
Ask HN: If there was a bury/upmod brigade on HN, how would we know? - osipov
Has anyone reviewed HN Arc source code to check if there is any log data of up/down mods? Is there a way to perform analytics to look for a HN equivalent of a "bury brigade"?
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jacquesm
I've definitely seen evidence of 'upmod' brigades, if you refresh the 'new'
page with a relatively high frequency (say once every two minutes) every now
and then you pick up a new article that is complete nonsense but that already
has 3 or 4 upvotes in less than the minute that it is alive.

Bury brigades are less common, but there are definitely people that have a
'fanclub' that will downmod whatever they write no matter how on topic or good
the contribution is.

Usually this corrects itself after a while though.

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messel
1) crap articles rise only as large as the brigade. If they have hundreds or
thousands of coordinated voters, they'd be better off at bigger audience sites

2) they'd leave a clear repeat user ID/IP trace. So moderator can automate
detection of anomalous upvote coincidences

3) if they faked new IPs while upvoting and rotated user IDs we'd have a more
difficult detection problem. We can look at growth trends of upvotes for
derivatives that are anomalous. Coincidental upvotes would show up.

4) if the upvote gang rotates IDs, IPs, and upvote intervals the HN team is
faced with a fun challenge. Something Digg, Stumbleupon, etc have likely faced
in the past. Chances are, your attention isn't worth it. But a dangerous piece
of malware may be.

Interesting question. What if they faked credentials from low activity members
that were compromised?

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messel
Downvote for sharing opinion? Huh

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mbenjaminsmith
I've been down-voted enough recently that I've considered not coming back. One
time I feel I added a comment that wasn't helpful or necessary, but the rest
was all my honest / best opinion on whatever was being discussed. I don't
know, unhappy people with too much time on their hands? Laid off coders maybe?
If it's a trend it's a shame.

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mbenjaminsmith
...and I get down-voted for that?

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DanielBMarkham
I didn't downvote you, but word to the wise: complaining about getting
downvoted without anything of larger value to add to the conversation almost
always gets you downvoted more (and any parent comments as well that you made
in that thread)

When I first started I spent one thread basically telling the rest of the room
to go jump in a lake for downvoting me. I lost about 7 karma points that day,
so I don't do that anymore. :)

A more reasonable question is: I do not understand what I said that was so
bad. Would somebody please take the time to explain to me why you think I was
downvoted?

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jacquesm
He's right though, look at his comment history.

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plinkplonk
I think (in this case) whining provokes downvotes. As simple as that.

This is just a discussion forum for $Diety's sake. Getting downvoted to -4
isn't the end of the world. It is just a number on a webpage which has no
impact on your success in the real world.

Just try to improve your points/writing. That's what I do when I am downvoted
to oblivion _and_ I care about upvotes.

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jacquesm
If it happens structurally it can definitely have a negative effect though.

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plinkplonk
"If it happens structurally it can definitely have a negative effect though"

I agree. But I am not sure any organized downvoting brigade would slip by the
admin folks for very long. And I am not sure that (downvoting brigade) is what
is happening in _this_ case. ( I was reacting to the "And I get downvoted for
that" bit. A comment like that gets downvoted because it (a) is content free
(b) sounds like angsty whining.

Imo comments about the injustice of downvoting aren't very effective on HN. By
and large, if you make a good point, the community's opinion overcomes
arbitrary downvotes.)

~~~
jacquesm
Since he's posted this a couple of people have already changed the numbers
enough for the discussion to be pretty muddled.

But I've definitely seen this kind of behaviour with others as well,
specifically with: vaksel, unalone, cperciva and a bunch of others. The
interesting thing is that in the long run it always balances out.

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ratsbane
Hacker News source: <http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc> Check
out vote-for at line 1351. I'm looking at the code and wondering how it keeps
users from up/down voting for the same article more than once.* It must be
there but I'm not yet following how this works. Interesting code, though. I
wish I understood it better.

*[edit] as this implies that it's keeping a list of votes as article-user records somewhere.

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rms
PG says that his best software for checking this is not in the public source
code.

