

Analysing the total points on the "newest" page over time - RiderOfGiraffes
http://www.solipsys.co.uk/Writings/TotalNewestPoints.html?HN

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akkartik
Oddly enough, I performed this analysis earlier in the week. I quickly
realized it would be random because there's only a tiny number of items
getting votes at any point. Total points depends on submission quality more
than anything else.

Hmm, it does tell us _one_ thing: there seems to be enough people voting on
the new page regardless of day of week.

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jdp23
That's pretty significant!

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RiderOfGiraffes
This is a follow-up to the item about how long submissions stay on the
"Newest" page as a function of time of submission:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2022547>

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stcredzero
My hunch is that there is a threshold for social news sites of this general
model (voting on items on a "new" page) where the volume of traffic swings the
balance of power sharply in favor of upvoting cabals. (Rapid fall of items off
the "new" page dilutes the power of the ordinary voting user, but has less
effect on the targeted actions of cabals.) After that point, the site's
"market" gets severely distorted. Deliberate manipulation by disparate parties
all motivated to redirect the maximum number of eyeballs to their site, and
this tends to pull excellent sites strongly back towards the average.

This would also imply that upvote cabals can manipulate conditions at a given
site in their favor simply by submitting more links.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
This is why PG has to have logic in the HN code to detect and punish or lock
out voting rings. The Sybil attack [1] is well-known and there are methods to
detect it. Harder is when a circle of genuine users all decide to watch each
others' posts and upvote them purely on reputation.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack>

