
The Difficulties of Self Publicising - AshleysBrain
https://www.scirra.com/blog/96/the-difficulties-of-self-publicising
======
patio11
A new shop opened on Diagon Alley this week. It is called Merlin's Marketing
Marvels. Their owner is a an emancipated house elf who has a curiously
eccentric rule: you only ever get to buy one thing from his shop.

I submit that, if you choose the Wand Of Always Hit The HN Front Page, you've
made a clearly suboptimal choice, and if you've chosen Wand Of Sometimes
Complain About HN Front Page, that's just nuts.

There may or may not be voting rings. A particular article may or may not have
them behind it. If the truth of the universe about either of these facts
changed, would that affect what is the rational course of action for your
business today? I strongly suggest that it wouldn't.

In a universe with or without vote rings, one would be well-advised to start
building a permission channel under one's own control, such that one can
routinely get into contact with people who will like what one has to offer.
Get folks' email addresses. Send them stuff they'll like.

I will guarantee you, from a wee bit of experience, that the business value of
X00 people who are actually in your market greatly exceeds the value of an HN
frontpaging, and you can send things to a mailing list bi-weekly, whereas a)
waving the magic wand of HN frontpage bi-weekly is taxing even if you can do
it and b) you will probably burn out your wand's welcome.

If you hate email, you're handicapping yourself unnecessarily, but you can do
similar things with RSS feeds or Twitter accounts. (But seriously, email
ROFLstomps those alternatives.)

Another option is finding a "beat" for yourself (journalism term) and _owning
the "'$(#'% out of it_. I'd tend to suggest high-value beats with low-
competition adjacent to spaces of commercial interest for you. You'd be
_amazed_ how short the path to being "the acknowledged expert" on a particular
subject is if you pick your subject well. After you're the expert, you'll
start just _showing up_ in places without actively inserting yourself there,
and your perceived expertise will tend to snowball. (Both because organic
mentions of you tend to be perceived as more credible than tooting your own
horn, and because you will be given credibility-enhancing opportunities by
other people _because they perceive benefit from association with you_. You
can also _explicitly pitch that to them_.)

~~~
larrys
"Get folks' email addresses. Send them stuff they'll like."

Let me add to that.

Find any reason you can to reply to both customers and non-customers (we
happen to get misdirected inquires all the time. We try to convert these
inquires that we take the time to answer with a coupon and a "use us next
time" blurb).

Anyway, for customers, this "legit" spam if you want to call it that takes the
form of helpful, personal, genuine "follow up" emails (pre-written in a
conversational tone in advance and with things that make them look as if they
are unique (we use quicktext on thunderbird but there are other ways to do
this obviously)) which could say something like "we made that address change
that you requested let me know if you need anything further" (more involved
but basically just a nice note). So see the idea is not to always have
everything to be "self service". If you can afford the labor hit, or the labor
hit leads to actual sales maybe encourage customer co-dependency because it
gets them to contact you. Of course this is going to totally depend on the
business you are in and of course you don't want to annoy customers by doing
it to much.

The bottom line is "always be selling". Use any interaction by email as a
chance to either enhance the customer relationship or make a suggestion for
something else they might need.

------
kemayo
Cheating's understandable, especially on HN. You only need to get a couple of
votes early on to edge onto the bottom of the frontpage. And once you're on
the frontpage you get seen by a _lot_ more people, so you tend to get upvoted
and stick around for a while.

I'd even say that it's not _that_ sleazy, since anything which sticks around
on the frontpage is, at least, obviously of interest to enough people to keep
it there. Unless you've organized a huge fake-voting ring, I suppose.

EDIT: I am slightly surprised at the downvotes. :P

~~~
diminoten
If you're willing to cheat to make your product seem more liked than it is,
what else are you willing to cheat at to get your paycheck?

~~~
j_s
Part of recognizing that there is a line between what is acceptable or not in
biz-dev has to be an understanding that other people will draw that line in
other places... it's human nature. Complaining about this is like complaining
that people cut you off in traffic, it rains sometimes, or anonymity
encourages misbehavior. If you believe strongly enough in how you do what you
do, stay busy doing it!

There is a long and storied history of sites 'cheating' for some definition of
cheating...

• collecting emails for signups for features (or entire sites) that don't
exist yet

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4117440>

• reddit faking a bunch of posts getting started

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2624086>

• 9gag re-watermarking content from elsewhere

[http://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/zacju/9gag_repost_mac...](http://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/zacju/9gag_repost_machine_explained/)

------
raganwald
When is gaming actually cheating? Some people analyze when to submit posts for
maximum likelihood of making the front page. Is that a bad thing if it pushes
another worthy post out of contention for eyeballs?

I sometimes write a blog post, but instead of submitting it myself, I check
the new queue waiting for someone else to submit it, then I pounce with an
upvote, giving it a second vote in a short period of time. Is that gaming the
system? Is that pushing another worthy submission down that really deserved a
better chance?

~~~
mbesto
Let's start by defining cheating: _"Cheating refers to an immoral way of
achieving a goal."_

Is it possible to cheat a system that has no rules? (remember, there are only
guidelines here, there's a difference). I don't know how to assess the
morality of HN, but clearly the goals of the general populous of HN has
shifted. The community was started by a group of people looking to share
information with each other, not promote their companies (although clearly
that has been an indirect benefit).

Point is - who cares if it's immoral, or if it's gaming, or if it's cheating,
it detriments the original intent of the community. I want the motivation of
scoring to be a meritocracy. Within this meritocracy you are more than
entitled to your own upvote.

~~~
001sky
Relevant: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunism>

_Human opportunism should not be confused with "seeking opportunities" as
such, or "making use of opportunities when they arise". Opportunism refers
rather to a specific way of responding to opportunities, which involves the
element of self-interestedness plus disregard for relevant (ethical)
principles, or for intended or previously agreed goals, or for the shared
concerns of a group.[2]

Somewhat confusingly, opportunism is sometimes also redefined by businessmen
simply as the theory of discovering and pursuing opportunities.[3] These
businessmen are motivated by their dislike for the idea that there could ever
be anything wrong with capitalizing on opportunities. According to this
redefinition, "opportunism" is a euphemism for "entrepreneurship".

Although human opportunism often has a strong negative (pejorative) moral
connotation (in contrast to e.g. biological opportunism, used as a neutral
scientific description), it may also be defined more neutrally as putting
self-interest before other interests when there is an opportunity to do so, or
flexibly adapting to changing circumstances to maximize self-interest (though
usually in a way that negates some principle previously followed).

Opportunism is sometimes also defined as the ability to capitalize on the
mistakes of others: to utilize opportunities created by the errors, weaknesses
or distractions of opponents to one's own advantage.[4] In a war situation or
crisis, this may be regarded as justifiable, but in a civilized situation it
may be regarded as unprincipled ("taking unfair advantage of the situation").

Taking a realistic or practical approach to a problem can involve "weak" forms
of opportunism. For the sake of doing something that will work, or that
successfully solves the problem, a previously agreed principle is knowingly
compromised or disregarded - with the justification that alternative actions
would, overall, have a worse effect.

Though it may be disapproved of, or criticized ("There ought to be a law
against it..."), opportunist behaviour is not necessarily criminal, corrupt or
illegal._

------
swang
Apparently pg already has implemented vote ring detection.

[http://www.quora.com/What-does-Y-Combinator-do-to-detect-
vot...](http://www.quora.com/What-does-Y-Combinator-do-to-detect-voting-rings-
on-HN)

------
swombat
Irony: there have been numerous rumours that there are mailing lists of YC
founders that systematically upvote each other's stuff on HN.

~~~
quintin
The fact that all YC launches hit front page with few comments should prove
it.

~~~
quintin
Current front page ReelSurfer is an excellent example. 29 votes and 3
comments. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4556078>

------
ivankirigin
It is really easy to tell these stories. They have 30 or 40 votes and few
comments. They are very often from YC companies. The better submitters will
engage in the comments immediately to give a more organic lift, basically
making the discussion more interesting to boost the story.

But these posts don't last very long. They will quickly get off the front page
unless there is actually something interesting here.

It is funny, after all this strategy chatter, I happened to gripe about Quora
on my blog, and that got more votes than anything else I've submitted, by far.
A community of distributed actors with solid software filters makes for a
pretty hard to game forum. After you have reasonable traction, it is probably
better to spend your effort on more scalable channels.

~~~
swombat
Actually, there's been a fair few of my articles which got submitted (I then
upvoted, and mentioned the article on #startups), then rose organically to
some number of upvotes, even up to 100, but had relatively few comments. Some
articles are just not very good at gathering comments.

However, I agree that in the general rule, articles with more upvotes tend to
have more comments.

------
usea
The proposed "solution" would only exacerbate the problem. The author
basically proposed that the cheaters can not only put articles on the front
page, but they're rewarded by also increasing each others' trust scores. Why
is that good?

There are tons of solutions to this, largely in the domain of statistics and
machine learning. They're flawed, but communication is not a precise beast.

------
wycats
I don't understand why everyone's calling this "cheating" when HN exists to
enable this sort of behavior from the YC elite.

Another incubator sets up a system to replicate YC's influence on the front
page and we all decry cheating. Who cheats the cheaters.

------
gaius
Name and shame, so we can flag their posts.

~~~
wrekkuh
I could not agree more. If the op isn't comfortable airing the laundry here,
then join a resistant force and do it there (GitHub).

While it wouldn't help the community, it would help the quality of content to
hackers if we open sourced something like a user script to override HN's
algorithm and simply blanket out this entire consortium.

An explicit, and specific blacklist for these jokers along with their snake
oil websites and ideas. Oh? You're offended by your being listed on The
Blacklist? Earn our trust back so we could pay a small bit of mind to your
vaporeware or opinion like we used to, when we called it vaporeware and a bad
opinion.

I apologize for the rant, but at least i'm offering an idea to put the brakes
on the gradual degradation of this website.

------
SeanDav
I am not sure there is anything suspicious but I often see stories from the
same sites making the front page of HN News. I am guessing that most of these
stories are there because they are of interest but sometimes I wonder...

The Atlantic, NY Times, Techcrunch, Extreme Tech, TheNextWeb, Github, bbc are
the main ones off the top of my head.

Unless someone has already done it it, it would be very interesting to see the
break down of front page stories by source and by poster.

~~~
benologist
ExtremeTech's parent company Ziff Davis (also geek.com and pcmag.com)
accounts:

\- <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=russellholly>

\- <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mrsebastian>

\- <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=adeelarshad82> (their social
media marketing manager, according to LinkedIn)

\- <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=11031a>

Then there's the mystery of:

\- Maxko87's (now hellbanned) autosubmitter for ExtremeTech:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4441016>

\- evo_9 who heavily submits stories, about 50% of which are extremetech.com:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=evo_9>

\- ukdm who heavily submits stories, about 50% of which are geek.com:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ukdm>

TechCrunch I think is as simple as YC startups going there and then propping
each other's articles up.

The Atlantic I'm not sure about, but they did just get busted spamming Reddit
so I wouldn't be surprised.

GitHub probably has high double-digits overlapping users on a site like this,
I doubt they need to do anything nefarious.

------
benologist
Cheating HN is something that comes with the growth. HN has enough traffic to
attract all the people and companies that have or would like to have gamed
reddit and before that digg, and plenty of companies are already doing their
best to make sure they get their share of the traffic - Ziff Davis
(ExtremeTech, Geek and PCMag), MacObserver, BGR etc all have multiple,
undisclosed employees spamming HN.

Then there's the heavy/blind submitters who make damn sure whatever you submit
isn't long for this world because it's super important we get everything
straight from their feed reader, probably automatically for the heavier dudes.

Then there's the easy topics that get easy votes like TorrentFreak and
TechDirt's constant manipulation, anything YC, and the endless soft-serve
entrepreneur-porn written for HN just because it's got a good chance of being
popular on HN.

The big difference is HN doesn't have reddit etc's resources to combat it, and
on top of that as a marketing tool for YC startups it's rife with conflicts of
interests as a democratic news site.

------
tptacek
This is already something the HN maintainers spend a lot of time thinking
about and working on. They're just not going to talk about it publicly,
because the ensuing arms race is expensive.

------
edw519
The perceived need to cheat is inversely related to the value your product
brings to customers with money and desire.

The more we hackers focus on the latter, the less we want to talk about the
former.

~~~
credo
Nope, the need to cheat is based on the individual's sense of ethics.

Some people create valuable products, write valuable posts, but feel the need
to cheat. Some others may write not-so-valuable posts, but they will not
cheat.

Of course, the ideal HN scenario is for people to write great posts, not cheat
and have those posts on the front page. Unfortunately, voting rings make that
a bit more difficult than it should be.

~~~
swombat
The noise outweighs the voting rings by a large factor IMHO.

------
JoachimSchipper
HN _does_ have a voting ring detection algorithm. It's not at all clear that
this attempt at cheating will actually work.

(Of course, an unsuccessful cheater is no more moral than a successful one -
but considerably less damaging.)

------
ig1
Hacker News (and Reddit) has voting ring detection, if the same people vote
for each others articles regularly they'll get penalized for doing so.

~~~
steve8918
It seems that someone can create a new sockpuppet account, and everyone in the
ring can vote up the sockpuppet. This would probably be a lot harder to
detect.

Maybe if there was a 24hr waiting period before a new account can submit
articles or comment, it might curtail this, somewhat.

~~~
ig1
Not really, it's just a case of measuring correlations of voting habits. Plus
new accounts with no comment history submitting stories is a spammer red flag
anyway.

------
mikemarotti
You're going to run into this on any social news site. Don't act surprised -
it's the nature of the beast.

------
Detrus
Widespread cheating reveals a bigger problem. These sites are commonly used
for self promotion but they lack a mechanism to give everyone a minimum amount
of attention so they can see if there is any interest in their
product/content.

I wouldn't discount voter ringers as unethical cheaters just because they
don't follow some lazily contrived rules set up by people who don't have
promotional problems.

The technology behind these up/down vote sites really hasn't moved and they
will run into ever bigger problems as people get accustomed to them and learn
to cheat bigtime just as content farms learned to cheat search engines.
Actually content farms cheat HN pretty well already. They spew out so much
crap people never learn what quality content looks like and upvote the crap.

------
davidw
I'm a techie, and for me, it's always been natural to build stuff like
LangPop.com, made for other techies.

But with LiberWriter, I really branched out into something that is not at all
for people who read this site: they could figure it out themselves pretty
easily, by and large. So I'm almost proud to say that when I get prominent
links to my site here, I get almost 0 conversions. In and of itself, that's
not that hard - just have something no one wants. But I do get a lot of
conversions from other sites that are more relevant to my target audience. I'm
proud that I managed to do something that was for "regular folks" rather than
an apple that did not fall far from the tree.

~~~
chromatic
It's really nice to hear someone say "You're not my target audience" without
any trace of shame. That's a good quality in an entrepreneur.

------
alpeb
The Tour de France analogy is priceless. I wished the final conclusion were
true "As always, for long term sucess the most important factor is working
hard to create a good product.". It all starts with marketing unfortunately.

------
WestCoastJustin
RE: Trust Score -- Am I missing something?! The trust score would not fix the
problem of people gaming HN by organizing to vote on your friends submissions.
If there is indeed a group of people that are organizing their votes then this
would most likely benefit them rather than deter them.

For example -- if a group of people start to vote on a "new start up" blog
post of something that the group wants to push to the top.. you are only
increasing their trust score and pushing the casual users out.

~~~
benzor
Not only that, but more generally it seems to me that this "trust" system
would cause a "bandwagon" effect on all posts. Other users would be afraid to
downvote anything that was taking off, since they would knowingly be causing
their own "trust" score to drop.

------
orangethirty
This is something that is rampant right now on HN. As someone who writes his
own new content for this specific community, the voting rings are just big
turn off. I dont participate in them, and will not upvote when a fellow
engineer asks me to do so (disclaimer: I have done it three times, but stopped
because it felt wrong). I do, however, don't think that it will ever be
stopped. It just pushes me to write better stuff and to improve my use of
analytics.

------
bicknergseng
Gaming websites like Reddit and HN seems similar to "shilling" in online
auctions. While people eventually find ways around most things we put in
place, it's pretty effective to group users by associations and crack down on
ones that shill for their associates.

It might be less effective for these forums because there's no risk involved,
but I bet there are still patterns in users bumping people off the "new" page.

------
HugoMelo
As long as there's an awesome system like Hacker News, there'll be people
trying to hack it. HN wins to the degree that it can counteract that and MAKE
SURE that the 'best' ideas organically flow to the top. And pg is all over
this.

I really like the idea of 'trust' / influence making your upvotes worth more
than my upvotes or someone else's if you're proven to give good stuff. Hmm..

------
ghshephard
I've often wondered why it is that a 400 comment, 200+ point submission
submitted within a few hours sits below a 60 comment, 100 point submission
submitted 8 hours ago.

I don't know if it's flagging, or user trust - but it's not clear to me that
there is a direct relationship between score+age+comments and how high profile
a submission is.

~~~
pc86
Tortoise beating the hare?

It's possible the HN algorithm detects a steady, consistent stream of users,
an above-average percentage of which upvote something compared a flash-in-the-
pan type of posting.

------
anigbrowl
Stop worrying about voting rings. I don't have a startup or a blog, and
contribute only intermittently to HN, but have little difficulty in engagement
with the HN community. Just ride your own horse to wherever you're going; the
fact that others may passing you by in the same direction does not make it a
race.

------
Jun8
"Is cheating these websites rife? Probably."

Just what evidence does the OP base this claim on, esp. for HN? The proof
seems to be: Well, the motivation is definitely there, so it must be
happening. That an a random email from a scammer/spammer.

~~~
DanBC
What? Voting rings are a well known problem for HN.

~~~
Jun8
Can you point me to previous discussions on HN about this well-known problem,
I can't seem to find any using Google search.

~~~
DanBC
Here's one from PG, reasonably recently.

(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108356>)

> _We've seen some fairly aggressive voting rings organized by publications
> with well known names. Only a few are actually banned though. Usually we
> just take away the voting ring members' ability to vote._

------
philip1209
I would be more interested in a "collusion score" that analyzes whether you
upvote certain users or posts consistently when they are just submitted.

------
keppy
OP plays the meta-game and gets a HN front page post :D

