Ask HN: Clans in news recommendation site?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=237531

by vizard • 18 years ago

4 4 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I was wondering what will happen if a "Clan" forms on News.YC or reddit etc. By a clan, I mean a group of users who always upmod each others articles or comments etc and possibly downmod certain topics? Even if there are only 7-8 user clans, the stories submitted by a clan can rise very fast to the top. How will you detect and deal with them? I dont believe any clans currently exist and its just a hypothetical situation.

pg• 18 years ago

Voting rings certainly exist, both here and on Reddit. And while we both have ways of detecting and neutralizing them, describing these techniques in detail would tend to cause them not to work as well.

Raphael• 18 years ago

What is wrong with a clan? Do you oppose political parties as well?

froo• 18 years ago

Voting rings definitely exist in on news recommendation sites.

For example, take Digg (I'm expecting to get downmodded for even mentioning this name btw) - you get people shouting within their circle of friends to get stories voted up, so that functionality is essentially built into the system. You also have the opposite true aswell, people banding together to downvote stories too and it happens often enough that theres a term for it "bury brigades"

offtopic: I think I might need to get glasses, I originally thought the title was "Clams in news recommendation site?"

shafqat• 18 years ago

Its bound to happen on any news site. At NewsCred, despite our still small-ish user base, we can see patterns emerging. Identifying patterns is the key. Once you have an algorithm to identify malicious activity, resolving is simple.

Ask HN: Clans in news recommendation site?

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