

Ask NH: Are people hacking hacker news? - jagira

In recent days, I have seen a lot of stories/urls/questions, which do not deserve to be on first page of HN, but they are.<p>It is obvious that the story will gradually move down the list if its content has no worth, but to be on first page gives enough exposure.<p>If I ask some of my friends to vote my submission up within minutes of submission, it will bring the story on first page and then if I ask them to keep voting in batches, the story will stay there.<p>I am not sure whether HN algorithm checks for such voting patterns or not. If it does not, how can it or we prevent such acts?
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Jun8
Unfortunately your questions has now become meta, i.e. it doesn't belong on
first page, but alas, as of now it is.

I normally do not comment on the "recently I've noticed HN is going down the
drain" type posts and questions, since I think doing so is akin to a reply-all
with a "please remove me from this list" message to an email posted to the
wrong list: it just makes a bad thing perpetuate (man, this happened recently
in my company, and it took _three_ days for the idiotic removal requests to
die down).

Getting worked up about the quality of this or that newsgroup is, I think,
similar to language police mentality, i.e. trying to get rid of (generally
English) loan words. Canada (Quebec), France, and now China is trying to do
it, but (i) it's futile, since language (and newsgroups) are dynamic entities,
shaped chaotically by a large group of people and (ii) you look ridiculous in
trying to do what cannot be done.

Why is this so hard to understand?

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jeremymims
This comment by pg should answer your question:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1035206>

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getonit
> If I ask some of my friends to vote my submission up within minutes of
> submission

If you and everyone else stopped doing things like that, the front page might
start to mean something again.

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jagira
The reason for asking this question was to know whether HN has implemented
such features or are they working on such features?

Did I screw the message up? Or was it difficult to comprehend?

~~~
getonit
> Did I screw the message up? Or was it difficult to comprehend?

I chose to ignore the main question, which yes, I did comprehend and no, you
didn't screw up - it just doesn't interest me. The sub-point I was interested
in - the broader picture - is the one I responded to, hence the quote in my
reply.

