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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, I should add protections against this phenomenon. Should be straightforward.

Just to be clear, I'm not asking for people on Twitter to vote for my stories, ever. My purpose in tweeting them has always been to notify my Twitter followers of my new content. I only noticed the effect on HN a couple days ago.

I understand why you'd want to "protect against this phenomenon", because I agree that it's probably negative in the long run, but I think something needs to be done about the new page, because a lot of good stories are being missed. People talked about this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1720742

All that said, I'd like to hear more about your feeling on this; I'd be disappointed if you felt I was intentionally spamming HN or gaming the system to the detriment of the community.

EDIT: Oh, and one more thing: my tweets always link to the original content on my blog, not to the post on HN (or even worse, never to the submit URL on HN).

Just to be clear, I'm not asking for people to vote for my stories, ever.

Why then, when I looked at your site, did it pop up a little pseudo-window saying "Hello HN reader, if you like this I would really appreciate an upvote"?

I'm not sure...when I click on the link above to go to my site, I see the popup asking me if I want to subscribe to the RSS feed:

http://img.skitch.com/20100929-xq3tsubtd9dkgj9uxbjdechmik.pn...

I installed WP Greet Box, which displays different messages to different people depending on their referrer, but I didn't think it was working for HN. Maybe it's because we're on different browsers (I'm on Safari 5)?

Also, this message would only appear if you were coming from the story on HN, not from a link on Twitter, so I'm not sure it's relevant here anyway.

EDIT: Yep, I see the message now in Firefox and Chrome. Should I disable? I'm not sure I see the problem with reminding people who came to the post from HN to vote for the story if they think it's worthwhile, but what do others think?

I thought it was a pretty obnoxious message, and that it should be disabled.

Honestly, I find the whole tone of this discussion pretty obnoxious. The thing that can destroy HN is when the front page stops being filled with the stories which people find most interesting and starts being filled with borderline-interesting stories from the best self-promoters.

With regard to the "if you like this story, please upvote" thing, I understand your point, which is why I asked for feedback. But as to the original topic of this blog post, I think we're on different pages. I don't see anything wrong with the fact that I tweet my blog posts to my followers and some of them happened to find it interesting and submit to HN. Should I stop using Twitter and RSS as promotional tools because it might somehow be unfair to the person who doesn't use them but writes better content? This seems akin to arguing that startups shouldn't worry about marketing and sales and self-promotion and should instead just make something awesome and then people will flock to them. I really (truly) wish the world worked that way, but it simply does not.

Honestly I think the whole idea of trying to get your own blog posts onto HN is contrary to the spirit of HN. It seems... somewhat gauche, like asking for a birthday present. If someone wants to give you an upvote or a birthday present they'll give you an upvote or a birthday present, but actively campaigning for one is socially unacceptable (unless you're under the age of, say, twelve, in which case the birthday-present case is okay).

Even submitting your own blog posts for consideration is something that I don't really consider to be kosher, and I'd never do it myself.

I shall refer you to this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=445455

Specifically this comment by PG:

Yes, it's ok to submit your own stuff. If you get to the point where you've submitted 20 things and none of them got any upvotes, though, you may want to start to be more selective.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=445526

On Metafilter, making a front page post that links to your own stuff is the only %100 banworthy offense.

It's all the more important there because the front page is reverse chronological and anyone who's been there a week can post to it.

A button on another site that casts my vote on HN rubs me the wrong way. And asking for upvotes sets a bad precedent.

How is this different from a FB Like or a Retweet button on a blog? Or do those rub you the wrong way as well? Not trying to be snarky; I'm genuinely curious.

I, personally, am fine with those when they come after the article. However, asking me to like, upvote, retweet, subscribe to your RSS feed, or do anything indicating that I like an article before I have read it is a really, really good way to get me to close the tab and go read something else. Even more so if, as on some sites, the request appears in a pop-up thing which obscures the text of the article.

Good point. If I do keep it, I'll modify to have it appear at the end of the article.

"Or do those rub you the wrong way as well?"

Do they do so for me. If I think something is interesting or valuable, I'll tell people, and do it in my own way.

I don't see how these buttons help me or add value to the content of a site. I'd rather readers be encouraged to participate in a discussion.

This assumes you have readers in the first place. It's very difficult to build any kind of audience without promotion, especially in the beginning.

Oh, sure. The question is how best to get those readers.

I'm one of those who do not respond well to blatant prodding for mindless promotion. I've some bookmarklets for posting things on friendfeed and HN, and use them when a site is interesting.

Maybe those buttons work well with others. But will they create the kind of audience you want? Does that even matter when you're just trying to get some initial attention?

FWIW, I don't like those either. I think it adds unnecessary clutter to the web.

And: Lowering the threshold of work needed to share something reduces the average value of the things shared. It's not a big deal when you can moderate who is sharing things with you, but it's catastrophic for a communal service like HN. It is the path to funny cat pictures.

I think there's an element of game theory here though: the people putting out the HN equivalent of funny cat pictures (like angelgate or other drama) are going to self-promote, and heavily. If they weren't the type to do so, they wouldn't write content like that. So the defense should be two-fold: encourage the HN userbase to only vote up good stuff, and create good content yourself and promote it. If you don't promote your own content, it'll be overshadowed by the funny cat picture people who do. Ideally, no one would self-promote, but if the guy with crappy content does, the people who write good content should too.

Of course, this supposes that I'm not in the category of people creating funny cat picture content. And the realization that perhaps I am more than I'd like is somewhat uncomfortable. How do you know for sure?

Why protection, isn't the fact that people are submitting the story actually a powerful indicator it is a good one?

Agreed, if anything I think submitting a pre-existing story should actually be worth more score than upvoting it. The problem lies if people give out submit links pre-loaded with the submission URL/title (if that's possible?).

But if you form a cabal to make front page of HN - whether your clique be Twitter followers or a "group of friends" on this site - it's gaming the system.

Essentially, that is what the article advocated (oh, and write interesting content - duh).

A "cabal" typically refers to a group secretly united to promote their own interests. I'm not sure that tweeting a link to a blog post meets that criteria.

A cabal of voters could easily be setup on HN. That is problematic.

It is a natural byproduct of the speed of submissions and necessity to hit a certain number of points before "making" it.

You could look at the referrer for "Vote this up/submit this" URLs. If they didn't come from the story itself or from within ycombinator.com, you can simply ignore them for voting purposes and route the traffic to the comment page or to the story itself.

Let the user actually read the story, then come back to vote on it if they like.

It's probably also worth making a note when a user clicks through to a story so that later on you can verify that he's read it before counting his vote for it. (Naturally, you'd also need to note referrals from the story itself to make this work.)

Jason, just to be clear, all my tweets link to the original post on my blog, so any votes or submits from my twitter followers who clicked on the link it my tweet would come from the story itself. I'm definitely not sending out tweets with links to the HN story or to the HN submit link.

You might care to read the 'sanitybit' contributions here: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/djxhq/gaming_the...

(I suppose yesterday I mislinked this submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1737079 )

Easy fix: submitting a duplicate URL should not cause an automatic upvote. This has always seemed a bit off to me.

A thousand times no!

That's the only way any non-groupthink content gets to the front page, and most of the time it fails anyway because a dozen submission-upvotes were spread out over a day or two. If anything more weight should be applied to it to counteract aging.

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