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Comment by laktak | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget that HN tries to detect vote fraud.

So some articles might simply disappear because the OP asked too many friends for upvotes or because of false positives.

View on HN

Does HN actually suffer this? I know its done on Reddit and by who in one case; just having a family member active in politics gets you good insight how many sites they try to manipulate.

I was hoping that HN's flag system would sufficient for the community to self censor. Perhaps we need a flag on comments too, something you can't see. I would also prefer that posts don't transition through the lighter grays as they get down voted but disappear completely once the dead threshold is met. That would prevent some piling on that does happen

HN has flags for comments. Click the timestamp of the comment and the flag option will appear.

I think there's a small karma threshold for flagging - something like 30 or 50 karma.

> Does HN actually suffer this?

Oh yes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13749685

Another possibility is that voting rings for _other_ posts flag maliciously to remove the competition and give their posts a relative boost. Maybe author can find correlations with other posts that were showing on the front page at the same time as the flagged ones and see how _their_ rankings got boosted due to the flagging.

The article is about posts that never receive the "flagged" designation.

A story is not marked as [flagged] as soon as someone flags it, and flags have influence even if the submission is not marked as [flagged].

See dang's comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13741276

I've chatted to mods on various sites over the years and I've heard that "voting rings", particularly the automated ones, often try to obscure their upvotes by also upvoting obscure stories and downvoting competing stories.

How would HN know who an OP's friends are? Do they track social accounts?

Likely if IP A posts a story and IP X,Y,Z always upvote it first, it likely flags that as suspicious. Or if IP X,Y,Z go directly to the link and upvote, instead of organically finding the post.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com