Ask HN: If there was a bury/upmod brigade on HN, how would we know?
Has anyone reviewed HN Arc source code to check if there is any log data of up/down mods? Is there a way to perform analytics to look for a HN equivalent of a "bury brigade"?
Bury brigades are less common, but there are definitely people that have a 'fanclub' that will downmod whatever they write no matter how on topic or good the contribution is.
Usually this corrects itself after a while though.
2) they'd leave a clear repeat user ID/IP trace. So moderator can automate detection of anomalous upvote coincidences
3) if they faked new IPs while upvoting and rotated user IDs we'd have a more difficult detection problem. We can look at growth trends of upvotes for derivatives that are anomalous. Coincidental upvotes would show up.
4) if the upvote gang rotates IDs, IPs, and upvote intervals the HN team is faced with a fun challenge. Something Digg, Stumbleupon, etc have likely faced in the past. Chances are, your attention isn't worth it. But a dangerous piece of malware may be.
Interesting question. What if they faked credentials from low activity members that were compromised?
When I first started I spent one thread basically telling the rest of the room to go jump in a lake for downvoting me. I lost about 7 karma points that day, so I don't do that anymore. :)
A more reasonable question is: I do not understand what I said that was so bad. Would somebody please take the time to explain to me why you think I was downvoted?
Got to do my good deed for today. Now back to work.
This is just a discussion forum for $Diety's sake. Getting downvoted to -4 isn't the end of the world. It is just a number on a webpage which has no impact on your success in the real world.
Just try to improve your points/writing. That's what I do when I am downvoted to oblivion and I care about upvotes.
I agree. But I am not sure any organized downvoting brigade would slip by the admin folks for very long. And I am not sure that (downvoting brigade) is what is happening in this case. ( I was reacting to the "And I get downvoted for that" bit. A comment like that gets downvoted because it (a) is content free (b) sounds like angsty whining.
Imo comments about the injustice of downvoting aren't very effective on HN. By and large, if you make a good point, the community's opinion overcomes arbitrary downvotes.)
But I've definitely seen this kind of behaviour with others as well, specifically with: vaksel, unalone, cperciva and a bunch of others. The interesting thing is that in the long run it always balances out.
Even this one was voted down, even though it is about as on-topic as it gets.
But for what it's worth, the most likely explanation for a small number of downvotes on each of many comments by a single person, including apparently innocuous or unremarkable comments, is one or two individuals holding a grudge and expressing such by mass downvoting. I've had that happen to me on another site, before an (extremely unamused) admin intervened.
I seem to recall, but can't find a reference, that abuse of the voting system in that manner is actually monitored by the site admins here.
The dynamics of the 'new' page and the 'front' page are completely different.
*[edit] as this implies that it's keeping a list of votes as article-user records somewhere.