper• 17 years ago

I've trawled /new a bit (though only once every couple of weeks or so) and seen some good stuff that deserves to make the front page but only gets a few votes - usually due to the time of submission or a crappy title. I wonder if there's a way to get "around" that problem without resorting to bloc voting.

nishantmodak• 17 years ago

I never care about who posed it. If I like it, I recommend fellow HNers by upvoting it (the content, not the author)

jrockway• 17 years ago

People will read whatever is on the front page, regardless of interest. If you want eyeballs, which almost everyone does, ensuring that you get on the front page is an effective way of getting them. Getting your friends to upvote your article is a good way to do this.

Saying it's unethical is not going to change anything. It's a social news site, not some place where imaginary ethics matter.

ErrantX2• 17 years ago

Define friends: do you mean HN users or just randoms? CLearly the last is unethical and the first should be discouraged.

With that said I don't see anything wrong with either going to your HN friends and saying "hey check this out and see what you think". It might well amount to the same thing but I feel it is the right side of the communities "eithics" [on the assumption that said HN friends are community spirited enough to judge the post on merit] :)

----

On a related anecdote; this is how I joined the community here. A friend asked me to vote up his "here's my new site" post (actually to be accurate and fair to him he asked a group of us if anyone had a HN account to add an upvote). Anyway I created an account and upvoted... and then hung around.

I like to think I'm a net gain to the community :) (certainly it has been good for me personally) so perhaps this issue is not wholly cut and dried! :)

jacquesm15• 17 years ago

Sure, but that is not what this is about, this is about structurally having your buddies upvote your stuff.

ErrantX2• 17 years ago

Ah right, well that is clearly wrong. I thought you were asking a broader question.

Besides, I mostly wanted to give my anecdote ;)

daleharvey• 17 years ago

thats exactly what this is about, thats exactly how the link that you are worrying about was posted

jedwhite• 17 years ago

I suspect most users (seeking interesting content) infrequently look at "new", and mostly stick to the front page.

Items already on the front page get voted up more because they are already on the front page.

The only stories that get on to the front page with the current algorithm are those that get a handful of votes very quickly (within first 10-20 mins).

Therefore, the story selection for the front page becomes a self-reinforcing loop. The combination of the algorithm prioritizing stories that get a few votes quickly, and the fact that new stories get reduced exposure, means, I think, that it's often random whether a story makes the front. Once it does, if it's interesting it will stay there and get a lot of votes (so that works) and if it's not it will drop off again quickly.

So the system is good at ranking stories that are already on the front page and keeping them there longer, but I think fails at selecting the best new content submitted. I often notice great items dropping off new that never got any votes or comments while there are less interesting ones that made the front.

Without wanting to suggest damaging the simplicity that makes it such a great site for surfacing interesting stuff, maybe there could be a sidebar or secondary area on the front page with a simple headline list of the lastest new submissions separate to the "hot" items, so that all users see what's coming in, rather than the subset who consciously go to "new" to look for new stuff to vote for.

Be interesting to know what the traffic difference is between the front page and "new" - that would determine if my theory had any merit.

alex_c• 17 years ago

I have occasionally done this, for stories that are of personal importance to me. I won't argue that it's absolutely justified, but there are a few reasons I can still sleep at night after doing it:

1) I love the HN community, and would never do it for a post that I don't think is of interest (for that matter, I wouldn't submit something that I don't think would be of interest in the first place, so maybe that cancels out).

2) It's never been more than about 2 votes, beyond which it floats or sinks on its own merits. Yes, it can be argued that a story floats or sinks on its own merits to start with, but there IS an element of luck - the 'new' page moves pretty quickly now. If a story is only "worth" 20 votes in its lifetime, what are the odds that one of those votes will happen when it's sitting on the new page at 1 vote? Asking for an initial boost doesn't put a story on the front page anymore, but it does guarantee that the community passes an actual judgement on it.

3) I don't abuse it (by my own definition of 'abuse' - whose else would I use?). I don't do it more than once or twice a year, and it's never for ego, karma, traffic to my blog, etc. It's for something that is personally important to me, and potentially useful to at least some members of the community.

There IS one thing that bothers me:

1) It can too easily be a slippery slope. "Just this once" or "just a bit" can too easily turn into "well, everyone's doing it", to the obvious detriment of the site.

Overall, I see it as asking a friend for a selfish favor. If it's done too often, or without giving anything in return, or without regard for the cost to the friend, then it's a problem. If it's done judiciously - give and take - it can be the basis for a stronger relationship.

tokenadult2• 17 years ago

Many of the interesting problems mentioned here can be alleviated in large part if a large part of the veteran participants here browse the new submissions

http://news.ycombinator.com/news

and upvote those that most contribute to the HN community's interests, as defined by the guidelines.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm sure some people ask for upvoting help from their friends, but I'm sure I don't, and most of the time I think I get a fair response from the (unknown to me) group of participants who either upvote or pass by my submissions. Random issues like at what time of day in what time zone I post probably make a difference, but I mostly don't worry about that.

jeremyw• 17 years ago

Your submission record mirrors that of most of the top posters I see: the majority of posts get a few votes and die. Assuming your content is HN worthy and you're not posting too much, then it's not about fair, but far more important is the too great volume of posts.

The exception in my limited scouting was those posters with a feel for headlines, e.g. petercooper stands out with a better percentage.

gyardley• 17 years ago

I'd love to see Hacker News release who upvoted what, when - 'anonymized' if necessary (although I'm skeptical whether anonymization with a unique ID would truly be anonymous). The quantitative among us could mine the data for interesting things and vote-rigging would be exposed.

Any reason why this data couldn't be made public? There's an implicit social contract here - you don't expect the private to suddenly become public - but if that's a concern, we could get around this by just exposing the data from a publicly-announced point in the future.

pg2• 17 years ago

There's a fuzzy line. I think it's ok (or at least undetectable) if the voters are genuine HN users. There are limits to what they'll upvote, unless they genuinely like it. Whereas it's not ok to email a bunch of people and tell them to create HN accounts for the purpose of upvoting your post; that's basically sockpuppets by proxy. The threshold is somewhere between these two cases.

There is a lot of code for detecting voting rings, and it itself embodies varying levels of punishment (ranging from votes not affecting the position on the page, to votes not affecting the score, to the post getting flagged to be killed) depending on how abusive a vote seems. So far things seem to be under control, probably because the way I decide when to add more countermeasures is when I notice lame posts doing suspiciously well on the frontpage.

jacquesm15• 17 years ago

Ok, thanks. So how about a group of people that collude on a back channel in order to categorically boost their posts/comments and flag others?

I know that it is annoying to have to define this but apparently it needs to be spelled out.

I've found that it is very easy to detect this kind of stuff by simply monitoring a post in the first few minutes after it goes live, anything that gets 3 or more upvotes in the first ten minutes but sinks off the homepage is a good candidate, 3 or more upvotes in the first 3 minutes is more or less a guarantee of having people that game the system.

pg2• 17 years ago

If they did it frequently enough to create a detectable pattern, the votes would start to be ignored to varying degrees.

As you point out (though this wasn't your theme), the ranking algorithm on the front page also helps mitigate the problem. Stuff upvoted by a ring will sink back down if it doesn't catch on with other users.

tokenadult2• 17 years ago

3 or more upvotes in the first 3 minutes is more or less a guarantee of having people that game the system.

It could be three or more people all multi-submitting the same article that just got posted to a frequently visited site. Each may not know that anyone else just submitted the same link to HN, if they are simultaneous enough. (It has happened to me.)

3pt14159• 17 years ago

I only up vote a friends article if I like it enough to submit it myself (not just normally vote for it). I think that should be the test.

swombat4• 17 years ago

Well put. For the record I regularly upvote things passed to me by other HNer friends (some of them YC alums), but I always read it first and make sure it's something I'm comfortable upvoting. And I occasionally bring articles (both my own and other people's) to those same friends' attention.

The ultimate decider has to be whether the article is good and worthy of an upvote. I think I have mistakenly upvoted something that was actually bad maybe 3 times in the two years I've been here, and each time I felt really bad about it. Basically, if you wouldn't happily submit it yourself, don't upvote it.

johnthedebs• 17 years ago

For one of the (few) stories I've submitted, I asked friends to take a look and upvote the story if they found it interesting - not all of them did.

I felt that approach was okay because I routinely recommend my friends to stuff I find interesting and, since I posted the story here, I obviously thought it was interesting.

The votes I got were still based on merit, though, even if I did generate a little bit of extra attention trying to get those votes.

That said, this is a really hard problem because it goes against the way humans operate. We learn to trust or distrust certain sources and that affects the way we view information we get from them - it simply takes too much time to evaluate the trustworthiness of everything we encounter.

I don't have any specific suggestions (although I'll be thinking about it), but maybe a system that operated with that in mind would have better success even as it grew in popularity.

koepked• 17 years ago

I don't like the idea of doing this, but as others have pointed out, there are many many submissions that never make the front page, and in many cases I don't believe it's because they lack merit. I've seen times where the same information was posted several times before one of the submissions hit the front page. I've attempted submissions about 3-5 times, and pretty much gave up on submitting after watching those submissions fall from the front page of the new threads in a matter of about an hour. It very well could be that the quality wasn't there in what I tried to submit, but, like others have said, a lot slips through the cracks until it hits the front page.

aplusbi• 17 years ago

Anytime a friend of mine has asked me to upvote something (usually on digg) I've read the article first and, if I liked it, I upvoted it. Most of the time I liked it and most of the time I would not have read it if they hadn't asked me to.

azharcs• 17 years ago

I would say posting and getting upvoted on HN should be like a litmus test for the blog posts, write good blogposts, put your effort into it and post it on HN to see if people like it or upvote it. If they don't, get back to work and improve your writing or style enough to get upvoted by itself (not by rigging). By asking your friends to upvote your posts (which I am assuming are not good because if they were, you wouldn't need your friends) you might be able to get couple of thousand views to your website, make couple of dollars in advertising money and then maybe some discussion too, but you wouldn't learn failure and improvement. So all I can say is, treat your posts like litmus test and improve enough that they can't ignore you.

Be so Good, They can't Ignore you - Steve Martin

hockeybias• 17 years ago

No.

anonjon• 17 years ago

Why can't it be weighted so that if one person up votes the same person all of the time, the up votes start to count for less.

Or if one person up votes more in general his up votes count for less.

Could be the same with down votes as well.

Would be a pretty easy system and would keep people from spamming up votes. Maybe people would choose a bit more wisely about who it is that they give points to.

j_baker• 17 years ago

I think the deciding factor is this: are your friends voting you up because your post was good or because they're your friends? I think there's only a problem if it's the latter.

pasbesoin• 17 years ago

I think HN wants ranking based on content and not the poster's social network.

araneae• 17 years ago

The algorithm actually deals with this; if the same person keeps upvoting your posts it will no longer work after a while.

So if you're using this strategy, save it for special occasions.

Ask HN: Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok?

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