

Blindly submitting content to HN, good or bad? - benologist

I've noticed an account that's submitting 80+ stories a day all from generally liked sites.<p>I think it's bad, at the least it automatically pushes everyone else a 1/2 a dozen spots further down when another batch is dumped making it that much more unlikely someone else has a fair chance.  It also reminds me of digg's 'power users' where a handful of people ended up dominating the site, this isn't happening right now but when you're submitting 10% of stories the front page will reflect that eventually.<p>But on the other hand some of the submissions would have been made regardless by other people.<p>Thoughts?
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gvb
80+ stories a day is excessive. I would be in favor of PG rate-limiting
submissions.

If each article takes five minutes to read, it would take the submitter 6
hours 40 minutes(!) to read all the articles he submitted. This implies the
submitter is not reading the articles before submission.

This worries me because it is indicating submission by quantity, not by
quality, and the thing I love about HN is the _quality_ of the submissions.

If _some_ of the submissions would have been done by other people, that's
fine. IMHO...

a) Don't hog the karma.

b) As pointed out by benologist, the weaker submissions _would not_ have been
submitted by others. The weaker submissions are therefore competing against
other submissions that are more deserving of our attention, contributing to
the dreaded "deterioration of HN quality."

~~~
jxcole
Users should be rate limited based on the average score of their last x (say
100) submissions. If their last 100 submissions got an average of 1 (no
points) then they should be rate limited to 3 a day. If their average score
for the last 100 is above, say, 30, then it's obvious the user is providing
real value to the community and their rate limit should disappear.

~~~
bartl
I don't like that. If anything here smells like Digg's "power users", this is
it: the more you can post, the more karma you gain, and up goes your ceiling.

~~~
jxcole
That's the point of the 100 most recent. If they are power users and they can
submit 80 posts a day, each of which gets at least 20 points, then they are
obviously making a contribution. If they just have high Karma though, they
won't necessarily be able to have a high limit. If they keep submitting crap
in the hopes that a few will be upvoted, their average will go down.

Also, you could try using median rather than mean and that might produce
better results.

------
biot
One thing I've noticed happens quite a bit is that a thread on one story will
have someone post a link to an external site. Someone takes this and then
submits it as its own story. Take, for example, this comment on the "ACTA will
force border searches" story:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3496269>

Two hours after this was posted someone posted the link within that comment as
its own story:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3496475>

Normally it's not a bad thing to have a new discussion if the subject is too
tangential to the main item being discussed. But this is close enough that the
discussion probably ought to have happened directly within the thread.

Additionally, the person who submitted it as its own story received (as it now
stands) 145 points for the effortless submission, far more than would be
likely for even an incredibly well-written and researched reply within the
original thread.

HN has gamified participation by rewarding people with karma. Even though it's
only a bullshit number, it triggers a desire to maximize this number. As it
stands, submissions are too highly rewarded relative to the value and behavior
like 80+ submissions per day results.

~~~
jamesbritt
_Normally it's not a bad thing to have a discussion if the subject is too
tangential to the main item being discussed. But this is close enough that the
discussion probably ought to have happened directly within the thread._

Similar to this is when the same event is reported by different sites, each of
which gets submitted. We end up with essentially the same discussion happening
in multiple places.

Ideally there would be some magical way to have all these posts direct to a
canonical discussion, but in practice it seems this requires human
intervention.

In the meantime perhaps the best action is to flag the late-comer posts and
post a discussion link to an existing thread.

~~~
tyre
Not necessarily. Google's news aggregation has gotten pretty good at grouping
numerous stories on the same subject together. It doesn't always get things
right, but helps to reduce the clutter.

~~~
billpatrianakos
Right, while this is technically possible (and really, anything is technically
possible when it comes to programming) I'm not sure if PG and whoever else
maintains the site have the time, energy, and resources to set up such a
system. I'm not sure what it would really take but I assume it'd be quite a
bit of work to put it conservatively. The way things are run now are, in some
ways, base on a compromise between the site maintainers and the users. It's as
if to say "We'll manually intervene on occasion if everyone promises to play
nice". Once you have to start implementing the kind of automatic quality
controls we're talking about here programmatically instead of relying n good
behavior, that's when you know the community just lost the quality it was
known for.

------
pg
When we notice people doing this we rate-limit them. I just did.

~~~
veyron
What are your thoughts on allowing people to downvote posts (akin to how
comments can be downvoted)?

~~~
cleverjake
I believe that is what the flag button is for. Down vote button on a story
could lead to people downvoting something they don't like because it is the
opposite of upvoting. Flag is more of a "this is an inappropriate story" word.

~~~
DanBC
There's less of a feedback loop there - people don't know if their submissions
have been flagged or not.

~~~
swombat
On behalf of authors everywhere, please don't use the flag button as a
downvote button. This, for several reasons:

1\. It's overpowered. Based on some experiments I conducted a year or so ago,
it seems like 1-2 flags equal about 10-20 places dropped in the rankings. It's
brutal. A single person in a bad mood can drop a story like a stone. I don't
know the exact maths, but a single flag seems to have the effect of many
downvotes.

2\. It's not what it was designed for! According to the guidelines, flagging
is meant to be for "spam or offtopic", not for stuff you don't like or
disagree with and want to downvote. If you disagree with it, write a comment
to explain why, or find a comment that agrees with your disagreement and
upvote that. Flagging is not a way to express disagreement!

3\. It's mean. I regularly get articles on the front page, and I don't care
_that_ much what happens to them (though of course I like to see the
discussion they generate!), but once upon a time I did, and I'm sure that's
still the case for many. When you put your heart and soul into an article, and
it miraculously got picked up by HN, and it's on the front page, and people
are finally checking out your blog, and it's getting more visitors in one hour
than it had in the last 6 months... and you see the story suddenly vanish to
the second page because someone flagged it... wow, that feels like a punch to
the stomach. So please don't flag "real" articles, only flag spam/trash.

If you think an article sucks, post a comment to explain why you think so.
Maybe you misunderstood. In any case, the feedback will be clearer. Please
don't use the flagging sledgehammer to express disagreement.

(note: I don't know if pg would agree with the above, but these are my
feelings)

~~~
Ives
_> It's not what it was designed for! According to the guidelines, flagging is
meant to be for "spam or offtopic", not for stuff you don't like or disagree
with and want to downvote. If you disagree with it, write a comment to explain
why, or find a comment that agrees with your disagreement and upvote that.
Flagging is not a way to express disagreement!_

Disagreeing with something is not a reason to downvote either.

~~~
veyron
In your perspective, what are valid reasons for downvoting?

~~~
chc
In the perspective of many people here, downvotes are to indicate that you
don't think the comment contributes to the conversation in a positive way. For
example, I upvote comments I disagree with as long as they make the point well
and give me something to think about. Similarly, I downvote comments I agree
with if they're snide or poorly constructed.

~~~
vannevar
Yes, I think many people are under the mistaken impression that the
upvote/downvote buttons are functionally symmetrical, which is understandable
given that they are presented as visually symmetrical. But upvoting serves to
avoid redundant 'I agree.' posts, while if users downvote to disagree, it robs
the discussion of valuable content (i.e., _why_ they disagree). It would help
if the UI were modified to signal this asymmetry.

------
tokenadult
Check the source code for news.arc

<https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc>

to see what is already done about this. The account submitting so many stories
may decide to be more selective after considering the implications of site
algorithms.

~~~
julian37
If you're referring to the "oversubmitting" algorithm,

a) this appears to be turned off by default (line 1535)

b) if turned on it only applies to new users (lines 1539, 1540)

(Disclaimer: this is the first time I'm looking at the source, please correct
me if I'm missing something.)

------
collegeportalme
Ha. This is a classic community phenomenon. You can also notice this in
Foursquare, Twitter, and almost every other community based site. I think us
as a community need to start encouraging progressive and meaningful arguments,
rather than just the top news. I would like to come to HN to have a
conversation/ discussion about something new rather than a link to NYT.

One idea would be to create separate sections for discussions, news, blog
links, at all.

~~~
pestaa
And how would that discourage the behavior of autosubmitting?

The speed in which new URLs are submitted by the same user should be limited
according to their karma. (Assuming users with high points are trustworthy,
which is the primary reason this metric is made for.)

~~~
mkr-hn
New users could start with a 24 hour limit between submissions (86,400
seconds) and get 20 seconds removed for every karma point. Someone with 2000
karma would be able to submit every 12.8 hours. By 4000 you've probably
learned that quality beats quantity.

~~~
mnutt
That seems fair, though it might be better to use average story karma. The
bots in question probably have a fair amount of karma just from the sheer
number of stories submitted.

~~~
mkr-hn
Multiply the value by their average. It boosts overall submission quality
automatically by giving better commenters more chances for a front page
article.

edit: Though the value would need to be much lower than 20 per karma with that
modifier. My average of 2.73 with 2011 karma would let me post as much as I
want.

karma * 3.7 * average would come to around 20,000 for me. That would let me
submit an article every 18 hours.

------
Lewton
I can't see any obvious disadvantages to having a set limit of, for example,
10 article submissions a day.

~~~
JeffL
Or even two a day.

As someone who almost never submits stuff, I find it really frustrating that
the few times I do find something that I think would be great, I see it get
knocked down on the "new" page within an hour because there are so many
submissions coming in. The rate of new submissions seems like it makes it
almost random what just happens to get picked up in the brief window of time
and what doesn't.

~~~
VMG
as with all regulation, don't forget the unintentional side effects: spammers
with many sockpuppet accounts will be more present in proportion to typical
users that only have one account

------
brackin
I definitely disagree with auto submitting but don't believe that Hacker News
should be more locked down.

There is always a lot of complaints about content but there is an inherent
system allowing posters to know what the mass wants rather than one commenter
and making sure the best content rises.

Don't vote up anything you believe doesn't deserve to be on the front page or
flag anything that deserves to be flagged. If there are very strict content
guidelines some of the most interesting and obscure content won't be
recommended for posting.

~~~
benologist
Voting or not only addresses the person submitting a ton of content, it does
nothing for all the stories prematurely bumped down to page 2 or 3 of the new
section where they are effectively dead.

------
mukyu
A slightly related previous discussion [1] on the aspect of blindly submitting
stories.

Even not doing it blindly (say, you save up links that are good and post them
all at peak times for better results) is not in good form either if it is more
than say 5 at a time.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386443>

------
willdamas
Agreed; surely there must be a limit on submissions per day?

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collegeportalme
I am not sure if limiting the submissions per day should be our goal. It's
obstruction of freedom of speech- which is do not stand for. Even if we limit
the user, how are we making the site productive? The real problem is not that
someone has 100K karma, rather, it's that because of this excessive
submissions real stories are lost in the mix.

How do we help good stories/discussions come to light? Karma is a vanity
metric, let's look beyond it ya'll

