Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

When you build a site with user submitted content and voting, you have two immediate problems you need to solve before you can even get started:

  - How are you going to deal with spam
  - How are you going to deal with gaming

They're actually related problems, since the aim of both is to drive people to a given website. Since that's demonstrably valuable in terms of cash money, it's an absolute certainty that people will try to take advantage of it.

You really need to bake something in to handle it from the word go.

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What you need to truly defeat this sort of spam is personalization, AKA recommendation,

If the top news stories are personalized to your interests, it is more difficult to game the system.

In particular, consider this scenario: I get a news result from a voting ring, and it ranks high because they all voted. But then I downvote the article because it is not interesting to me, Afterwards, the voting ring's weight is diminished in my personalized news feed. Hence, they cannot artificially rank articles for you,

I would argue that without some personalization, it is impossible to 100% avoid spam. Because if you treat there as being one objective lense, it is hard to discriminate between legitimate overlapping interests and colluders who share their authority.

Indeed, though that would only fix it for the small percentage of users who are (a.) logged in, and (b.) vote things down.

It wouldn't work on me, for example, because I hardly ever vote on anything here. In the 3 years I've been around I can't imagine I've actually voted down more than a half dozen times.

Unless you rated in whether or not you read the article/comments, in which case it might still work.

And of course, if downmod meant more "hide this sort of thing from me" than "I don't think this should be on HN", maybe you'd downmod more...

(But this starts showing the downside to such personalization - it's a lot more effort server-side, and it dilutes a single community)

You don't have to be logged in - just give them a long-term cookie when they show up on your site and it still works. And if you aren't voting anything down, you wouldn't be the kind of person who would need such a website in the first place.

And if you aren't voting anything down, you wouldn't be the kind of person who would need such a website in the first place.

You lost me there. You're talking about this on a site that doesn't even allow its users to downvote stories. And you're talking to a power user of that site, who just told you he doesn't ever downvote things. HN is a culture of voting up things that are good, and, rarely, downvoting things that are distracting from the conversation. That's one of the reasons it's so good.

As to cookies for non-logged in users, they don't really help anything. Sure, you could consider every clickthru as a 'vote' for personalization purposes, but it would likely just fill a user's feed with poorly titled things and clickbait. Probably more than half the articles I click through on get closed immediately without reading. I wouldn't want to optimize my view to include more of that.

Okay we try again. If he didn't wish he could downvote stuff, he hasn't got a need for a service that takes his downvote into account.

The long term cookie isn't really that important for vote counting perspectives but to be able to find out whom to serve the personalized stuff to. It is essentially no different from hn which also sets a cookie when you login, except that if you erase the cookie, you can get it set again when you log in, which wouldn't happen in my example.

>And you're talking to a power user of that site, who just told you he doesn't ever downvote things.

As an aside, what makes you a "power user"?

Same thing that makes you one, brother. 1000 reputation points and the equivalent of $10k in otherwise billable hours squandered on this site.

I'm going to be lording it over the hoi-poloi now, "I'm a power user".

It's quite possible to generate recommendations solely from upvotes.

I intend to spend next year building just this. The problem I have, which I suspect all similar efforts will face, is how to bootstrap a network like this, especially when your competitors are the social news sites where all your future users hang out.

I think this is a good time to launch a new news aggregation site. Reddit has "jumped the shark" so to speak and I think there is a large chunk of displaced users looking for an outlet. That brings up the third problem with these sites, how to gracefully get bigger without quality dropping. Of course Reddit did in a sense solve this problem by allowing Reddit itself to be the next solace for displaced people, they just jump down into a deeper/more obscure subreddits.

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