
Paying for hackernews frontpage links, now? - slater
http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/misc/BidRequests/ShowBidRequest.asp?lngBidRequestId=1130270
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DanielBMarkham
Just googling around, looks like the guy is Tamour Khan, from Pembroke Pnes,
FL

Tamour? You out there dude? Care to explain? What do you need to promote so
badly you don't trust the board to vote you up or down?

~~~
blurry
My guess is he wants to push androidster.com (android app consulting)

~~~
huhtenberg
It'd be absolutely brilliant if it were him who submitted this news item ! :)

The cake is a lie.

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JoelSutherland
Which is worse:

1\. A 'paid' frontpage story that is sufficiently HN related so that a
moderator doesn't kill it,

2\. A frontpage story showing evidence that somebody wants to game a social
news site.

~~~
jerf
The first is part of the charter of this site. That it doesn't come up often
doesn't change that.

The second is something neither the site owners nor the site community want.

------
il
Gaming social news sites has been going on for quite some time now, although I
don't see why anyonenwould bother gaming HN- the traffic is minimal and too
savvy to click on ads.

As for Digg and reddit- many of you have startups and blogs that are
floundering with minimal traffic and revenue.

Instead of complaining and being all up in arms, perhaps you should accept
that Digg and reddit have been gamed by numerous entities for years, and learn
how to game them for your own benefit. That doesn't mean spamming, it means
giving your own quality content an extra push. Back when I did that sort of
thing, I got dozens of stories to the Digg and reddit front pages. After
receiving, synthetically, with many accounts and proxies, the first hundred or
so votes needed to get to the front page, these stories went on to receive
thousands of natural, real upvotes. So much for your "algorithms". If you
can't beat them, join them.

~~~
swombat
Getting your friends to vote you up is one thing... getting a network of
proxied spam bots to do so is another.

There's a fine line between "giving an extra push" and being downright
unethical. I usually try to convince people (on twitter and irc and
personally) to upvote my stories when I think they'll be of interest, but I
would never actually contrive a script to do that for me.

I'll add that in my experience, the relatively small push of getting a few
initial upvotes from friends, even on reddit, is usually enough to propel
articles onto wherever they're destined to go. You don't need a 100 fake
votes.

~~~
chris11
Is this a common occurrence here? I've heard of power users on digg doing
this, but I'm slightly surprised its happening here.

~~~
il
If you're going to game a site, might as well make it a high traffic site- I'm
sure Digg and reddit get the vast majority of the bots/fake users.

That said, I see no ethical distinction between asking your friends to vote
for a story and asking a bunch of random people on the internet to vote for a
story. Either way, you're stuffing the ballot box.

One only has to look at the myriad submissions by Alex Jones/truther "bots" on
reddit to see that.

~~~
chris11
I think you can ethically ask your friends to vote up your stories, as long as
they actually have accounts used for more than voting up your stories. It
would be like asking your school friends to vote for you if you were running
for a school office.

I'm just not sure how comfortable I am with users politicizing the voting
process. At least spam and most fluff seems to be taken care of quickly, so it
isn't really a problem.

~~~
rms
It's not really unethical, but it is generally frowned upon to have your
friends vote up stories. There is a slippery slope with asking your friends to
vote up stories; that is basically how digg works.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196778>

~~~
chris11
I'm sure I would not find out from a moderator, but the math for detecting
voting rings sounds really interesting.

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moe
Well, they could disguise their content as an Erlang story...

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iuguy
I imagine it's probably not that difficult to game HN. The community's not
that big, the big gaming boys work elsewhere on much larger sites so scaling
down to HN won't be hard. If the article doesn't fit HN though, that's a
different question.

~~~
vaksel
you can get to the top with 2-3 upvotes, hardly impossible

~~~
axod
If it's a lame article/spam/offtopic it'd usually get killed pretty quickly
though. I'm not sure that's the case on digg/reddit.

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icey
I would really, really, really love to be able to see who upvotes a story
(just in general).

~~~
ivankirigin
I'd make my up & downvotes public if I could.

~~~
blasdel
Crawl <http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=XXX> using your login cookie.

~~~
icey
That only works for your own login, no?

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chanux
If the guy had mentioned the two links on that page he could hope for being on
HN front page :D .

------
ShabbyDoo
Somebody should bid $10 on it just to see who's behind it.

~~~
chaosmachine
According to Reddit, this guy: <http://tamournkhan.com/Qualifications.php>

~~~
biohacker42

      Master of Science in Entrepreneurship?
    

I wonder if I get a Ph.D in making it rich.

------
JabavuAdams
Then there are guys like me who submitted his iPhone app info-mercial article
at midnight on Valentine's day. Fail.

------
minsight
It's inevitable. The theory is that the algorithmic protection and a little
bit of oversight can remove the irrelevant stuff. If someone wants to pay to
submit relevant stuff, then I don't see a problem.

~~~
daveambrose
I do. I come here to read stories that are authentic. When or if I figure out
that someone "paid" to get their post or article to the front page of a site
like this, I'll start to lose something that I consider the best part of HN:
honesty and respect. [1]

[1] Maybe with the exception of a few people I read on Tumblr each morning, HN
is the most authentic community of like-minded folks who seem to either (a)
care about the viewpoints of other members or (b) act civilized rather than
become trolls.

~~~
noodle
i agree. its why i don't read digg/reddit.

~~~
w1ntermute
Digg/Reddit used to be civilized and intelligent as well, but then they grew
in popularity and everything went downhill from there. It is definitely
possible for the same thing to happen to HN if something (I have no idea what)
isn't actively done to prevent it.

~~~
noodle
difference between digg/reddit and HN is that HN users typically actively
police, and the application restricts functionality based on your karma.
you're not allowed to do certain things unless you have a certain level of
trust, which isn't the case on digg/reddit.

~~~
w1ntermute
" _HN users typically actively police_ "

This isn't very scalable. If HN's userbase were of the same size as Digg's or
Reddit's and most of those people were unwanted (i.e., if a large group of
Digg/Reddit users were to begin frequenting HN), it would not be able to
prevent them from saying/doing as they pleased.

" _the application restricts functionality based on your karma_ "

The karma is determined by other user's ratings, right? How well is that going
to work if a majority of the users are similar to your average Digg/Reddit
user?

One of the big differences that makes it possible for HN to maintain its
civility is its relatively small size. So far, I have not seen any scalable
methods of moderating a user-contributed link aggregation website. Therefore,
I can only hope that Digg/Reddit users don't find out about HN (which is
mostly a pipe dream).

~~~
allenbrunson
i don't think you've been here long enough to know how this site works.

if somebody submits off-topic or spammy links, they will be killed. if
somebody starts acting like a jerk, their account will be killed. it doesn't
really matter what the average hn user thinks about it, they will be killed
anyway.

the editors are very ruthless about this. it doesn't matter how many unruly
users come here, they will either abide by the rules or they will be banned,
period.

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spoiledtechie
<http://www.division1movers.com/>

Looks like he might want to promote this site on Digg and Reddit.

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noodle
for under $100? i don't think they understand how much people have paid for
frontpage status on digg/reddit in the past.

as for HN, i suppose it was only a matter of time before someone tried to game
the system (if they aren't already).

