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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

"Might be an interesting social experiment."

It's not an interesting experiment unless you learn something from it. There's virtually nothing that can be learned from this.

Plus, I like being able to follow the comments of pg and others on their threads page.

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Being able to follow pg on his threads page is part of the bias too. He gets more votes because his comments get read by more people.

Or maybe he just modifies his karma directly :)

This is true. But the experiment could take this into account. It could only count the votes which occur directly from the main page.

Agreed -- there probably is something of a pg bias, but it's impossible to measure because his comments and submissions are better than the average anyways.

How is it impossible to measure? It has nothing to do with how his content quality ranks compared to other people. Since he is writing both the content under his name and the content under a different name, given that he doesn't know which one he's writing under until after he writes it, the quality should be at the same level (on average).

If the quality is the same but the points are different (between his real acct and anon acct), then you've found a bias.

OK, yes, it is possible as long as the other account never answers meta questions about this site or YC, and all meta-questions are eliminated in the comparison. It's still not worth doing, because there is a pg bias: people follow his comments and submissions and are more likely to vote them up because they are more likely to see them.

I agree... no meta questions would be compared.

You can get around the problem that you mention by only comparing votes which are made from the main page and not from a "follow" page.

If that's the case, then couldn't we measure the bias by having some other user post under pg's name and see if it gets more or less upvotes than when posted under the user's own name?

Edit: To take this idea a step further, maybe have a random chance of any post being attributed to pg and keep track of which ones are actually pg, to see if there's any difference between them.

I agree. It tells us what we already know, a lot of people here have respect for pg and it's reflected in his upmods. He founded the site and has written the essays that have struck some resonance with most of the users and drawn them here. They upmod him a lot. What else would you expect?

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