
HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can - adieu
https://porter.io/blog/hackernews-cheaters-catch-me-if-you-can/
======
humanarity
This post provided interesting reading, and I think the focus on protecting
the credibility of the karma system from fraud is an important one. I don't
think those charts show any evidence at all of cheating. I also don't think
the "outing" idea will work.

Is it likely that there are people upvoting their own posts? Of course. It's
likely because of the risk/reward ratio, which the post points out, likely
reflects the reality: ie, easy to do, hard to detect, big pay off.

That argument is convincing.

I don't see any evidence in the supplied charts for cheats. The features
identified in the charts could have been produced by many other factors, and
even if they were produced by cheats, the features themselves are not that
convincing: "the rough shape of a graph". It reminds me of people who have
systems for Forex investing based on the shape of a graph. Compelling indeed,
and yet probably doesn't work. More extensive study and testing would be
required to validate the method.

My impression is this argument is fitting data to conclusion already assumed,
rather than discovering a conclusion from the data.

If the proposal is then to administer a sort of "justice" via this approach,
it's really no different than a kangaroo court.

Far more importantly, if some kind of analysis from rank and votes were able
to identify cheats, I think those capable of doing so should really think
through, go slowly, and work with HN/YC before deciding to "out" them.

Self-anointed vigilantes outside of the system almost never work as a way to
create justice, because they end up wielding a power for destruction, which
the community itself has not organically decided to give them. By holding
power to decide who is a member of the community and who is not, without also
shouldering the responsibility for building and constructing that community,
they have an outsized ability to reshape the community away from the forces
that built it.

In some cases, like when a community’s culture is so toxic to people’s common
good, this kind of dramatic shift from equilibrium works as a way to restore
an order more suited to people.

I don’t feel HN is in need of such treatment.

Sure, there's likely pain if a post doesn’t get upvoted, and that doesn’t mean
that there is anything that doesn’t work about HN. It also, as the article
points out, doesn’t meant there is anything wrong with that post. I haven’t
noticed a limit on the number of times someone can submit new stories, so if a
post doesn’t succeed at first, it can always be tried again.

The response to the upvote-pain could be to say, "What can I learn?" or it
could be to say, "Who can I blame?" I think the implicit assumption that “the
HN voting system is flawed” is incorrect. For a poster it’s a compelling idea
to “explain” a post's lack of desired upvotes, because then I doesn’t have to
take responsibility for ways they I have iterated and improved my post. I
choose to blame an external system, in this case “the voting system.”

It’s a very compelling story because then whenever I post something that
doesn’t get upvoted as much I want, I can say, “It’s not my responsibility,
the system is flawed, and other’s successes are fake.” That can make me feel
better. Except, it’s fake because I’m not actually feeling better because I
created something of value, only by diminishing the value of something in
comparison, and thereby elevating something which otherwise may not warrant
elevation outside such straw-man comparisons. Secondly, it doesn’t work for me
because then instead of learning from that experience, and iterating, I
effectively reduced my learning to zero. Instead of saying, “what can I do
that works?” I said, “The system doesn’t work. Now I will prove that is true.”

If we put all that aside and assume that the system really is flawed and a
method really can identify fraudulent post elevation, then I still disagree
that “outing” HN members is something which will work. Trust amongst HN
members, the sort-of anonymous quality of it, even the unspoken “sacredness”
of the voting system as a way of bringing us content, all contribute to social
harmony here. This place has been shaped by the forces on HN and YC that
sweated to build and unite it. If suddenly an asymmetric power arises outside
this system that can identify cheats, and publicly outs them, this divisive
force, used without the same care for the sacred harmony of community that the
people who built it have invested in it, there will be a lack of harmony. This
vigilante power would erode the trust and bonds between HN members.

It doesn't work trying to simultaneously mend the social fabric by breaking
it. The threads are the laws and the people who protect and respect them. An
entity which, outside of the fragile fabric of justice, decides which members
are "good" and which are "bad" is eroding the lawful links that connect
people, which were decided by the gestalt. Those laws, and unspoken codes and
culture, were not created by one fell swoop of a powerful tech. They were
created by sedimentary deposit of 1000s of man years of collaborative time and
interaction, whether on HN or in other communities. This is how these bonds
are shaped and the harmony they create is precious. It works that the ones who
create this order in a community, with the members themselves, are the same
ones who should wield the power to exclude members to protect some values,
rather than an asymmetric power self-granted to some external self-anointed
"authority". This seems unlikely to create harmony, because it is an external
force imposed rather than one that arose and was guided skilfully by highly-
invested and integrated community maintainers.

In this case the values to be protected are the credibility of the karma
system, which is certainly an important aim. I don’t think public naming and
shaming is the way that works to do so. And if it turns out it is, then it
works to be based on a solid evidentiary process.

------
pajju
Good that someone raised this topic.

1\. Many good articles & posts don't get upvoted.

2\. There are pre-formed HN groups who game the system often.

My Feedback

1\. Some special users can be given special Front-Page-Post Button permission.

Say, 3 Top Users have voted this Post for FP(Front Page)

2\. Frontpage should not be the highlighting part of HN. At least it looks
like that as of now.

The other good parts of HN: new|Ask|Show be shown side by side or given equal
weightage.

3\. Giving Better experience is the challenge.

The Front page feed can be a variable of Votes, Interest based.

There is lot of scope for improvements.

4\. Users Gaming the system, be strictly banned for X Days and shown in
different colors.

~~~
petercooper
_Many good articles & posts don't get upvoted._

As someone involved in news delivery, I find this to be an opportunity. I
frequently dig up stuff with only 1 or 2 votes here that I can share on and
look like I found it - ha! :)

As a long timer HNer, I think the main problem is there's little reason or
motivation to monitor /newest so it's mostly visited by people being asked to
vote up other people's posts. It'd be very cool if on the bottom of the
homepage, you got a few items from /newest you were invited to vote on without
actually going there.

~~~
onion2k
_As someone involved in news delivery, I find this to be an opportunity. I
frequently dig up stuff with only 1 or 2 votes here that I can share on and
look like I found it - ha! :)_

I really thought you'd have automated 99% of the information gathering for
your newsletters based on something like that. :)

~~~
petercooper
Not quite automated but there is certainly a process! :) Even just doing
searches for common terms on here can dig up some gold.

------
simonsarris
Topics like these crop up from time to time: 279 days ago Sama posted _asking
people to read newest_ as a solution[1], and I wrote:

\---

Sam I think you have great power to give /newest more views if you'd consider
minor redesigns.

Perhaps you could dither stories so the front-page list goes
top/new/top/new/top/new, etc, but that is potentially very messy.

Or perhaps instead, the front-page can show 30 top stories, then a line break,
then 30 new stories, all on the front page. Long-scrolling pages are in
fashion, after all.

These aren't well-developed ideas, but the point remains that the inertia of
being one click away means that a huge percentage of people will never even
look at /newest, never-mind up-vote interesting stories.

Please consider changes to modify the median behavior. It's within your power
and would do us all good. It's worth an experiment, isn't it?

\---

Sam replied: "good ideas here and in the responses. we will consider", but I
guess they never got around to testing any of them, or nixed the idea, or mere
inertia, etcetc.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972941)

~~~
rkuykendall-com
Another possibility is to show just a single random post from new. Considering
the difference between loads of the homepage and the new page, even that would
likely make a dramatic difference.

~~~
dang
> Another possibility is to show just a single random post from new.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9336759](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9336759)

~~~
PhantomGremlin
Maybe hire CmdrTaco to select stories for the front page? :)

------
AlexMuir
(I have the 2nd story HN as I write this.)

I've had front page stories on HN maybe five or six times over the last couple
of years. I don't feel anything has changed over that time. If you look at my
submission history, you'll see about 90% of what I submit gets no votes. I
once tried submitting a story a couple of times when I felt that it was
getting less traction than expected - it made no difference.

I'm actually surprised at how well HN surfaces decent content (I'm quite happy
to accept that my stuff which got no upvotes just wasn't of interest.)
Whenever I put something up it gets about twenty eyeballs off the 'New' page
so real people are looking at it.

I can say for sure that I don't have any friends with HN accounts (much to my
disappointment!) and I've never tried to game it.

~~~
bootload
_" I don't feel anything has changed over that time."_

Approaching 3000 days on HN. The things I notice most:

* increase in users has increased the churn rate of new submissions.

* the new page is dead because of the submission rate. good stories disappear off the stack quickly.

* the up-click is not a good indicator of story quality. I now see stories with up to 80 votes sans one comment. I used to read the comments BEFORE the post. This has now changed because of limited comments.

* the rate of high vote submission decay, means some good stories are lost as the HN crowd chew over some interesting post(s).

* also interesting to see users comment/post ratio. A lot of ppl have limited or no posts yet they comment. If you look at my post profile, in the last 60 days I've posted 100 posts. Approx 1:25 hit > 100\. It would be interesting to see how this has changed over time. cf: [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=bootload&next=9025...](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=bootload&next=9025264&n=91)

The biggest problem is the dilution of good posts/actual posts. Slow the rate
of posts and might influence the quality of posts.

~~~
DanBC
There are a few people who make very many submissions. Some people submit more
than 2 stories per day, every day. And those are often duplicates-but-
different source of other articles already on HN.

Better enforcement of the deeply interesting guideline would help but stories
that are intensely interesting get many upvotes so it's unlikely to change.

~~~
Udo
If there was a submission quota, either time-based or karma-based, the "new"
page would clear up rapidly, especially if obvious spam was not displayed as
well (though that may be a result of my "show dead" setting).

------
danmaz74
> This chart looks perfectly normal since the green line is smooth and the
> blue line is relatively stable.

The first chart goes to over 1,000 votes. The other ones stay one or two
orders of magnitude lower. Cheating or not, it's absolutely normal that a
stochastic phenomenon looks smooth when there are many events, and not smooth
when there are few of them.

~~~
MrDosu
Exactly this...

This comparison is statistically on very shaky ground at best.

Sidenote: HN page rank is not solely based on upvotes (for example the
recurring recruitment thread). So analyzing it like it was will not provide
reasonable results.

------
minimaxir
I've done a LOT of analysis into the voting patterns behind Hacker News
stories ([http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker-
news/](http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker-news/)) and Hacker News
comments ([http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-
comments/](http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/)). Here
are a few thought regarding comments made in the thread.

1) Yes, submissions are manipulated, but due to the flagging mechanic, any bad
submission with vote manipulation will be shot down. It's worth noting that
public vote manipulation on HN
([https://twitter.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator....](https://twitter.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Fnewest))
is far, _far_ less worse than the meritocracy known as Product Hunt
([https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=product%20hunt%20upv...](https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=product%20hunt%20upvote)),
which doesn't penalize _spamming_ people for upvotes.

2) Using startup-esque techniques like Recommended Articles and Verified users
won't work, as it will kill the simplicity of HN (note that Reddit has tried
similar systems not too much success). Content is the most important factor to
determining upvotes.

3) Yes, there are a few articles by YC alumni over the years which receive
suspicious amounts of upvotes, and I'm disappointed by that. (case in point,
see the cofounder of ReelSurfer's submission history:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=njoglekar](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=njoglekar))

~~~
nhayden
Any thoughts on why getmagicnow got such an insane amount of upvotes?
Especially when there was so much negativity in the comments.

~~~
minimaxir
That was submitted on a weekend, which always results in atypical voting
behavior.

Also, there's no correlation between negativity-in-comments and the number of
upvotes an article receives.

------
Lewton
Most of these can be explained by the fact that submitting the same article as
someone else counts as upvoting the first submission.

It makes sense to me that submissions comes in waves (as several HN'ers could
find articles they find HN worthy through other channels at the same time)

I am sure that some manipulation happens (I imagine a lot of people use their
network to ask for upvotes to their submissions if it's something important to
them), it's just not that clear cut

~~~
mintplant
I also wonder if caching has some sort of influence. Maybe the spikes in the
data are when the score is updated after a while of remaining static. The
variation in this could have something to do with load levels on the site.

------
jsnell
The mysterious case is probably manual moderator intervention to re-surface
good articles that got lost in /newest. So basically a one-time 5 point boost
(just to the article score, not to submitter karma), enough to give it a
second chance on the front page for half an hour or so.

(I might be wrong on this, but it definitely should not be taken as a sign of
cheating. It happens way to often, with links that have no obvious commercial
motive).

~~~
_delirium
Yes, when this came up about 9 months ago, 'dang acknowledged that they
occasionally manually promote stories:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8313505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8313505)

Also:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8122290](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8122290)

~~~
dang
Also
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9086614](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9086614)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134).

------
driverdan
One of the open secrets of YC alumni is that many will vote brigade new posts
by other YC companies when asked. This has been confirmed to me by multiple YC
alumni and I've seen it in practice.

This isn't to say others don't do it to, they do, just that it's another
"benefit" of going through YC.

~~~
dang
They do, but it ends up backfiring because those posts typically get hit by
HN's voting ring detector. It's definitely not a "benefit" of going through
YC. We tell YC alumni over and over not to do this, that the rules are the
same for everybody, and that the way to get on the front page is by posting
something intellectually interesting. Many, being human, try for shortcuts
anyhow. But in this they're no different from the general population.

I've thought about this a lot and believe that the way for us to help YC
startups make HN's front page is by giving them our best advice about what the
community finds interesting vs. what tends not to work—and then sharing the
same advice with everybody. In other words, do for HN what PG did with advice
about startups. Everything he tells YC startups to do and not do, he published
in essays that anyone can read.

That approach makes even more sense for HN, since it's in all our interests to
have better stories, regardless of who posts them. I hate to see startups (YC
or not) put a ton of effort into content that is unlikely to resonate with the
community. There is much to say about this. Unfortunately, I am a slow writer.

------
DigitalSea
I honestly suspected some form of this happening to some extent. I did not
realise the extent of the suspected cheating, but it does remind me of the old
days of Digg.

I recall Digg had a massive "digg brigade" problem where certain groups of
users and particular power users like MrBabyMan would make the homepage on
what felt like a daily basis. Solving these kinds of problems is a lot harder
than just analysing data and looking for patterns, because sometimes innocent
users can get caught up in data.

If solving cheating on social link submission sites was easy, it would have
been solved already. Even Reddit suffers from the same issues.

~~~
digi_owl
Reddit is fudging displayed votes and shadowbanning (the poster can't tell he
has been banned) for similar reasons, iirc.

~~~
SSLy
The shadowbanned poster can tell he has been banned, sut by trying to view
their profile as an logged out user. It will give a 404.

------
eatitraw
This is really interesting, but not all examples are convincing. For example,
this one:

> With huge front page traffic, it’s hard to believe that a good story would
> only get 4 or 5 up votes in its 3 hour window on the front page, therefore,
> it makes the first 3 upvotes look very suspicious.

Sounds like a typical 5-10 point story that didn't go anywhere? I feel like I
see lots of them on HN. Is the described story _that_ abnormal?

The front page and /new are very different, and I'd say that when browse /new
(which happens rarely), I focus on giving upvotes to stories that deserve
them.

------
waterlesscloud
There's a few factors other than vote totals and submission age at play,
any/all of which could skew the results a fair amount.

1- Some source sites are penalized heavily. Sites with a history of low
quality articles have built in negative modifiers (ie Gawker)

2- Posts with more comments than upvotes are penalized, on the theory that
someone is flame warring in the comments. This actually seems to work out more
accurately than you'd expect.

3- Flagging, which you don't see as a visible indicator until a story is dead.
However, there's some threshhold beneath which it affects a story's ranking,
but it hasn't yet killed the story.

And the mods sometimes manually tinker with stories they feel are / are not
what they want on the site.

~~~
reitanqild
> on the theory that someone is flame warring in the comments.

... one mans flamewar seems to be another mans: it takes a few tries to
explain this.

I'm find HN is very civilized. On other forums I see people talking about
nuking entire counties, calling each other names etc all while posting under a
full, real life names.

The thing that bugs me at HN (except interesting content disappearing like
this post describes) is anonymous downvotes, - _and mostly not because they
hit me_ (usually they don't do : ) but because so often they are so obviously
a result of political correctness and groupthink that it hurts.

------
stevewilhelm
Posts like these assume that HN needs or wants to display all the good
articles submitted on their front page . This is not the case. HN just needs
to insure that all the articles on the front page are good, that is to say a
representative sample of all the good articles that were submitted.

I lump these types of posts in with those that decry how unfair Google's
hiring process it and how they reject highly qualified engineers. Again true,
but there goal is not to hire every qualified engineer. There goal is to make
sure every engineer that they do hire is highly qualified.

------
Sealy
Karma to me is my score. How well I'm doing and how respected I am in the
community. At the moment I'm (proudly) on 517.

If my contributions are valuable. I will get upvotes. If they are not, then I
won't. Without gaming the system, I believe this was by design (PG also shared
this in a few of his earlier posts).

In reality. I'm always sharing links with the community of things I find
interesting. My experience is that rewards for sharing links (upvote karma)
seems to be very random, with stories I think are genuinely fresh,
conceptually challenging and interesting getting far fewer upvotes then
stories which I consider to be relatively dull.

~~~
rustynails
This is a double edged sword, and most probably the thing I like least about
HN. It strikes me as elitist and encourages a particular type of groupthink
That I am uncomfortable with. As an example, conservative thinking is usually
rewarded and less conventional thinking is usually overlooked. In some ways, I
find HN to lack diversity in its culture and what it values (which is why I
rarely contribute - I definitely put myself in the "on the fringe" category
who will remain that way unless some diversity in thinking creeps in, or
there's a radical change). This is interesting because I am a big contributor
at other sites where I feel diverse thinking is more respected .. I am
absolutely happy to accept this is my own bias, however, HN is a unique
experience for me in that respect (except Slashdot that I gave up on for
similar reasons). Personally, I don't pay any attention to these scores. I
prefer less profile visibility, less badges, less karma and more weighting on
an article or comment in isolation. If anything, maybe encourage certain
knowledge domains, eg. Science or biology. The domains themselves are less
important to me at this moment (except where they are political - and I
include gender politics in that: it's stifling and off putting to me, despite
its current popularity), but it may diversify what I see and view at HN.
Ultimately, I don't get a lot of benefit from HN, but there are some (few)
exceptional articles that I wouldn't otherwise see - which is why I visit HN.
Diverse thinking is very important to me. I am more likely to attribute HN
"rigging" to encouraged groupthink than being gamed. Other than categories and
less egocentric measurement, I don't have suggestions that would improve
things. I apologise if my post offends, I've felt these views since I first
came to HN. It's not intended to insult, but it most probably will.

~~~
Sealy
Agreed, Reddit chose to take the route of having subreddits or as you said in
your comment, Categorys. This absolutely makes sense in my mind as I can then
browse the sub-specialisation of most interest to me personally.

Subcategorisation does not need to be user-driven like reddit though and I'd
encourage the admins of Hacker News to control that themselves with the type
of content posts they would most like to see us post around.

If they are open to suggestion, I'd at least consider categories such as:
Startup Advice (like Ask HN), Innovative tech, Show HN (as its own category),
VC

------
borgia
There seems to be some demand here to warp HN into some bastardized version of
Reddit?

The vast majority of submissions that hit the front page cannot be explicitly
linked to one company, or a product, which would indicate that the vast
majority of that which is on the front page is there because users liked the
content and upvoted it.

If some parties are occasionally abusing the system to promote their own
content then I don't think the answer lies in a dramatic overhaul to
everything including throwing in flair pieces to submissions and giving people
special accounts.

Perhaps a solution would be to disable the upvote button until a user had a
certain amount of karma points, as is done with the downvote button? Or maybe
add weighting to upvotes based on the amount of karma points a user already
has? Or maybe monitor submissions for actual link clicks and use that as a
weighting i.e. to prevent people upvoting content they themselves haven't even
looked at?

All of that is game-able, of course, but not without significantly more effort
than is currently required, and the abuse of the current system appears to be
infrequent as it is.

I don't think HN needs any radical changes.

------
shin_lao
In Steam there is something called "the review queue" to encourage you
discover games you might like.

I think it would be possible to build review queues for user by listing
stories positively correlated to stories you up-voted and even more correlated
to stories you commented.

------
oskarth
How do you define cheating? There's lots of cliques of people that hang around
some product or community or service X. Someone tweets/emails/taps-you-on-the-
shoulder and says: look at this cool thing that just happened! Being an avid
HNer, what do you do? Submit to HN for the karma of course. Which results in a
lot of upvotes happening in chunk. There is nothing wrong about this. How do
you distinguish such behavior from outright cheating?

------
inthewoods
"These two stories are submitted at almost the same time. The first one failed
to reach front page even after more than 10 upvotes. And the second one got on
front page after 2 upvotes. This indicates the first one is very likely to be
a failed attempt to cheat which got detected by the system."

Why does it indicate cheating? Couldn't it just mean that there is a variable
that you are not accounting for in the ranking algorithm?

------
willvarfar
What we need is collaborative filtering:

Posters would self-organise and voting gangs would talk to themselves. Gaming
it would mean that voting gangs had to have convincing interests etc.

An old writeup on the idea:
[http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-...](http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-
organizing-reddit)

------
junto
I've been on the front page a few times. I don't actually know anyone else on
HN who would or could vote my submissions up (that I'm aware of). It seems to
be a combination of content, timing and luck.

Hence there are some front page posts that have nothing to do with cheating.
Just to add some balance here.

------
jfroma
I'm relatively new to HN and I dont understand how your article gets to the
FP, I don't know if is the upvotes, karma, comments, etc.

I had a submission for three days in the FP and that was the only time I
didn't ask any friend to upvote me over IM.

~~~
frik
There are certain algorithms in place to prevent unwanted spam, in your case:
voting ring detection

------
TeMPOraL
> _The upvotes is like fuel to lift your position and the time since
> submission is like gravity to pull you down. To get on frontpage, you have
> to get as many upvotes as possible shortly after submission. And to keep
> your place, you have to get upvotes continuously._

> _Getting on the front page is too random._

So in other words, getting to the front page is hard because you don't know
your delta-V and TWR before launch, and the cheaters are the ones who are able
to secure an estimate for those parameters.

#ObscureSpaceflightReference

------
xai3luGi
I've experienced the same thing which made me wonder whether there are any
control by the admins deciding which stories that should end up in the front
page.

For example a magic button for admins or moderators that will boost a story to
the front page irrespective of the votes or time the stories have been
submitted.

Because some older stories with little number of votes come up to the front
page where new stories with same number of votes doesn't end up in the front
page.

What do you guys think can there be a power for a selected few?

~~~
dang
Please see the links at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9333611](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9333611)
and in my reply for a description of our experiments and longer-term
intentions.

------
digi_owl
A variation of Campbell's Law?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law)

~~~
sudioStudio64
Thanks for that. That's really interesting.

------
alexcasalboni
I guess there might be some manual work by HN moderators. They must have a way
to help you get to the homepage and also to mark you as a cheater/spam. Don't
you think?

~~~
minimaxir
The Hacker News moderators have a way to rescue posts that were submitted but
never made it to the front page. That still doesn't guarantee that they will
get upvotes the second time around, though.

------
br3w5
"With huge front page traffic, it’s hard to believe that a good story would
only get 4 or 5 up votes in its 3 hour window on the front page, therefore, it
makes the first 3 upvotes look very suspicious."

This article makes a BIG assumption about what constitutes a good story and
about how HN users actually use the upvote feature. The least subjective way I
could define a good story on Hacker News is by basing it on the only visible
metric - number of upvotes. This doesn't mean I agree that the article is good
from a subjective perspective.

Upvotes could be given for lots of reasons and the higher number of votes
could just be because the article is about a subject that more people take an
interest in (you also have to take an increase in casual visitors into
account). An article about a niche subject, however "good" that article or
product is, is less likely to get a higher number of upvotes because less
people are interested in it. And posters need to ask themselves if their
article or product really is of interest. Posters would also need to put
effort into promoting their article elsewhere too (twitter, reddit, other
social) and not just expect results from HN.

------
kev6168
A feature suggestion (it might seem stupid to some people, but I think it's
interesting):

At the lower right corner, every minute or so, pop up a small box containing
three or four newly submitted links. The box is only shown for five seconds,
then it disappears by itself. Of course users can close the popup box with a
click (and can turn off the feature altogether).

In this way a whole lot of new links are exposed to HN readers.

I don't mind this distraction at all, because 90% of time when I am on HN I am
not working, have no need for intensive concentration. Frankly, I am often
looking for distractions and unexpected/unusual contents. The more links I can
see the merrier (come on, I know you agree with me). When I see an interesting
link in the popup, I might click it right away, or just keep it in mind.

The links shown can be the same to everyone on HN at the moment, or better,
tailored to the user depending on many factors generated by some testing
algorithms.

The benefits are more exposure on newly submitted links and probably more
additive and longer mindless browsing on HN :-)

------
enraged_camel
Equally suspicious are popular but controversial stories that disappear off
the front-page within a very short amount of time despite having accumulated
lots of votes and comments quickly. I've always gotten the feeling that there
are groups of users who flag submissions to make them disappear.

~~~
notlisted
Exactly, though I suspect moderator intervention, not user groups. Notably,
anything remotely critical of AirBnB. Changes are too sudden (e.g. story on #3
position, loads of upvotes and comments, and while I'm formulating a comment,
it disappears and a completely inane and inactive post takes its place). At
times I've even had trouble finding the original post again in the first few
pages. Maybe Porter could shed some light on that too.

------
lhorie
Maybe I'm just missing something, but what does one get by "cheating" the HN
ranking algorithm? Just some karma points?

IMHO, it's rare to see obviously gamed submissions, and the quality of front
page articles has been pretty decent for something that rises out of hive
behavior (although it's not as well targeted to my own interests as scanning-
and-hand-picking-what-I-like, obviously).

My own theory is that with the high volume of medium-high quality submissions
(i.e. a post can easily fall off the first page of /new in less than an hour),
you end up with lottery-like dynamics since your post is likely not in the
"breaking news" magnitude.

~~~
lnanek2
Most of the internet is funded by sites desperate for page views. All of the
Gawker sites, for example, have content written by content authors who receive
most of their pay based on how many views their content gets and fired if they
are bad at it. HN is small compared to the real large social news sites like
Slashdot and Reddit and Digg, but it is still 10s of thousands of page views
if you get on the front page. Many startups are similarly desperate for press
or talent so also consider it vital to get their content out there in front of
people.

------
vacri
For patterns like the last case in the article, all it takes is one browser-
of-the-depths to link a story in an IRC chat, and a few more people to check
it out and like it. It sounds like a standard pattern rather than cheating.

------
Joona
So how do you fix it? I don't really see another way to rank large amounts of
stories other than points. Sure, you can try to detect cheating, but you want
a minimal amount of false positives, too.

Edit: missing word

~~~
hawski
Few options: make system more complex, add randomization, increase moderation
effort or make it less open.

I am fan of adding randomization. It was previously proposed: show few random
new items on a front page in random places, maybe with a little threshold.

I was thinking about community page destined to fork. After community reaches
certain threshold (size, activity) there is automatic fork and 2nd generation
community is created. Some algorithm adds accounts for certain users and
blocks some other users from account creation. It's just a pipe dream...

~~~
dang
> I am fan of adding randomization. It was previously proposed: show few
> random new items on a front page in random places, maybe with a little
> threshold.

We tested this idea (though we didn't roll it out for everyone) and the
results were terrible. The median story is too low in quality for randomness
to add value here. You just end up planting junk on the front page and
annoying people. From that we concluded that there needs to be additional
filtering, be it by algorithms, humans, or a combination.

------
aunty_helen
6 of the top 10 articles at the time of writing are corporate news sources
(sciencedaily, nytimes, washingtonpost, cbc, bbc, medium).

I don't have any data but I would be interested to know if these companies are
gaming the system. It sure would be in their best interest and I can't help
but shake the feeling that they are after looking at the front page sometimes.

It would be good to get a 'hail corporate' button / profile setting that could
toggle some of these domains from your front page.

~~~
dang
I haven't seen evidence of that and would be shocked if they were. Maybe this
is an advantage of HN being relatively small.

------
elmin
To me the easiest solution is to expose more users to the /newest page. When
more eyes are on the new stories, legitimate ones will have more of a shot.

~~~
dang
Yes, except that users just don't do it. It's a tragedy of the commons:
sifting through the story stream to find the interesting ones is not, itself,
interesting enough. The reason people come to HN (to read interesting things)
is a reason not to do that.

Our current idea for the solution is twofold: create a new review mechanism
for stories (not to replace /newest but to live alongside it), and reward
users with karma for participating. But we're a fair way away from having
anything worth rolling out.

~~~
tokenadult
That's funny. By reflex, I visit the new page most times after I visit the
main page. And I venture to guess that on many days I visit HN more than the
average user here. But, yeah, when N gets big enough, what any one person does
doesn't set the culture of the whole community.

------
amelius
It would be nice if the score of a page was not a global thing, but if scores
were clustered, depending on interest. This could be automatic, based on the
user's own upvoting history. Of course, it may be important to not get too
much "bubbled" into one's own world, but this could be mitigated by a slider
in the UI by which the user could specify how much "bubbling" he/she wants.

------
mrmondo
Trying to login to Porter.io via Github gives a Cloudflare error suggesting
your server is down:

Error 502 Ray ID: 1d351e9c19a519b6 • 2015-04-07 10:41:24 UTC Bad gateway

~~~
adieu
Scaled to a large instance with more instance. Should be stable for now.

~~~
mrmondo
Still unavailable unfortunately!

~~~
adieu
hmm...I'm running out of ideas. Which country are you in?

~~~
mrmondo
Australia - you could contact Cloudflare and let them know - they can shuffle
the CDN if there is a dodgy node.

~~~
Sealy
If you log into your Cloudflare you can perform a full cache flush very easily
on your domain.

~~~
adieu
Maybe it's not cache that caused the problem. We host our website on Google
Appengine which is global balanced. Maybe some cloudflare nodes just pick the
wrong entrance.

~~~
mrmondo
Reporting back in that it's all working now. I managed to sign up, request an
invite and I also sign up to your digests to try that out as well. Everything
was _very_ quick. Thank you.

------
zongitsrinzler
This just in: You need a boost to get to HN frontpage!

~~~
tormeh
Or your link could be about inequality, net neutrality, spying, self-
improvement or a hot language/framework. HN has pretty predictable interests.

~~~
drpgq
Lately everything deep learning seems to get upvoted, even rather mediocre
stuff. I like deep learning and certainly think it is interesting but it is
getting ridiculous.

~~~
JimmyM
I think the mediocre stuff is often necessary for people on the outside of
relatively specialist areas - like I am - to have a way in. Not that I've been
upvoting much deep learning stuff, but I'm sure I've upvoted similar.

I seem to recall that the same thing happened when HN had a fling with
Bayesian statistics...last year? Two years ago?

I think it's a necessary consequence of having a large, _broad_ technical
audience that really enjoys investigating very narrow niches. Eventually even
the people on the 'edges' of that topic's appeal want/need to find a way in.

~~~
tormeh
A shallow treatment of a topic can still be excellent, if it picks the right
stuff to present and does so in a pedagogical manner.

Going by reputation, the dragon book would be an example of the opposite: Very
in-depth, but with horrible writing.

------
davemel37
This might sound strange...but an imperfect ratings system might actually be a
good thing.

I'm already drowning in information overload. HN feeds me several good stories
a day. If it got any better I would probably stop reading because it would
take too much time and work.

Not to say I like cheaters...but short of adding the equivelant of
subreddits...I'm fine with only enjoying a few top page stories a day.

------
yvoschaap2
Sounds like a fun project.

I did some digging in the upvote data of ProductHunt a while back, and
although submitting a product needed special privileges, I easily found lots
of dubious upvote behaviour. Unfortunately its hard to distinguish between
people asking their friends to help upvote (eg via twitter) and 'spamming'
upvotes.

If the actual content is good, do we really care how it got in the top ranks?

------
arikrak
Is there also a reverse issue, where posts that should reach the front-page
are downvoted or prevented from reaching it for some reason? I.e. how many
posts are there that fit with what HN is for and are popular on similar forums
online (such as /r/programming), but still do not reach the front page?

~~~
dang
A lot of posts. The overwhelming reason is simple neglect. We've been working
on this problem for a while. If you're curious about what we're doing, see the
links at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9333611](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9333611)
and in my reply. They're a bit out of date now, but the intentions remain the
same.

~~~
arikrak
Right, neglect is an issue, since most people don't check the new page and
links quickly fall off it.

I wonder if there might also be a more nefarious problem where say YC alumni
down-vote competitors?

------
protomyth
It seemed like stories that get submitted and then take a couple of hours to
start getting votes are the result of one person with an RSS feed /
notifications from the posted site, then people submitting the story after it
hits social media thus upvoting the original submission.

------
argklm
Someone need to develop an userscript that will display a two pane Hacker
News. On the left the standard page on the right the newest tab. These days
I'm in rehabilitation from surgery if no one want to materialize the idea I
will look into it.

~~~
touristtam
chrome extension for you then:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
ux/chn...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
ux/chngbdmhgakoomomnnhfapkpbalpmhid)

~~~
argklm
Thank you, I will check it.

------
sudioStudio64
I was always suspicious of the LISP articles. Just kidding.

I think that the lack of down votes for normal people means that you end up
seeing a lot of support for some things that are popular with the people who
CAN down vote.

Maybe I've got it wrong, but it seems that way.

~~~
DanBC
Anyone with an account can upvote stories. It's probably a good idea to visit
/new to upvote interesting submissions.

Anyone with an account can flag a submission. Flagging should only be used for
submissions that violate site guidelines. No-one can downvote a submission.

Anyone with an account can upvote comments. (Click the timestamp to reveal the
flag link.) Anyone with an account can flag comments - again flagging should
be restricted to comments that violate the guidelines.

People with karma over 750(?) 1000(?) can downvote comments. There's
disagreement about when downvotig should be used. Some people feel it should
only be used for posts that violate site guidelines[1]; others think that
downvote to disagree is okay.

[1] that makes the flag redundant?

~~~
sudioStudio64
Plenty of people downvote comments because of disagreement. It means that
conversations that are contentious disappear...so the subjects popular with
the high karma crowd end up being the ones that are seen over and over again.

I'm not trying to be too negative here...I'm just saying. There are days when
the number of Go stories is just crazy. It reminds me of the Linux advocacy of
the 90's where people seem to think they are doing a great good by posting
them.

I realize that it could also just be a very visible indicator of the overall
zeitgeist of people using the site. Something tells me this isn't the case,
though.

~~~
DanBC
People can downvote comments but not stories. Anyone can upvote stories. So
the number of Go articles has nothig to do with downvoting or users with high
karma.

------
solve
Alternatively - the votes aren't being manipulated, the rankings are. HN has
the most manipulated rankings of any reddit clone. The rankings are changed
for all kinds of reasons other than just points and spam flags.

------
Ideabile
Thanks for this, looks really interesting, also because I'm getting demotivate
on publish stuff in HN. All the link look dope, for marketing reasons, and
some are just interest to read.

------
arkistouk
I have found my success/failure to be hit and miss with things I have
submitted over the years... I just thought it was luck

------
bvinicius
After try to login with GitHub to have early access, i back to page and get
one "Error 502".

~~~
adieu
Thank you for your feedbak. We'll look into this.

------
tux3
This needs a user-script that adds a small warning around potentially
suspicious stories.

------
Skilleen
It would be funny if they cheated themselves to get this on the front page.

------
kcbanner
The way Slashdot worked when I last used it was cool. Regular visitors would
be randomly granted 5 moderation points which could be used to either upvote,
or downvote stories and comments. You had to give a reason for the vote
(funny, interesting, off topic, etc)

------
aquarin
Frontpage should be a sample of some pool different for each user.

------
davycro
I'd like to see these graphs for every hn story

------
butwhy
Your email subscription page is offline.

------
senpai
website is offline?

------
AC__
Any system that ranks popularity undoubtedly can and will be gamed, it's as
simple as that. This is how news outlets end up reporting ridiculous
statistics or outrageously skewed public opinion polls. In 2013 it was
estimated that between 5.5% and 11.5% of facebook's users were fake accounts,
but their likes and votes are real. I'd hazard the guess, based on the shear
volume of global propaganda perpetrated lately, that number is substantially
larger today.

------
imaginenore
Have you considered that maybe HN doesn't display the real number of upvotes
to prevent gaming?

------
Geee
Note to mods: Please unban TerryADavis, I don't think his occasional god-mode
is harming anyone.

------
freefromgoogle
Any story about Google on HN or reddit will be heavily manipulated.

Just look at the abnormal vote patterns on stupid stories concerning
Google...they've mastered the art of getting their shit on social media.

Unfortunately the masses are too stupid to tell and Google continues to
destroy freedom on the WWW by curating the WWW and controlling what is seen
and what is not.

Google killed the free(libre) WWW and now it's their ad crap box.

