

Ask PG: Publish story upvotes data to aid voting ring detection - malandrew

Would it be possible to add one link to every story submitted to HN that goes to a page that lists all the people who upvoted a story that has been submitted?<p>Gaming the front page of HN (and other sites) has always been an issue, but techniques have gotten good enough where it is harder to detect. With that in mind and the skillset and hobbies of HNers in mind, it would be great to provide transparency so that data-science minded members of community can detect voting rings and provide their proofs to you.<p>It would be great if this page included: username, karma, timestamp_account_created, timestamp_upvoted and maybe the first three decimal dotted numbers of the IP address (or some other data point to help determine geographical or network proximity without sacrificing privacy)
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samwillis
I'm not sure I like this idea, it would mean all our votes are no longer
anonymous. I think there is something to be said for not having to publish
what you are voting for. You could anonymize the data with hashing but to make
it useful it would still have to be able you to see what other items were
voted on by one account. It would then not be too hard to match people to a
hashed account is based on low voted items with only a few comments as you
could assume they had also been one of the votes, with enough points of data
you can then make a fairly safe judgment on who someone is.

I beleve PG has implimented a fairly sofisticated voting ring detection tool,
I think I remember him talking about it before.

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ig1
Comments and submissions are already non-anonymous, what's the advantage of
anonymous voting ?

The knowledge that votes/flags are public may well change incentives, but I
suspect the overall effect will be positive. That is people will be more
thoughtful about what they vote up/down, rather than just voting for something
because it's posted by a friend or flagging an article about a competitor.

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ari_elle
Please no...

Why should this become a place of witch-hunting?

You give no reason why it should be implemented other than that gaming sites
has become more sophisticated.

That is not enough justification, especially since

-) i don't see clear signs for HN degrading in Quality

-) i am sure that pg is concerned about HN and has implemented some measurements to guarantee the high quality of this site for the future

No need for such drastic measurement just yet.

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malandrew
Maybe because there is witchcraft being practiced? It's not like we suspect
voting ring craft is merely a belief like witchcraft was. Voting rings most
certainly exist and there is no doubt that they are manipulating the site
right now.

If the data is anonymized and there are no details published that can be used
to identify the real user involved, it's no harm no foul. This wouldn't be
about witch hunting but simply pattern matching.

We wouldn't be identifying witches but the act of witchery. We would never
know who the witches were, only pg would. There would be no elements of
shaming or individual people called out. This would be entirely ad hominem
free.

~~~
krapp
_Voting rings most certainly exist and there is no doubt that they are
manipulating the site right now._

Where's the evidence that these rings, if they exist, are having a detrimental
enough effect on the frontpage to warrant something like this? Why is it so
bad that PG, his fiddly algorithms and his staff of moderators can't deal with
it?

~~~
malandrew
We know they've existed in the past (such as the voting ring around The
Atlantic), so are you asking if we've succeeded in catching them all? I highly
doubt it.

~~~
krapp
No, i'm just wondering if their effect beyond whatever efforts pg is putting
in, is big enough to matter.

~~~
malandrew
Personally my motivation isn't just to improve the front page, but just to do
this in the interest of science. We probably have one of the best communities
on the internet insofar as percentage of members interested in data science.
Providing this data would probably result in several HN worthy write ups on
how someone went around detecting voting rings from the data made available.

Science should be a good enough reason to do it ;)

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codegeek
In theory, it sounds like a cool idea but I think it will be an overkill and
of not much use. Not to mention that now everyone will know who is voting on
what. That could start other flame wars besides the point of HN.

From what I have seen being on HN, the front page is usually of good quality
and i m sure the voting ring detection mechanism is already decent.

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staunch
The list of upvoters could be anonymized. Assign a random and unique ID to
each account, and display that.

It would be pretty neat to let the hackers on Hacker News see what kind of
nefariousness can be sniffed out.

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nitrogen
It seems you could learn a lot about a person by what stories they upvote. Is
there some way of anonymizing this data enough to prevent deanonymization,
without making it useless?

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kohanz
Wouldn't publishing this data enable those who "game" the system to learn more
about the system they are trying to beat?

