

How to stop a story from appearing on Reddit (2010) - shawndumas
http://corte.si/posts/socialmedia/reddit-story-dos.html

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networked
Submitting a story with a bad title would make for a similar, if weaker,
exploit for Hacker News.

A key to this would be to make the title boring rather than offensive so that
it doesn't get flagged but rather slips off "new" into oblivion. You can also
use a handy chart [1] to pick the worst time to post. As a bonus you'll also
get karma from all the people legitimately trying to submit the story.

A pertinent question: can you come up with a sufficiently boring title for any
story?

[1] [http://nathanael.hevenet.com/the-best-time-to-post-on-
hacker...](http://nathanael.hevenet.com/the-best-time-to-post-on-hacker-news-
a-comprehensive-answer/)

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wmf
HN's dupe detector is so weak that you can just add ?reposting or something to
the URL and it will get another chance.

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rcfox
People (like me) notice this, and don't appreciate it.

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jcr
When you think it through completely, you'll see there's good reason for the
dupe detector to be lenient. In the early days of HN (or earlier, as "Startup
News"), avoiding dupes was more important since the rate of submissions to the
/newest queue was fairly slow. These days, the rate of submissions is very
brisk, so a lot of really great stuff floats by basically unnoticed. Allowing
for a second chance actually makes sense.

If you have "Show Dead" on, you'll see there are a lot of people submitting
who have their submissions immediately marked [dead]. If you've studied how HN
is built, you'll see pg (et al) tends to follow an "Enough Rope" design policy
-- this is from the old expression "Give him enough rope to hang himself, and
he will." It seems if you intentionally and repeatedly abuse the lenient dupe
detector to promote something, you will be noticed, silently, and handled
accordingly.

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kintamanimatt
This is very incorrect.

Things get stuck in the spam filter all the time for a variety of reasons
independent of keywords in the title. Multiple accounts, new accounts, or
something else can trigger it. In any event, most moderators are really swift
to free up things that aren't spam and otherwise comply with that subreddit's
rules.

This evil plan falls apart quite rapidly because when a story is freed from
the spam filter it jumps to the top of the new queue regardless of its age.
This is why you'll sometimes see something that's an hour old sandwiched
between submissions that are minutes old.

TL;DR I need to get off reddit and do some work.

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veb
You do realise this post is from 2010, and it was on the front page of Reddit
and HN back then, so it wouldn't be hard to think that someone may have fixed
it since then!

~~~
kintamanimatt
No, I didn't realize it was from 2010.

My comment still stands though: this post is incorrect. It may have been
correct way back in the day when I was a Digg user, but now it's wrong.

A lot of people, like me, won't read the date of the post and will assume that
this is still how reddit works. My comment illustrates how reddit works today.

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shill
You can append something like ?foo=1 to submit a new URL.

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sgdesign
I wonder if HN should permit duplicate URLs. Maybe with a message saying that
the URL has already been posted and asking if you're sure you want to double
post (I think that might be what Reddit does?).

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waterlesscloud
As long as people are smarter than the algorithms, this is a danger. It's like
bizarro SEO in that way.

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markkat
I remember when we used to just be able to append ?x to the url and it allowed
duplicates.

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damian2000
I believe you still can - works on HN and reddit.

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westonh
Mallory's a guy?

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dfc
I had always thought Mallory was the female name and Mallet was the male name
for the second attacker. I did a little digging and it seems that Mallory is
primarily a girl's name it can also be a boy's name.

