Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattbee | Hacker News Reader

What alterations could HN make to the front page weighting algorithm that tries to spot and penalise voting rings?

e.g. if you're someone who routinely upvotes posts within minutes, maybe your vote could count for less than an account that only dips in to the new page occasionally?

Or maybe your vote gets penalised if it's your only upvote in a 24 hour period?

Or maybe HN keeps track of who you upvote with, and your vote gets penalised the more you upvote with the same people?

idk, it sounds like a fun project for someone if HN wanted a more organic front page.

View on HN

Voting ring detection has been one of HN's priorities for over 12 years:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I've personally spent hundreds of hours working on this, as well as tracking down voting rings of every imaginable sort. I'd never claim that our software catches everything, but I can tell you that it catches so much that I often go through the lists to find examples of good projects that people were trying ineptly to promote, and invite them to do it again in a way that is more likely to gain community interest.

Thanks, I didn't know at all.

I can see you didn't want to talk about this, esp with the tedious conspiracists. But I'm glad you did, and appreciate your work in keeping HN interesting & fair.

It surprised me because 1) I achieved a moderate position on the front page a few years back "asking a few friends" to upvote something about my former company, but mainly 2) there's no warning to new post submitters as to the values, integrity etc. of the site, to warn people off trying to game it, which I'd expect when you'd put that much work in.

I know there's a minimalist / in-the-know aesthetic to HN but I've been here 10 years, started & sold a tech business, and still didn't know the rules, the moderation patterns etc, other than "by example" (but then who'd want a whole meta.hn forum, gulp).

"Guidelines" is the first link in the footer.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html are linked in the footer of every page, and both contain information about this.

Out of curiosity, would you be willing to share a link to the post you mentioned that got on the front page? I'd like to see whether our software missed it, and why. You can provide it here or send it to hn@ycombinator.com if you'd prefer a private conversation.

Sometimes the software catches voting rings and we turn the penalty off because the article seems likely to interest the community. It's not perfect, though, and knowing about cases that it missed can be very helpful, since independent verification is usually not available!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com