
HN voting ring improvement - dman
http://twitter.com/paulg/status/22551773068
======
pkaler
A technical solution to a social problem. I am not confident that this will
solve the root cause of the problem. Not that I understand the root cause.

Coming from a game development background ("real" games not "social" games),
there are feedback issues with the voting system. Frankly, I don't vote a lot
because I don't understand the system. I usually only up-vote one story a day.

Sometimes, if there is a "crap" story in the top 5 I will up-vote the other 4.

Look up the term "meaningful choice" in the book _Rules of Play_.
[http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&...](http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=9802)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_Play> [http://www.amazon.com/Rules-
Play-Game-Design-Fundamentals/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Rules-Play-Game-
Design-Fundamentals/dp/0262240459)

The problem is that I don't have to choose between story A and B. I can up
vote them both because there is no scarcity built into the system.

I don't even think there is a scarcity model with voting. How many up votes do
I get in a day? If there is a model then I don't understand it. That implies
the second issue with the system is that there is a lack of feedback.

This isn't only an HN problem. I see the same problems with other social sites
that try to implement voting or other game mechanics.

Focus on improving the system for good players. Don't focus on squashing
behaviour by bad players trying to game the system. The good players will
police the bad players if the system is fairly balanced. No one reads the
instruction manual, therefore the good behaviour has to be designed into the
system. And feedback, feedback, feedback. There needs to be better feedback
when there is good behaviour.

~~~
NathanKP
I wonder if providing the ability to downvote submissions would fix the
problem of voting rings. Surely there will always be more legitimate voters
than ring voters, and if legitimate voters can downvote submissions that were
artificially inflated by ring voters it would balance things out.

Of course there is a reason why we don't have downvoting of submissions. The
negative side-effects would probably outweigh the positive.

~~~
awa
I am not sure I support downvoting of links. Though I am intrigued whether
allowing downvoting for a set of users with some higher criteria than upvoting
(say account date > 1 year + 500/1000 karma) will have some positive results.

------
petercooper
On Twitter I follow and am followed by a lot of HN users and I know a lot of
HN users independently and.. I can recall fewer than 10 times anyone has ever
said "check this out and vote it up?" Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't - it
entirely depends on if I'd vote it up _anyway_.

It saddens me, then, that there are "voting rings" which, I'm assuming, rely
on people voting up each other's stories in a mutually beneficial way. I hope
this can be curbed but, I fear, innocent groups of friends or popular HN users
could fall foul of it merely for consistently submitting or voting up each
other's stuff in an unorganized fashion.

~~~
tptacek
The nice thing about dampening collusive votes in code is that we don't have
to sit around in threads like this arguing about the "ethics" of voting and
searching our souls. The nice thing about having a benevolent dictator behind
the site is that we can just have things like this fixed automatically.

I suggest: stop worrying, vote however you want.

~~~
petercooper
The ethics of voting are not my focus. My concern is the potential _collateral
damage_ of the "punishment." Google has had to take similar actions with its
algorithms and even their best efforts yield collateral damage - I suspect
this is why it takes them so many people and so much time to make
improvements.

The voting system on Hacker News is small beans compared to Google rankings
(which can make or break entire businesses), but it doesn't negate the
validity of showing concern for a site from which I get much of my daily
reading material.

------
rlpb
This must be difficult. I presume that some of the more popular personalities
on HN receive quick and multiple upvotes per blog post by a number of "fans"
rather than a ring. Should these also be ignored?

How does one differentiate between a voting ring and genuine fans who like a
particular blog article by a popular author (say having read an RSS feed and
independently submitted the same article to HN)?

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paulbaumgart
For the San Diego Hacker News meetup announcements, we generally post the HN
link on the SDHN mailing list and invite people to upvote so there's a
realistic chance new potential attendees will read about it. Would this
constitute a voting ring?

~~~
patio11
"If that is wrong, I don't want to be right."

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dman
Would love to know more details about this.

~~~
ronnier
What does he mean by "voting ring"?

~~~
mrshoe
At the time of this comment this submission has 5 upvotes in its first 22
minutes and it is #5 on the front page.

This means if you can convince just 5 of your friends to quickly upvote your
submissions, they will all get promoted to the top of the front page. You can
do the same for their submissions. That's a six-person voting ring.

Ideally pg would like to detect these rings and assign your friends' votes a
lower weight on your submissions.

~~~
Devilboy
Sounds like a NP-hard problem, am I correct?

~~~
Groxx
Not so much. Trust metrics (underpinning Google's PageRank) are pretty
efficient at this sort of thing. If people A-Q all vote each other up, but
nobody votes them up, their weighted effect is pretty close to nil.

Try: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_metric>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank> and <http://www.advogato.org/trust-
metric.html> for a bit of an overview.

------
Alex3917
Would it be possible to apply this research to the new page in order to reduce
or eliminate information cascades?

<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/04/popularity_is_r.html>

If we split the new page into three or four parallel universes then it seems
like that could go a long way to improving the quality of what hits the front
page.

~~~
jacquesm
That would likely backfire, already a lot of stuff that is good or even great
does not get enough votes to make the homepage. Splitting the new page in to
multiple segments would make that worse.

I can see the case for randomizing the entries on the newpage, and maybe
making it a bit longer to offset the variation in traffic on the site at
different times.

Happy to see PG work on more voting ring busting, there is definitely still
quite a bit of that happening, the new page sometimes shows pretty weird
things.

~~~
Alex3917
"Already a lot of stuff that is good or even great does not get enough votes
to make the homepage."

The reason this happens is because stuff scrolls by very quickly, and people
are most likely to click on the stories that already have votes. And the first
stories to get votes are always the ones from outlets that people are familiar
with, like Mashable and TechCrunch. If you split the new page into three
universes then all of the stories that would normally get free votes have
their vote count divided by three, whereas the other stories do about the
same, which is comparatively better than they'd do otherwise. At least this is
my thinking. And then you just add up all the votes from all the new pages to
determine the front page.

------
Groxx
If we can get a PG in here, I have a question:

Trust metric based, or something else?

I'm not asking for code, as I suppose exposing that could make it more
attackable, but I _am_ curious about the technique.

------
d0m
I would like one story taken from the new section to be randomly inserted in
my top 10. This would encourage readers to vote and make it easier for good
news to go top.

------
thegyppo
Does HN give less Gravity to a vote if they don't actually view the story?
(i.e. click through to read it)

~~~
sorbus
I'm not sure if HN tracks this, currently; it's pretty obvious that clicking
on a story doesn't send you through an intermediate redirection page, which is
the simplest way to monitor that sort of thing, but there could be some fancy
javascript stuff going on to register click-throughs. It's all in the source
code, of course; if you want to go hunting for it, then by all means do so.

------
j_baker
I suppose this explains why my rep suddenly dropped by over 12 points today.
Perhaps I'm part of a voting ring that I wasn't aware of?

~~~
BobbyH
It looks like you were downvoted a lot for this post:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646903>

The karma for that post is actually less than -4, as explained elsewhere, the
karma for a post can now be lower than -4.

~~~
j_baker
Could you point me towards where that was explained? And why would it be less
than -4 and only show -4?

~~~
what
PG mentioned it today actually:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1647322>

------
jacquesm
Cool :) And thanks for keeping it a level playing field.

Once voting rings get the upper hand it would be a real problem.

------
kapitalx
It'll be interesting to see some statistics on this.

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teyc
Quora does this by not identifying the poster, so that self-validation does
not occur.

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duck
Call me naive, but I thought stuff like this only happened on digg and reddit.

------
ivankirigin
Not worth a hacker news post.

~~~
drivebyacct2
A post concerning how the site functions isn't relevant? Dang, picky crowd.

~~~
ivankirigin
I didn't say not relevant, I said not worth a post. The main problem with
twitter is that it turns content which would normally be too light into
something that seems like it is substantial.

But your quip got your 1.5 month old "drive by account" a dozen up-mods, so
good on you.

