Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972941

by sama • 12 years ago

178 100 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

A lot of people ask us why their submission gets kicked off the front page. The answer is almost always that it trips our voting ring detector.

Please occasionally read /newest so interesting stories that don't solicit upvotes can still get on the front page.

gus_massa2• 12 years ago

I usually read the newest page, but usually it has a lot of 1-point stories, and many of them are almost-spam or almost-dupe.

Another user proposed a newest page with a >2-points filter (someone else think that it’s interesting). See for example http://hnapp.com/filter/d3a308f2ac9a071c0bf174e0c1a8fd22

james33• 12 years ago

How does anything get on that list then if nobody ever sees the 1-point submission (without asking for votes).

PaulHoule• 12 years ago

exactly. that's the true terror of pagerank -- not that spammers are putting in millions of junk links, but that it makes legitimate people stop linking.

bryanlarsen• 12 years ago

A link gets a point every time it is submitted. So it's quite possible for a link to get more than 1 point without the link ever being seen.

Text submissions would be stuck at 1 point, though.

ColinWright2• 12 years ago

But that would mean that stories with only one point never get seen, and hence never get up-voted, and hence nothing gets to the 2-point page. It seems necessary that people should read "newest" and up-vote things they think are of value.

gus_massa2• 12 years ago

I agree. I usually read the (unfiltered) newest page, but sometime this is useful to find a story that was submitted 12 hours ago and only got 2 points. Perhaps the problem is that there are 928 stories submitted in the last 24 hours.

weinzierl• 12 years ago

When I read the newest page I usually ignore the points. Most of the stories are 1-point or 2-point anyway. What I scan for is the comments. If the story is on newest and already has a few comments it's often worth reading in my experience.

yesimahuman2• 12 years ago

I'd be curious to hear more about how YC companies handle voting so they get their content on the front page. From what I've heard, they get a lot of help to promote content.

Totally makes sense seeing as HN is built around YC, but in that light makes it a bit disingenuous to ask the community to not solicit help from their group to promote content.

sama2• 12 years ago

YC companies complain the most often because they trigger the voting ring when they ask their batchmates to votes them up :)

yesimahuman2• 12 years ago

Fair enough, that's good to know :)

volaski• 12 years ago

As a counter argument, I haven't seen any ycombinator company NOT make it on the front page. I am not saying this is a collusion or anything but wanted to point out that there are people with knowledge who do this all the time and can get away with it because they know how it works. They would send a message like "Please go to HN and look for such and such title and vote it up. I can't post the link because of voting ring algorithm". And I see these people always show up on the front page. When this is the reality, how can one NOT do this? The people who try to play fair are the ones who will lose. I agree with you that it's not good to ask for upvotes but people who already know how it works will keep doing it, and the people who don't will just lose like they always have. Also I wonder what you do with those YC company guys who complain about getting detected as voting ring. Do you just let their posts stay buried or do you give them a second chance? If you are going to ask people to cooperate, I think it's crucial to have some transparency. Otherwise, no matter what you ask, nothing will change.

As a person who discovers lots of cool projects through showHN posts, I hope you could come up with a solution for this, really.

tptacek5• 12 years ago

I don't know what's "fair" or "unfair" in this context, but suggesting that Sam's comment is "disingenuous" is unproductive, because the voting ring detector isn't going anywhere. It's one of those things where most of us only see the occasional annoying side effect, but we don't notice the avalanche of crap that it's keeping off the front page.

You can probably safely assume that the decision to keep aggressively penalizing voting rings (and things that to the detector look like rings) is made and isn't changing.

With that in mind, read Sam's comment as "here's how not to get stung by the detector", not as an appeal to change your behavior for his sake. He's trying to help.

louis-paul• 12 years ago

I think at this point, they have a network large enough to kick off the newest page to the front page pretty quickly.

pbhjpbhj2• 12 years ago

Perhaps promoted content should be labelled as such, eg an orange 1px border around the listing. If adding a new story in to the mix that could have a green 1px border to highlight it was out of normal flow too.

kogir2• 12 years ago

Job listings are the only promoted content. They're distinguished by the lack of vote arrows.

zt2• 12 years ago

Other than "jobs" we get no help promoting content.

I actually think being a YC company can hurt you because all your YC buddies vote for you and then it appears that your cohort is a voting ring. I actually have to tell people NOT to vote for my posts sometimes, lest I trigger the HN Gods' wrath.

ggiaco• 12 years ago

Do you really believe it's a disadvantage?

kenrikm• 12 years ago

Just everyone in the office independently voting on something can trigger it, which is unfortunate since it was not even planned.

dang2• 12 years ago

From what I've heard, they get a lot of help to promote content.

They don't from us (the people running HN). The only help HN gives YC cos are (a) being able to post job ads and (b) YC founders' names appear in orange to other YC founders.

YC startups routinely get hit hard by HN's ring detector.

compare• 12 years ago

Is there actually any dataset of upon which the accuracy of this detector is measured and improved? Or is it just some hard-coded rules?

For example, does it really differentiate between people who ask for votes, and people who just vote up the content of someone they recognize?

simonsarris• 12 years ago

Sam I think you have great power to give /newest more views if you'd consider minor redesigns.

Perhaps you could dither stories so the front-page list goes top/new/top/new/top/new, etc, but that is potentially very messy.

Or perhaps instead, the front-page can show 30 top stories, then a line break, then 30 new stories, all on the front page. Long-scrolling pages are in fashion, after all.

These aren't well-developed ideas, but the point remains that the inertia of being one click away means that a huge percentage of people will never even look at /newest, never-mind up-vote interesting stories.

Please consider changes to modify the median behavior. It's within your power and would do us all good. It's worth an experiment, isn't it?

privong• 12 years ago

Another option is a 2-column layout (for non-mobile devices). The normal front page on the left, with the blast of new articles in the right column. Perhaps for mobile devices the new articles could go under the top stories, with some sort of obvious demarcation between them.

adamnemecek• 12 years ago

This seems like the best option to me.

jkbyc• 12 years ago

It's even already implemented as the Hacker News UX extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-ux/chn...

I like it a lot, it would be great to have it that way by default.

schrodinger• 12 years ago

I really like this idea. Just occasionally throw in some random "new" pages to users and see what gets read / upvoted. I'm sure that most users don't check the "new" page.

tlrobinson• 12 years ago

I like the idea of simply appending a subset of the /new stories to the end of the front page. Make it clear they're brand new (should also be obvious from the low vote count).

huhtenberg2• 12 years ago

Just splice a random /newest entry into a front page on every load.

This gets extra eyes on them and helps float good stories up. Optionally mark them green, just like HN currently marks noob users.

tptacek5• 12 years ago

If you have ideas on how to improve the front page, a great thing to do is to send them to hn@ycombinator.com. Dan and Nick are super responsive, and you might be able to have a more productive conversation in email than on a thread.

toomuchtodo• 12 years ago

Optionally mark them green, just like HN currently marks noob users.

Love this suggestion. +1

Timsalabim• 12 years ago

This is a great suggestion. Or the bottom 5 are newest or something like that.

I check the front page a couple of times a day but don't take the time to go any further.

d0m• 12 years ago

This.

I use HN only for the front page and I occasionally upvote or downvote comments. I'd be totally willing to have one link from the /newest in a different color on the front-page and if it's good I would upvote it. The action could be a bit more explicit [Keep on front-page?]

awjr• 12 years ago

Would two columns be too messy? Left one is top, right one is new?

Honestly though, having 20 green new stories at the bottom of the front page would be great and would increase my interaction with the site.

chrisdevereux• 12 years ago

I like the idea of adding a sample of new stories to the front. It would guarantee a number of extremely low quality submissions on the front though, which might affect the overall percieved quality of HN.

It also might be a problem if simply submitting to HN guarantees a decent number of pageviews.

DanBC2• 12 years ago

Perhaps new, but filtered to exclude certain sites that get a lot of attention here anyway.

sama2• 12 years ago

good ideas here and in the responses. we will consider.

sharemywin2• 12 years ago

any thoughts on actually creating a discussion board/forum. because there are a fair many of those types of posts. (Show HN, questions etc.)But,there are a lot of news/off site type posts and they don't seem to go together.

willvarfar2• 12 years ago

somewhat related, you could use collaborative filtering. I've blogged about my thoughts and experiments with it in the past: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-...

You can show some random unrated stories at the very top of the list, and then stories sorted by collaborative filtering.

In my prototyping it worked super-well.

coffeecodecouch• 12 years ago

I suggested[0] the same thing a few months ago with a visual example of what I had in mind. Here it is again as a reminder: https://i.imgur.com/ZNQTn7q.png (I still think it's a great idea!).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7612737

aikah• 12 years ago

What does count as a voting ring?

If I post a link to HN on twitter and people upvote the submission coming from twitter,does it count as a voting ring?

mathrawka• 12 years ago

Always the same people giving upvotes to a certain user.

tptacek5• 12 years ago

You're never going to get a totally straight answer, because things like voting ring detectors rely in practice on obscurity; if you knew the exact details, it would be much easier to game the system.

angersock2• 12 years ago

Makes it rather hard to debug or avoid posting in a bad way.

rickyc091• 12 years ago

It's probably better to up vote from the feed. When you click on a link from the feed, you're generally going directly to the article. You hit the browser back button to get back to hackernews; chances are if the article seemed interesting, you would then hit the up vote button. When's the last time you hit the up vote button on a comment page?

jsnell2• 12 years ago

People have very different workflows, it's very dangerous to assume that the way you use the site is the way everyone uses it. (Probably 90-95% of my article votes are from the comments page, and I never use the back button to return to the front page.)

vacri4• 12 years ago

Almost all my upvotes come from the comments page. If an article looks interesting, it gets opened in one tab, followed by the comments page to see what people said about it. Look at the article, then go to the comments, may as well upvote whilst there.

bcohen5055• 12 years ago

Upvoted

Kiro• 12 years ago

I wonder how many false positives there are.

oskarth• 12 years ago

Please occasionally read /newest so interesting stories that don't solicit upvotes can still get on the front page.

In theory this is good, but in practice it's hard. Here's a suggestion for how to make it easier in practice: redirect 1/3 of the visits from the start page to /newest. As a regular and medium-karma user, I would know why this happens, and I personally wouldn't mind it.

Mz• 12 years ago

On a full sized monitor, most titles go only about halfway across the screen. I think with a little tweaking, you could have two columns on the front page: One with the current front page code, one with the newest stories. You might have to have titles wrap for longer titles or make some other tweaks to make this work. But that might cut back on the need to ask folks to look at new stuff.

Generally speaking, if you can write the code, you can make the rules people have to follow (though it does require some deep thinking, data, etc at times). If you want to compel x behavior, then compel it. If you want to forbid y behavior, then deny the ability in some way where possible. Writing the code makes you "god" for your little world: You decide the local "physics". Deciding the local physics is going to generally get you better results than asking people to please do x or please don't do y.

webhat2• 12 years ago

I did something similar for an RSS reader I was building based on bayesian filtering, a col-4 column on the right with the "live" feed and a main col-8 column with the filtered feed, meaning all the matches. It looked pretty good in landscape mode.

encoderer• 12 years ago

Of course, the alternative is just to submit something to HN and..... hope for the best? Sure, THAT sounds reasonable to a bunch of type-a founders.

I think it's reasonable that somebody promotes their HN post. The takeaway is just to be careful about how you share and how widely and with whom.

I made the front page last week (for a few hours) for a side project that I launched with a friend. Several up-votes shortly after we posted it got us to the bottom of the front page, and organic traffic took it from there.

sharemywin2• 12 years ago

I prefer /newest. I'd rather see stuff unfiltered. Plus you can comment on stuff without 150 other comments. so it feels like your comments are heard.

lucb1e• 12 years ago

I think they're read more than one realizes even if it doesn't gather upvotes

bl4hblahblat6• 12 years ago

What gets me is that unless you are really interested in GO, Haskell, dislike Microsoft, think you can write a real encrypted instant messaging system in JavaScript crypto, and have a libertarian leaning you will never have enough karma/points to downvote other people.

It encourages group think in the extreme.

Also, at around 180 gold stars/dingles it just stops.

I mean seriously...there is a vast amount of consensus around a set of things here that are just impermeable. Yes I have read "the approach to comments" and it sounds like you guys think that "resisting decline" means everyone basically has the same opinion but everyone gets to restate it to each other in "civil" and interesting ways.

EDIT: You also have to really be into crypto-currency...it also helps if you mention hayek while talking about it. You rebel.

jfoster2• 12 years ago

Is downvoting other people an important part of HN, though? It's important that someone is doing it responsibly to keep things clean, but upvoting gems and adding value to discussion through intelligent comments seem like they would be far more valuable activities for HN.

bl4hblahblat6• 12 years ago

Well, that's kind of my point. You are at the mercy of people who disagree with you if you are in the minority. If you disagree with the consensus you will be downvoted to the point that you can't be seen anymore.

I think that differing views add value.

Having contrary opinions just disappear so that everyone can keep restating the same thing to each other is really frustrating.

EDIT: Clarification...

vacri4• 12 years ago

Your own biases are showing. I am interested in none of those things, not even the bits in your edit (and in particular, think that libertarianism is damagingly naive), yet I accrue a few votes here and there. I have plenty of karma. Seriously, the downvote mechanism is overrated anyway, and is one of the most poorly implemented features of HN - if you're using access to that as a yardstick for value on the site, I'd suggest reviewing your expectations.

bl4hblahblat6• 12 years ago

I accrued 188 points on my last account before it just stopped, like I was invisible...so I logged in with another account and couldn't even see my other posts.

I'm not saying that I want to downvote people...I'm saying that you haven't been downvoted into oblivion because you don't disagree with people.

Start commenting with a contrary opinion and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Also..."Your own biases are showing" might sounds like a reasonable and measured thing to say to someone, when you say it to yourself in your head, but its not. Somehow the rest of you have no bias?

And are you saying that I should ignore conservations that I disagree with to protect my votes...??? That's exactly what I was saying happens here. It's a self censorship that leads to this massive amount of consensus on everything from posts to comments.

gjm112• 12 years ago

I have never written a line of Go, and have only a casual acquaintance with Haskell. I'm not a Microsoft fan but spend approximately zero HN time bashing them. I would not attempt to write any sort of crypto anything in Javascript. I am not a libertarian. I am slightly interested in crypto-currency but have never owned any. I think Hayek is way overrated.

My karma score is approaching 8000, and I promise it's enough to downvote other people.

I dare say there is some groupthink on HN. There is groupthink everywhere where like-minded people congregate. But I've seen a very wide range of ideas treated with respect here, and pretty much the same very wide range of ideas treated with contempt, depending on who happens to be reading and responding.

bl4hblahblat6• 12 years ago

Well congratulations on that, and I swear I'm not trying to be snide here, but you've been on HN for 6 years.

If you are a new user and you actually want to communicate with people...and hold a minority opinion...you will be downvoted out of visibility.

bl4hblahblat6• 12 years ago

And so now i'm being downvoted, because you know...disagreement isn't cool.

How can I save this...Who wants to talk about Rust? Huh? Anybody? Bitcoin? That god damn NSA? Amirite?

minimaxir• 12 years ago

Complaining about downvotes isn't cool either.

vacri4• 12 years ago

In this case, disagreement isn't the problem, it's being snarky that is.

DanBC2• 12 years ago

I like Microsoft; I think Bitcoin is stupid. I'm not particularly (for HN) libertarian.

I don't get many downvotes and when I do I can usually understand why.

Perhaps people expressing minority views are just doing so in sub-optimal ways?

(Having said that I tend to agree that any threads that are MS vs Google vs Apple are death.)

programminggeek• 12 years ago

I remember the early days of digg and people tend to see social news sites as a mechanism to get a wave of traffic. What they don't always think about is providing value to the social sites.

HN is probably better than most about not letting much crap on the home page, but these sites are almost universally terrible at surfacing new content so that it has a good opportunity to get up voted.

The selfish human response is to get your friends to vote for you (just like you get your friends to vote for you in real life actually). It's just that there are so few actual people looking at the submitted stories that it wouldn't take much to astroturf your way on to the front page without a voting ring filter.

The best solution is very likely to have a better interface for surfacing submitted stories to a wider audience. Or, incentivize people to actually look at the new section. Maybe extra points for voting or commenting before it hits front page.

I don't think it would take much to solve this problem, but this isn't a policy or filter problem, it's a human problem and your system needs to work with the user psychology that naturally exists on HN (and similar sites).

Reddit seemed to solve this by making subreddits a bigger part of the site, but I don't know how HN would incorporate such an idea without losing the site identity.

TeMPOraL4• 12 years ago

This post just motivated me to go through /newest and upvote few things. Thank you.

Everyone, let's take a minute now and go through the new submissions and move some fresh things onto the front page. Let this also become a habit, until mods tweak HN interface to reduce the effort it requires.

arikrak• 12 years ago

Currently, it seems you need either a lot of good luck or upvoting friends to make it to front page. Why not use some categorization so every link makes it it's category's page and has chance of reaching front page?

mhartl• 12 years ago

What do you think about soliciting upvotes by sending people to /newest? Among other things, as a side-effect they might upvote other stories as well.

lisper2• 12 years ago

Some observations:

1. Almost no one reads the new page. For proof, go to the new page and count up the total number of votes that all the stories on the new page have received in the last hour.

2. There is a VERY short time window (typically about an hour nowadays) during which a story either gets enough votes to end up on the home page (half a dozen or so seems to be enough) or drops off the first new page, after which it will never be seen again.

3. Once a story arrives on the home page, there is a very good chance that it will stay there for a while (longer than an hour anyway).

4. As a result, there is an EXTREMELY strong incentive when one has posted a story to send out an email to one's friends saying, "I just posted this to HN, please take a look and upvote it if you think it deserves it." [1]

5. A story that gets a lot of votes as a result isn't necessarily a bad story. So a voting ring detector is likely to generate false positives.

6. Simply asking people to go read the new page isn't going to fix the problem. Figuring out what to do instead isn't easy.

---

[1] Last year I did an experiment where I wrote a series of six blog posts all related to a single topic. I posted all six to HN. Three of them I sent out an email announcement, and three of them I didn't. The first three all ended up on the home page, ultimately garnering many tens of votes. The other three never got a single vote.

jsnell2• 12 years ago

Low vote counts on the new page don't prove nobody goes there. An alternative explanation is that 90% of the new page is crap that really doesn't deserve a single vote. (Just did this experiment, and only found one of the 30 submissions interesting enough to even click on).

It is true that you need to get something like 5-6 votes in the first hour to get to the front page. But that's not a very large amount, and it's definitely possible to get across that threshold without soliciting for votes, so clearly there are a decent amount of people reading /newest. (About a third of my submissions made the front page, and it's kind of obvious in retrospect why many of the others failed. I never asked anyone to vote for any of those submissions).

lisper2• 12 years ago

Low vote counts on the new page don't prove nobody goes there.

True, which is why I did that experiment. The odds of getting the results I did by accident are one in 64, which counts as a statistically significant result.

PhasmaFelis2• 12 years ago

If legit submissions are getting booted by your voting-ring detector so often that you need to ask readers to take action to prevent it, then the detector is broken. It's not the readers' responsibility to change our habits to make up for your broken mechanisms.

schodge• 12 years ago

If the OP is still reading, why didn't this at least get onto the Ask HN page? I wasn't asking for upvotes, but it seemed to fall like a stone without ever having a chance to get views... ?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7948001

lbr• 12 years ago

Sam, Does saying "discuss on hn: link" at the bottom of a blog post violate your voting ring detector or any other terms of service? I couldn't find anything about that.

Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

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