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Comment by slyfocks | Hacker News Reader

Unless I’m missing something, timestamps seem to be HappyOrNot’s only defense against malicious users.

While that works against a toddler who relentlessly taps the unhappy button, it’s an ineffective defense against a manager intent on manipulating feedback.

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"Wow, you have a lot of happy customers who did not actually buy anything! Care to explain that?"

"kids"

"Well the stadium/store/restaurant/security-area has cameras and we saw you pressing the button [at all]. Care to explain that?"

(Also: why would they press the button? bad reviews being given)

"We see that, while your over all ratio of good to bad isn't horrible, you have quite a bit more bad than usual and more votes than usual without the sales we'd expect."

By the time you add the costs to administer these buttons which includes detecting fraud, reviewing security footage, and contacting the store, the value proposition of these buttons evaporates. It's no longer a cheap source of customer feedback.

They could notice weird things like these and sounds like they have done things like lookup the camera footage before to identify an issue.

Great, lets pivot into child care.

It's not a technological problem: you only need to catch someone cheating once.

This is addressed in the article:

"When I first met Theisen, I asked him what would prevent a store manager from standing next to a terminal and repeatedly pressing the smiley button, and he said that... the most important information from any location comes from the number of frowny presses, which not even a dishonest employee would be able to undo."

Or a camera pointed at the button

Less invasive potential starting point: compare number of impressions with number of sales, look for suspicious outliers. More sophisticated options could be derived from similar easy-to-get numbers, too, like amount of foot traffic, door openings, etc.

But this would never happen, since the gimmick is to deploy a system to generate vanity metrics, not solve any problems.

If it's on a tablet, it probably has a front-facing camera taking snaps every now and then.

That angle is just not covered in the article, but wouldn't it be safe to assume that there is some sort of algorithm cleanup of the data? Collapsing clusters of pushes, or something.

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