
Ask HN: If you wanted to manipulate HN, how would you go about it? - 58
By manipulation I mean either the suppression or promotion of certain information &#x2F; discussions, gaming the ranking algorithm, astroturfing, etc.<p>As just one example, I&#x27;ve wondered if for instance there was a front page article about a bad quarterly report, or a corruption scandal, and I wanted it to drop off the front page fast, would it work to simply introduce some flame-war-inducing topic via a tangential comment? If the company in question was Microsoft, for example, you could pretty easily slide in some dig against Linux, begin a flame war, and then as I understand it (and as I&#x27;ve witnessed many times) the HN ranking algorithm would start to push it down.<p>Of course this discussion is not meant to encourage any bad behavior, but as a security exercise it seems useful. I also am unaware of and interested in what HN has made publicly known about their ranking algorithm, and how this squares with best practices as far as thwarting manipulation.
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pmontra
A large number of accounts you control. It must be so large that you can use
small and different subsets each time you need them. Make those accounts post
and reply sometimes to get points and be plausible users. Maybe some passably
intelligent bots. Don't register them at the same time. You probably need one
year or two to ramp up the accounts.

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greenyoda
I'm not sure why someone would go to great lengths to manipulate HN regarding
something like a bad quarterly report or a corruption scandal. HN is not
really a significant news source if you're interested in financial or
political news, so keeping it off HN's front page won't make any difference -
how many people are there whose _only_ news source is HN?

Another way of thinking about it is that HN is a news aggregator, so any
article on HN has already been published somewhere that probably has a much
higher readership than HN (mainstream media, tech media, etc.). So why bother
to manipulate HN?

That said, it's clear that there are articles posted here that have political,
social or commercial agendas behind them, so one has to read skeptically (as
is true for all media sources).

