
Auto submission bots on Hacker News - jacquesm
http://jacquesmattheij.com/auto+submission+bots+on+Hacker+News
======
jasonkester
Why does HN give karma points for submitting articles?

That's never made any sense to me. All it does is encourage this kind of
behavior, where you submit everything you can find in the hopes of gaining
points. You haven't really contributed anything valuable, since good articles
tend to find their way here on their own.

Karma for comments makes sense. You can look at somebody's average and it
gives you a sense of what sort of things they're posting. It actually measures
something.

If somebody posts a cheap attack on one of your comments, you can click their
username, notice that they have a 1.9 average, and go about your day knowing
that they're probably just angry with the world in general. On the other hand
if they have an average score of 8.6, you might want to read what they said
again and see if they were actually right.

Karma from article submissions, on the other hand, tells you nothing useful
about the submitter. Any chance we can disassociate upvotes on articles from
user karma?

~~~
mzl
I seldom comment on HN, and when I do I typically do so in threads that are
somewhat dormant, with little activity. I don't really care about karma/votes
at all, I just say something when I think I have something of value to add. My
comment average is 1.7, but I would still like to believe that I have yet to
exhibit any behavior that I'm just angry at the world. I hope that I could
still get yours or others attention, even though I'm not such a high-ranking
commenter.

~~~
jasonkester
First, I hope my upvote just gave your average a bit of a boost.

Second, you'll need to produce a bit more anger and irrationality before
anybody starts labeling you as a troll :)

Frankly, the only time I ever check anybody's profile is when they say
something really valuable or really obnoxious. So by the time I get there I've
pretty much made up my mind about the character of the individual in question.
I can't imagine forming an opinion of somebody based solely on their karma
score on some website.

~~~
mzl
Thanks. That comment was my biggest hitting one ever, so my average will
probably jump quite a bit. Funny that it should be in a meta-karma thread.

I do see what you mean, I didn't think you were discarding comments from low
karma commenters. I mostly wanted to bring up a point that is often missed in
these discussions, that karma points might be very dependent on not only
participation and quality, but on timing.

Given that using average karma as a filter is so blunt, an alternative way to
express your method would be "I might see a high average karma as a reason to
re-evaluate a comment that I initially discarded". Then it would be even
harder to misconstrue into something sinister and karma elitist as I did :)

 __* Edit: from the comment below by mrduncan that shows how average
calculation is done, my previous comment will not affect my average a lot. The
max comment is sensibly ignored as a potential outlier.

~~~
khafra
You started me thinking about ways to normalize average karma, but I haven't
come up with one that makes me happy yet:

\- adjusting to other comments on the same post doesn't account for timing

\- adjusting for time after the post is gameable by necromancers

\- adjusting by the total karma of the post commented on is incomplete; it
also needs some relation to the time lapse from posting to comment

\- penalizing short comments might help discourage snarky one-liners

Are there browser plugins to give an adjusted average karma score this way,
yet?

------
RiderOfGiraffes
FWIW, I was one of the people running a bot to auto-submit. I've always been a
big-iron algorithms programmer, and I've never done much web programming, and
certainly never programmed an auto-submitter before. Since I figured most of
Jacques' idle thoughts were worth more than half the things making it to the
Front Page, I figured it was an ideal time to learn a little about the back-n-
forth of a form submission system with cookies, and to see (a) what I could
learn, (b) how quickly I could learn it, and (c) how little code it took.

So it was an interesting experiment, I'm glad I did it, I'm pleased I learned
something from it, and I'm sorry it seems to have caused Jacques some grief.

For that I apologise unreservedly. We have had a chat off-line and I believe
there's no on-going problem. I have, of course, disabled the bot.

But the questions raised are interesting. I suggest that the "first submitter
gets all the karma" situation means that people submit without thinking,
worried that unless they do so they will miss out on that one item that earns
gobs of karma, that they saw first, but didn't submit quickly enough.

Just sharing the karma between submitters won't work, because then if someone
sees something gaining traction they just submit it themselves and share in
the imaginary profits. Simple, clean, clear solution that's wrong.

No solutions, just problems.

~~~
shrikant
I came here to this thread only to say this:

When reading Jacques' post on his blog, I immediately thought RiderOfGiraffes
must be up to one of his social experiments with the community.

FWIW, I find your 'work' interesting and the chilled out approach to it,
doubly so.

~~~
jacquesm
Agreed. The only downside was that I wasn't in on the joke and that quite a
bit of the backlash was directed at me, not at the people running the bots.

I also think that it would be prudent for anybody that intends to run any kind
of bot on HN to ask PG for permission.

------
DanielBMarkham
I had somebody recently launch into me with a vitriolic attack on HN (they
deleted the comment almost immediately) which started with something like "I
know you probably think you're special, what with 18K karma and all, but..."

People take this karma thing waaaay too seriously.

I know I find the site dangerously distracting, and a large part of that is
watching the up or downvotes on my comments -- it's kind of a realtime
indicator of whether I have my finger on the pulse of the community. So I'm as
much to blame as others.

I've said a few times that somebody should monetize this karma nonsense. Set
up an auction clearing house where karma can be auctioned off for cash.

It probably wouldn't amount to much, but it's just the kind of out-of-the-box
thing that HN should be messing around with. I'm just trying to guess a
number, but I think you could pull 5 percent off each trade and make a nice
bit of chump change, without changing the look and feel of HN at all. (If it
bothers purists or interferes with the running of the board, then simply keep
a separate list of "natural" karma hidden from everybody and use that for the
system stuff)

~~~
barrkel
The karma matters precisely because it can't be bought (not in any ordinary
way, at least). It represents peer acclaim (or conformity to groupthink). If
it was bought and sold, the basis for its value would evaporate.

~~~
damncabbage
It's also valuable because it eventually grants the ability to downvote.

(It's annoying to see obvious trolls and spam sitting at 1 and not be able to
do anything about it. I'm still a few hundred points away, unless the
threshold has gone up again.)

~~~
mirkules
How do you find out the threshold anyway? It seems like it's a mystery for
some reason (unlike, SO for example, where it's all spelled out)

~~~
damncabbage
It was 500 last time I looked; pg raised it during a "HN is going to the dogs"
discussion a while back:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1853529>

------
alexandros
The bots are doing nothing 'wrong' as such. There are certain feeds from where
>90% of the material ends up on HN. If somebody writes a bot to auto-submit
items from that feed, it's helping HN be faster in accessing new and (mostly)
relevant posts. What is not relevant should (in principle) not reach the home
page.

The problem is that submission is winner takes all, i.e. first submitter reaps
all the upvotes. Also, HN does not reward finding new sources of material more
than posting from the predictable sources.

The logical endpoint of these two facts is auto-submission bots rising to the
top of the Karma tables. If Karma is used as a way of anti-gaming (need karma
threshold to downvote, etc.) then this is a way to circumvent that for a
sufficiently motivated manipulator. They can make a bot that auto-submits from
the known sources, and use it to build up an arbitrary number of accounts,
from which they can then boost the articles they want (or bury the comments
they don't like). For all we know, this could already be the case.

I have two suggestions that can sidestep this problem to a certain extent:

1\. Reward articles from predictable sources less than articles from rare
sources.

2\. Split the karma benefit between the first submitter and the people who
upvoted the article early (of course, this needs to take into account how
selectively and successfully the user upvotes to avoid blanket upvoting 'just
in case').

This all is still gameable, but probably not as easily.

~~~
duck
_The bots are doing nothing 'wrong' as such._

Not really... because they just add to the noise on the new page when it isn't
something for HN. HN is curated by hand (with votes) for that reason.

------
gjm11
Proposal:

1\. When a link is submitted, it doesn't actually appear on HN until a certain
(fixed?) time T has elapsed after its first submission.

2\. Everyone who submits it within that time is noted.

3\. Karma from article upvotes is shared equally between all those users. (Or
perhaps unequally in a way that weights earlier submitters slightly more
highly -- but not winner-takes-all as at present.)

4\. If the same link has been submitted N times before time T elapses, the
delay is truncated at that point.

Effects:

1\. There's very little incentive to submit something super-quickly.
Therefore, there's more incentive to read it carefully first. (Good.)

2\. Super-quick submitters don't hurt slower submitters' karma so much.
(Good.)

3\. Submissions no longer have hugely higher potential karma gain than
comments, as they do at present. (Good.)

4\. "Obvious" submissions probably no longer give anyone very much karma.
(Good.)

5\. Breaking news doesn't appear on HN as quickly as it does now; but if lots
of people are submitting it, it still gets in pretty fast. (Maybe good, maybe
bad.)

I think that with suitable choices of T and N -- perhaps 1 hour and 20, or
thereabouts -- this would be a considerable improvement on what we have now.

~~~
vessenes
I like this suggestion. Slowing down HN wouldn't be a bad outcome as well; PG
has mentioned he doesn't want it to be too addictive.

On the other hand, I'm not clear if would slow things down that much, so much
as delay. In any event, this isn't a breaking tech news source for many
obvious reasons.

------
raganwald
I used to encounter what I thought might be bots auto-submitting my old
raganwald blog to reddit. The only person losing karma was me, since I no
longer got to submit my articles at a time when they were interesting to
reddit's readership. Big whoop!

My thinking is that if I write and give my work away, it is no longer up to me
to decide how it is to be used. That's because my words are free as in speech,
not just free as in beer. Of course, copyright violations are a different
matter, but I can't tell people whether to submit a post to HN, I can't tell
people whether to bookmark it, or tweet it, or whether to use it as part of a
corpus on guessing the sex of the author.

If there's a race for meaningless karma by bot authors, that is irrelevant to
me as an author. IF it is a problem--and I do not grant that it is a problem--
THEN it is HN's problem, not my problem as an author.

I give my words away. That inevitably means someone will use it in a way I
didn't intend. That's the point.

~~~
scott_s
I got the impression that jacquesm wasn't so concerned with how his work was
being treated, but with how HN was being treated.

~~~
raganwald
Good point, thanks!

FWIW, I think there is a problem if multiple bots attempting to autosubmit end
up inadvertently creating a voting ring. But that can and should be fixed by
changing the way HN treats submitting an article that has already been
submitted.

Other than that, I only think bots are a problem for HN when submitting spam
rather than ham. I am in favour of bots provided they don't play fast and
loose with accounts. I would be ok with each bot having its own account, or
all bots using their creator's accounts. I would consider it fraudulent to
create bots that periodically give themselves new accounts to evade filtering.

If bots all used a stable account, pg could throttle or ban those that submit
too much spam. But if a bot is constantly submitting articles that are upvoted
by humans.... I'm happy to see it seed the new page.

JM2C, I don't make the rules, I just play by them.

------
lwhi
Maybe the problem is people _upvoting_ uninteresting articles.

Without wanting to be mean, it's kind of crazy that this meta-discussion about
someone's inability to remain off the HN scoreboard is number one right now.

Sycophantism and idle self-promotion are boring pursuits.

EDIT: I think we should be able to down-vote uninteresting articles.

~~~
jacquesm
Multiple submissions of the same link have the same effect as upvoting and
once a thread is on the homepage it will gain a lot more views instantly, if
only a small number of people on the homepage then gives it another upvote it
is likely to hang around for a long time.

These are artifacts of the way the 'new' and the 'news' page work, the
cumulative effect of those is larger than the actual quality of the
submissions.

~~~
lwhi
But these articles generally have many more votes than just a couple - this
article has 149 at current count.

------
edu
It might be interesting to hide total karma score from users. I guess that if
we don't know our total karma score the karma harvesting will stop but keep
the points for submissions and comments so there's still the incentive to
contribute good material (the pride of seeing your comment/submission being
upvoted).

What do you think?

edit: the first version didn't make much sense, I got interrupted in the
middle of the message

~~~
roel_v
This is a lesson that was learned on Slashdot in 1999 already I think. A
'karma cap' makes perfect sense and the total karma wouldn't even have to be
displayed to the user himself, to avoid karma whoring. What does it matter if
someone has 1500 or 15000 karma? They've both proven to be contribute; maybe
the one with the higher score just has more time, or a more popular opinion,
or has been here longer.

In the same vain, it's not easy enough to lose karma. By being active here,
you will in the end always have good karma, even if your contributions are
bad; it's very rare to see comments with lower than -5 karma, but it's easy to
get a +10 comment, even if it's nothing special (I mean I know I've had a lot
of those...)

~~~
roel_v
A small comment since people are upvoting and I did a rather meaningful edit:
I wrote 'it's too easy to lose karma', but I meant (as was elaborated on in
the rest of the sentence) that it's too hard to lose karma.

------
mryall
Jacques, perhaps you could configure your blog so you can choose to submit
your own posts automatically to HN when you post them? That might reduce the
tendency of people to try to rush and post them first, assuming the majority
of posts are actually suitable for posting here.

I don't think you should worry too much about it either. Your posts seem to
keep gathering a high number of votes whenever they appear on HN, so this is a
sign that they _are_ useful and relevant to the community. If an irrelevant
link gets posted and it only gathers a few votes on the new page, then what
have you lost? What has the community lost?

~~~
jacquesm
I understand your intentions but I don't think that's a good solution because
it will still submit items to the 'news' page that are not always 'up to
standards', giving them at least one upvote. That's roughly 25% of what's
needed to get an item to the homepage, so only 3 more (bot)votes and it's
done, once an article hits the homepage it is likely to stay there for a
while. All this would do is add one more bot to the race and thus increase the
problem.

Not having those items on the 'news' page would seem to be the best solution.

Really, people should at least read the articles they submit and judge them
for content before submitting them to HN, especially when they're associated
with the better known (ex)HN'ers.

Probably Sivers, Patio11, Tptacek or any one of the people that seem to be
featured a lot here could write an article about 'Condé Nast acquiring HN' (in
a desperate move to re-acquire Reddits' audience that has left for HN, thereby
realizing the fears of all true Hackers, the proof that this would make 'HN
more like Reddit' is left for the reader) (there goes my April 1 post ;)) and
it would get upvoted without much consideration.

One possible (technical) solution would be to let the karma boost be dependent
on the average of all posts from a domain, submit a 'below average' link and
your karma will drop!

~~~
Vivtek
I've discovered an elegant proof that HN is like Reddit, but ... oh, darn,
that doesn't work online.

Maybe submission upvotes in a short time shouldn't front-page an item. I don't
see why not putting these links on the news page should make a difference - if
anything it would make it impossible to get _non_ -bot upvotes, if I
understand what you mean.

------
ricefield
Maybe its about time HN had a CAPTCHA on their submit form.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
A CAPTCHA? In a forum for Hackers?

Hmm ... interesting ...

ADDED IN EDIT: HN voting makes me laugh sometimes - I have no idea why this
got a downvote. Thank you - made my day.

This is _not,_ let me hasten to add, a request for more. Some things are funny
just the once. More than that and I'll really start to question my
understanding of the world, let alone just the HN community.

~~~
iwwr
If there's CAPTCHA, then submit an app that collects these images and sends
them to your phone. Send back the answer to help the bot.

~~~
Maxious
That would at least slow down the bots based on how attentive the maintainers
are. There are of course captcha solving services but this just trades
maintainer time for money - trying to run a successful karma hoarding bot
would still be death by a thousand papercuts.

------
raganwald
Building a bot to win karma is a little like hiring a model to pretend to be
your date. No, scratch that. We're hackers! Building a bot to win karma is a
little like building your own replicant and taking it to the party as your
date.

~~~
kwantam
No. Building a replicant would be awesome.

Even more so if more of this audience were old enough to remember when Daryl
Hannah was hot.

VVV ahh indeed! Why then we're in violent agreement!

~~~
raganwald
_Building a replicant would be awesome_

That was the intent of my post. Building a bot that earns 10,000+ karma ought
to be an achievement. If for any reason it isn't particularly difficult, then
it ought to be taken that earning 10,000+ karma as a human isn't an
achievement either.

------
erikpukinskis
To me, the technical solution is to incorporate the relationship of the
upvoter* to the poster in the "hotness" algorithm. If I upvote every single
item from jacquesmatteij.com then my "this is awesome" signal isn't as strong
as someone who only upvotes 10%, or who has never upvoted him before.

* When multiple bots submit the same link, "submission" is basically the same thing as "upvoting".

------
Tycho
It kind if seems like a false alarm if one of the botters was just
RiderOfGiraffes (whose motives I don't suspect), and there was only one other
person, possibly equally innocent.

One would hope nobody here is irrational enough to seek 'easy/automatic' karma
... I mean the nice thing about karma for submissions is it's basically a
whole lot of smart people saying 'well done for finding this, it's definitely
valuable.' If there's no real finding involved then what's the point? You're
the only person your karma matters to.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes

      > the nice thing about karma for submissions is it's
      > basically a whole lot of smart people saying 'well
      > done for finding this, it's definitely valuable.'
    

That doesn't really seem to be the case any more. There's a lot of stuff
coming up on the Front Page now that I, personally, think is not valuable at
all. It's not spam, so I feel disinclined to flag it, but I can't downvote it
either. I think there are a lot of older hands who are starting to despair
that so much trivial material makes it to the Front Page, and there seems to
be no way of stopping it.

There is no doubt in my mind that the community has been diluted in its
intent, purpose and interest. Often the new people have insightful and
interesting things to say, but the focus is largely gone _as compared to what
attracted people in the first place._

One can no longer assume that just because an item has a high score, it must
be of value. The interesting thing is that this is true of the Classic page as
well.

And I've checked my snapshots from 2 years ago, and it really does seem to
have changed.

People are upvoting things not because they are valuable, but because they are
entertaining.

~~~
Tycho
From a top-down perspective the karma vote are less meaningful, as certain
topics and sources get up voted ad nauseum. But from the bottom-up
perspective, it's still great when you pluck an academic article or technical
blog from obscurity and thousands of people read it, sending the karma from 1
to hundreds. And there are other people trying to do the same thing. You can
usually avoid the chaff just by reading the title or domain (personally i skip
the 'motivational' type blogs and try to resist the 'hot topic' ones and
contentious debates, but there's still so much good technical content that
crops up, and fairy high maturity among commenters).

------
jcdreads
What happens if blogging tools become their own HN post bots?

The last few Dave Winer posts I've seen here have been submitted by davewiner.
Since he's a dude who rolls his own blogging tools, I'd be not at all
surprised to find that he wired up the ability to simultaneously publish and
post a link to HN.

I can see good reasons for doing this for one's own blog, but if this practice
were widespread or built into normal people's blogging tools then it would
(among other things) cause the "new" page here to be useless.

------
vinodkd
I am a long time lurker on hn, and like mzl, dont care about karma at all.

reading the ~160 comments on the topic, however, sounds weird to me because
being indian, karma is not just a number against your online profile, but a
fact of life - a word that you hear from people several times during a normal
day - and they've probably never even been online.

i get that its about measuring the overall place of a person in a community,
and that "karma" is as good a tag as any to condense that concept into one
word, but it just seems very weird when there's so much debate around it. true
karma is not exactly the "double-entry book keeping of life", nor does it have
a leaderboard (which, btw, i realized existed on hn only recently).

on hn, the linked content's mostly great and its always useful to check the
comments before loading up the link itself. that should be enough, imo.

ps: yes, i feel the same way watching "my name is earl", although i do enjoy
the show itself.

------
SeanDav
Would have been extremely ironic if this post had been submitted by a bot!

My vote/suggestion is to hide Karma from all users once it reaches a fairly
low cap. I know I am in a minority here but to me personally Karma beyond the
level needed to downvote and basic functionality is hardly an issue.

------
keyle
Karma harvesting bots. I thought of it a while back and I was sure it already
existed.

Thanks for proving it! I do like the term of "harvesting karma".

In reel life, that would be a good deed automatically actioned based on a set
of inputs? Such as grabbing the mail of the neighbour on the way in?

------
rwmj
There are also user accounts that have been created just to spam HN, eg:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=subhbwn>

------
oemera
Is HN karma worth anything? Don't get me wrong. I love HN and I think it is
unique in its way but I never thought that I could earn a medal because of a
lot karma on HN.

I can understand this "function" on StackOverflow (even though I don't have
much karma there either) cause karma at StackOverflow can bring in new
chances.

My question: Do anyone use HN karma as measurement to see if this guy is worth
to hire or worth for something else?

~~~
icey
I would certainly hope not.

------
jacques_chester
A related idea I've been toying with is "karmic arbitrage": auto-submitting
posts that have been upvoted at proggit and vice versa.

~~~
jacquesm
please don't.

~~~
jacques_chester
As a fellow Jacques, I will cut you a break.

edit: I didn't realise having a name common in Francophonic nations was a
downvotable offence.

------
nandemo
Jacques is such a nice fellow. If it were me, I'd just make a post with pics
of cats and watch it being submitted to HN.

------
jacquesm
Maybe a simple rule could be that if you run an undeclared bot on HN to auto
submit stuff that you forfeit your account when you're detected, no matter who
you are or what you've done.

That way we only get really clever bots that are indistinguishable from really
good submitters.

~~~
raganwald
Why? I haven't read a good argument _against_ bots. Your article doesn't
present an argument that HN is harmed. I haven't read a good argument that
anyone is harmed.

If a bot had its own novelty account, say "ragnawald_speaks" that submitted
everything I wrote, what would be the harm to HN?

People keep talking about "spam." How is it spam if a bot submits an article
that has an excellent chance of making it to the top ten? That's the opposite
of spam, it's all signal and very little noise. If people think that a bot
auto-submitting a feed with excellent signal is spam, then I have something
very serious to tell them: humans are pattern-matching machines too.

~~~
jschuur
The argument against bots would be that it makes it more difficult to go
through the 'new' section and find quality posts to up vote if everyone did
this.

In fact, I seem to recall Digg is going to/already has pulled back it's
feature where you can register an RSS feed to post all your content for this
very reason.

~~~
raganwald
_The argument against bots would be that it makes it more difficult to go
through the 'new' section and find quality posts to up vote if everyone did
this._

If everyone wrote bots that auto-submitted feeds from authors who consistently
get upvotes from HN readers? How is that a problem?

If the problem is submitting articles that HN readers don't find interesting--
spam, not ham--banning bots is unlikely to help. How do you stop me from
submitting every article I write?

There is a huge amount of content out there loosely relevant to HN readers.
Bits overwhelming the new page are a symptom, not a disease. The disease is
that the new page doesn't scale well to handle a large volume of submissions.
As HN grows, the number of submission si going to grow as well, with or
without bots.

Behind the scenes, there must be some changes to accomodate this, such as
algorithmically showing users new stories they are most likely to find
interesting, or showing users a random selection fo new stories from the last
hour.

Bots merely accelerate the decline of the new page's usefulness. Banning bots
that auto-submit high quality feeds isn't going to work if we allow HN to grow
at its current rate.

------
piramida
Always surprised me how advanced humans pretend to be and how simple-minded
they actually appear en masse, with this race to "get my integer number
higher" which is a basis of most social algorithms.

Really people? That is the only way to stand out from the crowd? An integer?
:)

------
ck2
Turn off karma for users, keep it for new posts, problem solved.

(posts get the karma, not people)

------
jschuur
Are there indications that this is a wider spread problem beyond
jacquesmattheij.com or the two individuals that have already been caught doing
it with his site?

One is an anomaly, two independent occurrences is a trend?

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, but I can't actually prove those.

------
kinnth0
I never knew this, thanks for highlighting it and writing a nice post about
it. That's why I read hackernews, to find out things I don't know from people
who know them.

------
guelo
Didn't pg admit that he uses karma as a criteria in evaluating yc
applications? If so that was just an invitation to a bunch of smart hackers to
try to game the system.

~~~
gregschlom
No, he said that karma as nothing to do with YC application, but that if he
sees an application from a user that he knows from HN to be a smart guy, he
will look at it more specifically.

In other words, interesting, on-topic, and frequent comments are important,
not your absolute karma number, even though of course you're likely to have a
high karma if you're a frequent poster of good comments.

That's also why the average is more important than the absolute karma.

~~~
jarek
> interesting, on-topic, and frequent comments

submitted early during a discussion's lifecycle _

------
shawndumas
<http://xkcd.com/810/>

------
jaredstenquist
1) Use Wordpress 2) Make posts "Private" until you are finished with them 3)
$$$

------
TimothyBurgess
There's gotta be quite a few auto submission bots going on here...

 _cough_ TechCrunch _cough_

...not that I have any problem with it. I'm just amazed at how quickly
TechCrunch (and similar) articles find their way onto HN.

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leon_
Ironic. I always assumed jacquesmattheij.com would be such a bot submission.
Every day a new post from that blog in the tops :)

