

Voting Rings: How Insiders Game User Generated News - MediaSquirrel
http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/09/01/mafia-sourcing-the-insiders-game-of-user-powered-news/

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btilly
How many people here ever click on "new"? How many stories just disappear
without hitting the front page? How many accounts need to be involved to make
a particular story get to the front page?

I'm sure that the answers respectively are, "rather few", "the vast majority"
and "not many". And there you have the raw ingredients for a voting ring to
form. As a matter of principle I would never be involved with such, and I have
a natural dislike for anyone that I think is. But the ingredients are there.

More than that, you still have a popularity effect. People who vote on new
articles have to prioritize what they read in some fashion. Speaking
personally, it is natural to choose to look at articles with interesting
titles, or which are submitted by someone you recognize as being a consistent
source of good content. Therefore if someone like patio11 submits an article,
it has a significant advantage. As does anything involving YC. (Of course
promoting YC is the whole point of this site, so I don't mind that at all. And
I'm guilty at looking at content from people I trust before content from
people I've never heard of.)

Memory says that jacquesm mentioned once that he had turned down an offer of
money to post certain articles from companies that were looking for good pr.
(I don't swear that I correctly remember who it was.) He may have turned them
down, but I'm sure they asked again, and if they asked around enough I'm sure
that they found a taker. And if so, then you have the dark side here on HN.

~~~
jbert
Why not simply mix some 'new' randomly into the front page at some ratio? If
one or two of the stories in the front page were (different) new stories for
each visitor, you'd solve the "front page or bust" problem.

You'd sacrifice a bit of "quality" from the front page, at the gain of a more
variety and more exposure for new stories - entirely tunable by the ratio.

~~~
alextgordon
Or display both in two columns. Frontpage on the left. New on the right.

~~~
jbert
Well, the idea would be that the casual viewer couldn't distinguish the 'new'
from the front page and so would treat them the same.

Otherwise people will ignore new as they do now.

(Point score could be left off of the front page to help this).

~~~
alextgordon
I think the problem is not that people are wilfully ignoring it, rather it's
just not prominent enough.

When I open HN, I am immediately seduced by an interesting headline (or point
score) of a frontpage story. I don't have time to make a conscious decision to
visit /newest. There's no way it's getting precedence over _"12 ways to speed
up your Erlang programs with NoSQL"_.

If new and the frontpage got equal treatment, then I'd be seduced by
interesting headlines of frontpage and new stories equally. Meaning the good
new stories would have a better chance of being upvoted.

I wouldn't like to see frontpage and new stories merged into the same list,
since a great deal of new stories are spam or otherwise devoid of interest.

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_delirium
It's interesting to me that Kuro5hin in its heydey had relatively few problems
with voting rings, despite having a purely voting-driven front page. There are
probably some reasons involving community size and dynamics, but my guess is
that the biggest one is the fact that the site was organized around submission
of original articles to Kuro5hin, as opposed to submission of links. That
raises the buy-in stakes beyond what people only interested in promotion are
willing to spend time on, as well as lowering the potential gains from
promotion (you got your article read, but directly on k5, not via traffic to
any monetizable endeavor of yours). The fact that all votes were public may
have had an effect as well, making any sort of collusion easier to spot.

~~~
jacquesm
It's also what made K5 in to a huge echo chamber.

~~~
_delirium
I guess I didn't find that to be the case, any more than any other forum, at
least. In what ways was K5 more of an echo chamber than, say, HN is?

~~~
jacquesm
If you write stuff for your 'own' audience of the K5 members, which will then
write stuff as well for you to comment on and so on it's different than if 90%
or more of the submitted articles is about stuff from the outside.

It brings in fresh blood, outside perspective and avoid inbreeding.

~~~
_delirium
Ah, I guess that's the part I actually find much better. There's a certain
community aspect where people are actually talking to each other, addressing
an audience, that leads to much deeper engagement and discussions imo. That's
also the feature of good mailing lists, BBSs, and Usenet groups I like best
(though there are plenty of bad ones). The link-site thing seems too
disjointed, and imo actually leads to _more_ of an echo-chamber effect,
because people end up having to pattern-match based on superficial things like
headlines. So we get lots of random submissions that seem superficially about
hackerdom or startups, but less sustained engagement. I mean, I personally
find HN _much_ more echo-chambery than K5 at its peak was. Perhaps personal
preference.

~~~
jacquesm
Interesting. You've convinced me to re-visit K5 to see what it's like there
now.

~~~
_delirium
Haha, I wouldn't suggest it. I still post there, but it's basically a dive bar
of old regulars and some old trolls (who are now a bigger proportion, but have
been around long enough that they're sort of endearing, like the local drunk).
Very little technical content, and nobody ever writes/submits stories any
more, although there is occasionally technical stuff in the diaries (Luke from
prgmr.com still posts some stuff there). I think early 2000s was its peak, it
was on life support by around 2006, and from 2008-present it's been the
walking dead.

An interesting question (to me) is what killed it. One might be that Rusty
Foster increasingly lost interest in too much active sysadminning, and
eventually added a $5 registration fee, which he thought would raise the
quality of the userbase, but actually ended up completely killing any new
registration. Another might be the rise of blogs. Although I like the submit-
to-K5 model, blogs _do_ make it a lot easier to just post on your personal
blog and link somewhere if you prefer. I think there are especially economic
incentives to write good content on your own blog rather than on a community
site these days (you can make a little money from even a personal blog, get
pagerank/prestige from it if it's attached to other projects, etc.).

Of course, that's exactly the part I'm ambivalent about, even though I do it
too. I think something's lost when you go from 100 people discussing in a
community (whether it's a site or a mailing list) to 100 people each trying to
build their personal brands.

~~~
jacquesm
So, I did take a look. It's mostly dead. Pity!

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dasil003
HN may have voting rings, but it still works because it's a niche site, and
hackers have strong Internet BS detectors that counter
spam/phishing/linkjacking/other mischief relatively effectively. People on HN
may be killing time, but the majority still have some quality standards for
what they want to read. Gaming HN isn't worth as much because A) there's fewer
people, and B) you have to work harder to game it. Other niche sites can
easily share this quality.

But for a site like Digg that wants to be the biggest social news site, it's
just a race to the bottom. Gaming Digg just requires a tabloid-editor
mentality where you figure out the quickest thing that will grab peoples
attention and then boost it to the front page.

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iamwil
YC is already one giant mafia, if you'd like to think of it that way. I'm sure
YC classes vote each others' stuff up.

I'm wondering what the recently implemented voting ring detection reveals. Are
they all clustered by YC class? Are there overlaps? Or is there an outside
group moving the articles up?

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jasonkester
When you build a site with user submitted content and voting, you have two
immediate problems you need to solve before you can even get started:

    
    
      - How are you going to deal with spam
      - How are you going to deal with gaming
    

They're actually related problems, since the aim of both is to drive people to
a given website. Since that's demonstrably valuable in terms of cash money,
it's an absolute certainty that people will try to take advantage of it.

You really need to bake something in to handle it from the word go.

~~~
bravura
What you need to truly defeat this sort of spam is personalization, AKA
recommendation,

If the top news stories are personalized to your interests, it is more
difficult to game the system.

In particular, consider this scenario: I get a news result from a voting ring,
and it ranks high because they all voted. But then I downvote the article
because it is not interesting to me, Afterwards, the voting ring's weight is
diminished in my personalized news feed. Hence, they cannot artificially rank
articles for you,

I would argue that without some personalization, it is impossible to 100%
avoid spam. Because if you treat there as being one objective lense, it is
hard to discriminate between legitimate overlapping interests and colluders
who share their authority.

~~~
jasonkester
Indeed, though that would only fix it for the small percentage of users who
are (a.) logged in, and (b.) vote things down.

It wouldn't work on me, for example, because I hardly ever vote on anything
here. In the 3 years I've been around I can't imagine I've actually voted
_down_ more than a half dozen times.

~~~
tomjen3
You don't have to be logged in - just give them a long-term cookie when they
show up on your site and it still works. And if you aren't voting anything
down, you wouldn't be the kind of person who would need such a website in the
first place.

~~~
jasonkester
_And if you aren't voting anything down, you wouldn't be the kind of person
who would need such a website in the first place._

You lost me there. You're talking about this on a site that doesn't even
_allow_ its users to downvote stories. And you're talking to a power user of
that site, who just told you he doesn't ever downvote things. HN is a culture
of voting _up_ things that are good, and, rarely, downvoting things that are
distracting from the conversation. That's one of the reasons it's so good.

As to cookies for non-logged in users, they don't really help anything. Sure,
you could consider every clickthru as a 'vote' for personalization purposes,
but it would likely just fill a user's feed with poorly titled things and
clickbait. Probably more than half the articles I click through on get closed
immediately without reading. I wouldn't want to optimize my view to include
more of that.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>And you're talking to a power user of that site, who just told you he doesn't
ever downvote things.

As an aside, what makes you a "power user"?

~~~
jasonkester
Same thing that makes you one, brother. 1000 reputation points and the
equivalent of $10k in otherwise billable hours squandered on this site.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I'm going to be lording it over the hoi-poloi now, "I'm a power user".

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mkramlich
I'd bet there are voting rings on HN. Perhaps not as bad as was on Digg. But
I'm sure it's here. PG made a comment about it the other day, offhand, in
something about getting some code/idea help about fighting it.

~~~
fbnt
Since many people have dynamic IPs, I think tracking geolocation patterns of
the first 10-ish votes would be enough to distinguish suspect cases and
eventually put them 'on-hold' (HN dosen't really need to get stories on the
front page as soon as possible, it's not exactly a breaking news site).

~~~
dLuna
Since people have to be logged in to vote, there is a much easier solution:

Count votes from new users lower.

And count early votes from users often voting on articles posted by a
particular person lower.

It can be refined quite a bit...

~~~
fbnt
True, but the problem with voting rings is that links may be submitted by
different participants to the ring each time, and if they all have genuine
high karma, that is difficult to track down.

------
DanielBMarkham
There's a fine line between a couple dozen guys on IRC with similar interests
and an actual voting ring. I'm not sure where one concept stops and another
starts. I guess if you demanded money for voting, that'd obviously be bad. But
if you IM'ed a couple dozen friends about a cool new link you saw? It gets
fuzzier.

I have noticed voting trends by time of day on HN. I've also noticed what
appears to be auto upvoting and downvoting based on the submitter. But I'm
just an outsider, so what do I know? Up until recently, I have always assumed
such activity to be more demographically-based. I am slowly beginning to have
my doubts, though.

The interesting point about HN is, at the end of the day, this is PGs site.
Maybe he decides he wants articles about squirrels. So we get articles about
squirrels. Maybe he decides site X is trollish. So we get no stuff from site
X.

It's been called a "benign dictatorship". Meh. Sounds a bit like "jumbo
shrimp" to me. Even though HN isn't what it used to be, I still visit.

------
terra_t
oooooh, i'm so scared... but excuse me, I've got to make a few 1000 electric
sheep so I can get some traffic to my blog...

