
Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes - sama
A lot of people ask us why their submission gets kicked off the front page.  The answer is almost always that it trips our voting ring detector.<p>Please occasionally read &#x2F;newest so interesting stories that don&#x27;t solicit upvotes can still get on the front page.
======
simonsarris
Sam I think you have great power to give /newest more views if you'd consider
minor redesigns.

Perhaps you could dither stories so the front-page list goes
top/new/top/new/top/new, etc, but that is potentially very messy.

Or perhaps instead, the front-page can show 30 top stories, then a line break,
then 30 new stories, all on the front page. Long-scrolling pages are in
fashion, after all.

These aren't well-developed ideas, but the point remains that the inertia of
being one click away means that a huge percentage of people will never even
_look_ at /newest, never-mind up-vote interesting stories.

Please consider changes to modify the median behavior. It's within your power
and would do us all good. It's worth an experiment, isn't it?

~~~
huhtenberg
Just splice a random /newest entry into a front page on every load.

This gets extra eyes on them and helps float good stories up. Optionally mark
them green, just like HN currently marks noob users.

~~~
tptacek
If you have ideas on how to improve the front page, a great thing to do is to
send them to hn@ycombinator.com. Dan and Nick are super responsive, and you
might be able to have a more productive conversation in email than on a
thread.

~~~
huhtenberg
Posting it here helps accumulating other people upvotes, which, presumably,
Dan and Nick can see on their end. It also opens subject to a wider
discussion, which is hardly a bad thing. Meta threads are pretty damn useful
if you ask me.

~~~
tptacek
I agree, and I actually like the meta-threads, but I've had much more success
talking to Dan privately than I have in trying to motivate changes with public
comments. I think if you're really serious about a suggestion, mailing Dan is
the right way to go.

If there's one consistent thing I've read from Dan in his tenure of publicly
moderating the site, it's "please mail hn@ycombinator.com about this stuff".
I'm just heading him off here. :)

------
lisper
Some observations:

1\. Almost no one reads the new page. For proof, go to the new page and count
up the total number of votes that all the stories on the new page have
received in the last hour.

2\. There is a VERY short time window (typically about an hour nowadays)
during which a story either gets enough votes to end up on the home page (half
a dozen or so seems to be enough) or drops off the first new page, after which
it will never be seen again.

3\. Once a story arrives on the home page, there is a very good chance that it
will stay there for a while (longer than an hour anyway).

4\. As a result, there is an EXTREMELY strong incentive when one has posted a
story to send out an email to one's friends saying, "I just posted this to HN,
please take a look and upvote it if you think it deserves it." [1]

5\. A story that gets a lot of votes as a result isn't necessarily a bad
story. So a voting ring detector is likely to generate false positives.

6\. Simply asking people to go read the new page isn't going to fix the
problem. Figuring out what to do instead isn't easy.

\---

[1] Last year I did an experiment where I wrote a series of six blog posts all
related to a single topic. I posted all six to HN. Three of them I sent out an
email announcement, and three of them I didn't. The first three all ended up
on the home page, ultimately garnering many tens of votes. The other three
never got a single vote.

~~~
jsnell
Low vote counts on the new page don't prove nobody goes there. An alternative
explanation is that 90% of the new page is crap that really doesn't deserve a
single vote. (Just did this experiment, and only found one of the 30
submissions interesting enough to even click on).

It is true that you need to get something like 5-6 votes in the first hour to
get to the front page. But that's not a very large amount, and it's definitely
possible to get across that threshold without soliciting for votes, so clearly
there are a decent amount of people reading /newest. (About a third of my
submissions made the front page, and it's kind of obvious in retrospect why
many of the others failed. I never asked anyone to vote for any of those
submissions).

~~~
lisper
> Low vote counts on the new page don't prove nobody goes there.

True, which is why I did that experiment. The odds of getting the results I
did by accident are one in 64, which counts as a statistically significant
result.

------
yesimahuman
I'd be curious to hear more about how YC companies handle voting so they get
their content on the front page. From what I've heard, they get a lot of help
to promote content.

Totally makes sense seeing as HN is built around YC, but in that light makes
it a bit disingenuous to ask the community to not solicit help from _their_
group to promote content.

~~~
sama
YC companies complain the most often because they trigger the voting ring when
they ask their batchmates to votes them up :)

~~~
volaski
As a counter argument, I haven't seen _any_ ycombinator company NOT make it on
the front page. I am not saying this is a collusion or anything but wanted to
point out that there are people with knowledge who do this all the time and
can get away with it because they know how it works. They would send a message
like "Please go to HN and look for such and such title and vote it up. I can't
post the link because of voting ring algorithm". And I see these people always
show up on the front page. When this is the reality, how can one NOT do this?
The people who try to play fair are the ones who will lose. I agree with you
that it's not good to ask for upvotes but people who already know how it works
will keep doing it, and the people who don't will just lose like they always
have. Also I wonder what you do with those YC company guys who complain about
getting detected as voting ring. Do you just let their posts stay buried or do
you give them a second chance? If you are going to ask people to cooperate, I
think it's crucial to have some transparency. Otherwise, no matter what you
ask, nothing will change.

As a person who discovers lots of cool projects through showHN posts, I hope
you could come up with a solution for this, really.

~~~
dang
I realize you may discount this, coming from HN staff, but I'd like to try to
ease your worries a little.

> there are people with knowledge who do this all the time and can get away
> with it because they know how it works.

I believe you that people say they know, but unless I'm extremely mistaken,
most really don't. We see evidence all the time of people trying (but failing)
to sneak around HN's anti-ring systems. That's not to say some don't succeed.
Some probably do. I'd like very much to get better at catching them.

> And I see these people always show up on the front page.

When you see that, we'd like to know about it. There is a lot that we can (and
will) do to investigate those cases. Don't forget that even when the ring
detector misses something, there's still a lot of data we can look at if we
know to. So please, everyone, email hn@ycombinator.com when someone is gaming
HN.

Our goal is to have the best stories on the front page [1]. We don't all agree
about what the best stories are, but I think we can agree that they're usually
not ones that are only here because someone is promoting something. When we
say we want people to vote for things they're interested in, that's not the
kind of interest we're talking about.

> Do you just let their posts stay buried or do you give them a second chance?

Good question. We occasionally override the ring penalty when a story has
clear merit for HN. (I've commented to that effect in perhaps a dozen of those
threads.) But that goes for any story, not just a YC co's. And we're pretty
stingy about it.

[1] That's also, by the way, our primary idea of how HN as a forum can help
YC's business interests. If HN has the best quality content, the best quality
people will want to be here, and some of them will start startups that YC
funds. I'm not saying we do have the best quality content—there's a lot to be
desired. I'm saying that this is HN's global optimum and we're not interested
in trading that away for something less.

------
gus_massa
I usually read the newest page, but usually it has a lot of 1-point stories,
and many of them are almost-spam or almost-dupe.

Another user proposed a newest page with a >2-points filter (someone else
think that it’s interesting). See for example
[http://hnapp.com/filter/d3a308f2ac9a071c0bf174e0c1a8fd22](http://hnapp.com/filter/d3a308f2ac9a071c0bf174e0c1a8fd22)

~~~
james33
How does anything get on that list then if nobody ever sees the 1-point
submission (without asking for votes).

~~~
PaulHoule
exactly. that's the true terror of pagerank -- not that spammers are putting
in millions of junk links, but that it makes legitimate people stop linking.

------
oskarth
> Please occasionally read /newest so interesting stories that don't solicit
> upvotes can still get on the front page.

In theory this is good, but in practice it's hard. Here's a suggestion for how
to make it easier in practice: redirect 1/3 of the visits from the start page
to /newest. As a regular and medium-karma user, I would know why this happens,
and I personally wouldn't mind it.

------
sharemywin
I prefer /newest. I'd rather see stuff unfiltered. Plus you can comment on
stuff without 150 other comments. so it feels like your comments are heard.

~~~
lucb1e
I think they're read more than one realizes even if it doesn't gather upvotes

------
Mz
On a full sized monitor, most titles go only about halfway across the screen.
I think with a little tweaking, you could have two columns on the front page:
One with the current front page code, one with the newest stories. You might
have to have titles wrap for longer titles or make some other tweaks to make
this work. But that might cut back on the need to ask folks to look at new
stuff.

Generally speaking, if you can write the code, you can make the rules people
have to follow (though it does require some deep thinking, data, etc at
times). If you want to compel x behavior, then compel it. If you want to
forbid y behavior, then deny the ability in some way where possible. Writing
the code makes you "god" for your little world: You decide the local
"physics". Deciding the local physics is going to generally get you better
results than asking people to please do x or please don't do y.

~~~
webhat
I did something similar for an RSS reader I was building based on bayesian
filtering, a col-4 column on the right with the "live" feed and a main col-8
column with the filtered feed, meaning all the matches. It looked pretty good
in landscape mode.

------
aikah
What does count as a voting ring?

If I post a link to HN on twitter and people upvote the submission coming from
twitter,does it count as a voting ring?

~~~
rickyc091
It's probably better to up vote from the feed. When you click on a link from
the feed, you're generally going directly to the article. You hit the browser
back button to get back to hackernews; chances are if the article seemed
interesting, you would then hit the up vote button. When's the last time you
hit the up vote button on a comment page?

~~~
vacri
Almost all my upvotes come from the comments page. If an article looks
interesting, it gets opened in one tab, followed by the comments page to see
what people said about it. Look at the article, then go to the comments, may
as well upvote whilst there.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I do similarly except that I just start with opening comment pages in
different tabs, then go through them one-by-one, opening article from the
comment thread, and upvoting there if I find it interesting. Saves me on
number of tabs opened at the same time, which matters for me because in
Chrome, after you hit ~ two dozens of open tabs, the favicon disappears which
makes them pretty much unusable.

------
encoderer
Of course, the alternative is just to submit something to HN and..... hope for
the best? Sure, THAT sounds reasonable to a bunch of type-a founders.

I think it's reasonable that somebody promotes their HN post. The takeaway is
just to be careful about how you share and how widely and with whom.

I made the front page last week (for a few hours) for a side project that I
launched with a friend. Several up-votes shortly after we posted it got us to
the bottom of the front page, and organic traffic took it from there.

------
programminggeek
I remember the early days of digg and people tend to see social news sites as
a mechanism to get a wave of traffic. What they don't always think about is
providing value to the social sites.

HN is probably better than most about not letting much crap on the home page,
but these sites are almost universally terrible at surfacing new content so
that it has a good opportunity to get up voted.

The selfish human response is to get your friends to vote for you (just like
you get your friends to vote for you in real life actually). It's just that
there are so few actual people looking at the submitted stories that it
wouldn't take much to astroturf your way on to the front page without a voting
ring filter.

The best solution is very likely to have a better interface for surfacing
submitted stories to a wider audience. Or, incentivize people to actually look
at the new section. Maybe extra points for voting or commenting before it hits
front page.

I don't think it would take much to solve this problem, but this isn't a
policy or filter problem, it's a human problem and your system needs to work
with the user psychology that naturally exists on HN (and similar sites).

Reddit seemed to solve this by making subreddits a bigger part of the site,
but I don't know how HN would incorporate such an idea without losing the site
identity.

------
TeMPOraL
This post just motivated me to go through /newest and upvote few things. Thank
you.

Everyone, let's take a minute now and go through the new submissions and move
some fresh things onto the front page. Let this also become a habit, until
mods tweak HN interface to reduce the effort it requires.

------
compare
Is there actually any dataset of upon which the accuracy of this detector is
measured and improved? Or is it just some hard-coded rules?

For example, does it really differentiate between people who ask for votes,
and people who just vote up the content of someone they recognize?

------
Kiro
I wonder how many false positives there are.

------
schodge
If the OP is still reading, why didn't this at least get onto the Ask HN page?
I wasn't asking for upvotes, but it seemed to fall like a stone without ever
having a chance to get views... ?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7948001](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7948001)

------
PhasmaFelis
If legit submissions are getting booted by your voting-ring detector so often
that you need to ask readers to take action to prevent it, then the detector
is broken. It's not the readers' responsibility to change our habits to make
up for your broken mechanisms.

------
arikrak
Currently, it seems you need either a lot of good luck or upvoting friends to
make it to front page. Why not use some categorization so every link makes it
it's category's page and has chance of reaching front page?

------
lbr
Sam, Does saying "discuss on hn: link" at the bottom of a blog post violate
your voting ring detector or any other terms of service? I couldn't find
anything about that.

------
mhartl
What do you think about soliciting upvotes by sending people to /newest? Among
other things, as a side-effect they might upvote other stories as well.

------
bl4hblahblat
What gets me is that unless you are really interested in GO, Haskell, dislike
Microsoft, think you can write a real encrypted instant messaging system in
JavaScript crypto, and have a libertarian leaning you will never have enough
karma/points to downvote other people.

It encourages group think in the extreme.

Also, at around 180 gold stars/dingles it just stops.

I mean seriously...there is a vast amount of consensus around a set of things
here that are just impermeable. Yes I have read "the approach to comments" and
it sounds like you guys think that "resisting decline" means everyone
basically has the same opinion but everyone gets to restate it to each other
in "civil" and interesting ways.

EDIT: You also have to really be into crypto-currency...it also helps if you
mention hayek while talking about it. You rebel.

~~~
bl4hblahblat
And so now i'm being downvoted, because you know...disagreement isn't cool.

How can I save this...Who wants to talk about Rust? Huh? Anybody? Bitcoin?
That god damn NSA? Amirite?

~~~
minimaxir
Complaining about downvotes isn't cool either.

~~~
klibertp
Not if what a downvote means changed that drastically recently. I _never_
complained about downvotes, because I believed in the community collective
wisdom. However, in the past few weeks, I've seen many cases of downvotes
being used to basically communicate that "I disagree with you and your six-
paragraphs, coherent, civil post, which is even on-topic, but I'm too lazy to
write my own comment explaining why, so have a downvote."

I'm seriously thinking on putting some effort into collecting some examples
and starting a discussion on the topic, because it's IMHO very bad tendency.

EDIT: Although in the case of your parent post downvotes are understandable.

~~~
lotharbot
pg has said many times in the past that it's OK to downvote for disagreement
-- even if a comment is civil, coherent, on-topic, etc. (I usually prefer to
voice disagreement in such a case, but don't always have the time/energy.)

It's usually self-correcting. A lot more people can upvote than downvote, and
most people don't like seeing good comments in the gray.

------
bcohen5055
_Upvoted_

