Auto submission bots on Hacker News
jacquesmattheij.com
jacquesmattheij.com
That's never made any sense to me. All it does is encourage this kind of behavior, where you submit everything you can find in the hopes of gaining points. You haven't really contributed anything valuable, since good articles tend to find their way here on their own.
Karma for comments makes sense. You can look at somebody's average and it gives you a sense of what sort of things they're posting. It actually measures something.
If somebody posts a cheap attack on one of your comments, you can click their username, notice that they have a 1.9 average, and go about your day knowing that they're probably just angry with the world in general. On the other hand if they have an average score of 8.6, you might want to read what they said again and see if they were actually right.
Karma from article submissions, on the other hand, tells you nothing useful about the submitter. Any chance we can disassociate upvotes on articles from user karma?
I personally sometimes won't bother commenting on a low comment simply because there is little chance of an interesting coversation happening there.
The other thing that's messed up now is duplicate submission. They should be forbidden again. Find a way to get the duped article to the front page if we're trying to make sure it's seen (maybe with a different decay constant), but allowing the resubmission takes away the original conversation.
Second, you'll need to produce a bit more anger and irrationality before anybody starts labeling you as a troll :)
Frankly, the only time I ever check anybody's profile is when they say something really valuable or really obnoxious. So by the time I get there I've pretty much made up my mind about the character of the individual in question. I can't imagine forming an opinion of somebody based solely on their karma score on some website.
I do see what you mean, I didn't think you were discarding comments from low karma commenters. I mostly wanted to bring up a point that is often missed in these discussions, that karma points might be very dependent on not only participation and quality, but on timing.
Given that using average karma as a filter is so blunt, an alternative way to express your method would be "I might see a high average karma as a reason to re-evaluate a comment that I initially discarded". Then it would be even harder to misconstrue into something sinister and karma elitist as I did :)
* Edit: from the comment below by mrduncan that shows how average calculation is done, my previous comment will not affect my average a lot. The max comment is sensibly ignored as a potential outlier.
- adjusting to other comments on the same post doesn't account for timing
- adjusting for time after the post is gameable by necromancers
- adjusting by the total karma of the post commented on is incomplete; it also needs some relation to the time lapse from posting to comment
- penalizing short comments might help discourage snarky one-liners
Are there browser plugins to give an adjusted average karma score this way, yet?
Either their comment is useful to you where you live today or its not. You don't have to justify your judgement by yet another subjective.
(By a... checking... 3.4 karma/comment user who was sub-1.0/comment last week; not having changed his opinions or commenting style.)
In some ways its very Karmic in that my goal is to maximize all users Karma over my own individual Karma. I get really excited when a comment of mine results in multiple 20+ Karma comments because that means I'm really contributing.
I think it works like this: Take the last N values from the last T time, discard the largest (and perhaps the smallest) and compute the average of what's left. If there aren't enough, don't bother.
For more details, read the code. It's available here somewhere ...
; Ignore the most recent 5 comments since they may still be gaining votes.
; Also ignore the highest-scoring comment, since possibly a fluff outlier.
Most people submit articles in some part because they receive karma points for interesting submissions. It's not just by magic that good articles "tend to find their way here."
Maybe we shouldn't penalize articles that don't gain attention, but it should have a determined negative score in the back end, while displaying 0 or 1 to users on the front end. The initial score could be calculated somehow through the karma (or possibly comment karma average) of the submitter and length of time the submitter has been a member of HN.
When a newer, but established, user submits an article, it could need up to 15 upvotes before it actually starts gaining the user karma/points, for example. The score could then start to adjust to it's actual total as it becomes more active.
My only issue with actually penalizing articles that don't get attention is because some articles may be submitted a few times over the course of a day from different sources, yet the later submitted ones in what I have unscientifically observed seem to be the most active. The actual information in the article is completely relevant, but due to whatever probabilistic cause, they just don't get noticed. I don't think it's "right" to penalize a submitter because no one else was on the ball, so to speak.
Jasonkeste's idea for tying reputation to comments could be done with an icon. Our (New Zealand's) equivalent of ebay does this quite well.
Perhaps we could measure meaningfulness by the size of the tree of replies and assign karma according to that. That would even solve the post-to-upvote ratio problem.
I just don't know what to do with the downvote-for-disagreement thing. Not everyone regard it as a problem, but I'm not sure I agree.
Maybe Slashdot-style metamoderation...
One measurement to make might be the votes divided by comments.
Let V = votes
Let C = comments
Let IT = 1.0
Let R = V/C
If R > IT then the article is "worth IT"
Let "the paper it's written on" be 0.1.
If R < "the paper it's written on" then it's not worth the paper it's written on (not that it's written on paper, but you get the idea).
But all this is tinkering around the edges, and doesn't feel like it's significant. Perhaps a new model of how a site like this works at all is necessary.
I'm not sure I agree with you on that. The best stories produce a high volume of high-quality discussion. Your proposed algo punishes submissions that generate discussion, which seems to be the opposite of what's desirable.
It's not perfect, but I'm finding it a pretty good predictor.
Additionally, it's very hard to have a high-quality discussion that is also high-volume. Once an article's comments get over several pages long, you can be sure that most commenters are not reading everything before commenting, so you get a lot of similar comments. Sometimes this is valuable (e.g. "Ask HN"), but most of the time it just worsens the signal-to-noise ratio.
I made it for myself. I'm sure it misses some good stuff, but what does make it is almost always top-notch.
Note: there's a hidden span after the links with the score if you're curious. I have it hidden because it can be distracting.
Maybe we could get better results by identifying unanswered questions.
Perhaps you could implement a cost-refund system where it costs x karma to submit an article. If that article receives x number of upvotes, then you get them all back -- otherwise, they're gone.
For each subsequent article following a situation in which you did not get refunded, the cost doubles.
So, the scenario would be like this:
- new users can submit articles after they've attained 5 karma points, which are spent upon submission.
- If the article gets upvoted 5 times, the karma is refunded, and the cost is still 5 karma to submit.
- If the article does not get upvoted 5 times (or is flagged more than upvoted, or whatever) then the user loses the karma cost, and their next submission costs 10 karma. If the user doesn't have 10 karma, they can't submit.
There is a low entry cost, and good submissions aren't penalized, while bad or negative submissions are penalized progressively. There is no point at which the user is 'banned', but they have to earn progressively more and more karma to keep submitting. For high-karma users, this should allow them the luxury of gambling some karma on things they want shown, while lower-karma members have to be more mindful of whether they think this is worth gambling their karma on.
So if you do implement a system like that you're basically codifying the herd mentality much more strictly than it probably should be.
I would also venture that 'cutting edge' is HN's bailiwick, and therefore, it's really hard to get ahead of the tech curve here.
Incidentally, i submitted a link (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386915 ) about an hour ago, and after watching it depressingly fall off the first page of the new list, i think i'm giving up on ever submitting a link to HN again.
What's so frustrating is that i can identify content that is good, and relevant (the link above is about open data, citizen access to data, and information management), which are obviously relevant to the hacker news community.
But the only ways i can think to remedy this would be to either lobby my friends hard to vote up the link (something i'm loathe to do), or start pimping the links on other sites, in the hopes that people will try to submit it, see the existing link, and vote it up.
There's just no way i can do better than a piece of content like this. Oh well. I guess i'll stick to commenting.
> i submitted a link ... about an hour ago, and after
> watching it depressingly fall off the first page of
> the new list, i think i'm giving up on ever submitting
> a link to HN again.
> What's so frustrating is that i can identify content
> that is good, and relevant (the link above is about
> open data, citizen access to data, and information
> management), which are obviously relevant to the
> hacker news community.
That doesn't mean it's of zero interest to everyone. That doesn't mean it should be of zero interest to everyone. It does mean that you are mistaken in your belief that founders and hackers would be interested, if only they'd seen it.
You're going to fall into at least one of those categories, and i think that hackers in particular are going to fall into multiple of those categories (that i happen to know from personal experience).
But if you didn't think it was relevant, then i certainly don't think you're obligated to upvote. :)
And that's my point.
It should be of interest to everyone, and it's got nothing specifically related to being a hacker, being a founder, running a project, or other technical issues that are the point, purpose and focus of this community.
Or once were.
And before someone trots out the "satisfies intellectual curiosity" line from the guidelines let me just say no, it doesn't, and if you think it does then you have a very different concept of "intellectual" from mine.
So I'm not saying it's uninteresting in general, I'm saying it's uninteresting to this community as I understand it ought to be.
And in consequence it's clear that you have a different understanding about with this community ought to be. Maybe I'm now out-of-date, and it's changed into something with which I don't share significant overlap.
At the same time, if you don't find the generalist argument persuasive, i'd fall back on the point i skipped previously, which is that this is of direct interest to data geeks. One of the major information brokers, which is interesting both as an individual instance, and as a representative of all large information brokers is fundamentally broken internally.
This is a data processing and scaling issue laid out in a way that should make us ask what's wrong, and what it is that can be done to fix these sorts of problems.
Put more succinctly, this is a problem in our domain.
I think you're getting into a long-deplored mailing-list tendency for people to ascribe general attributes to their community based on personal preference. "I like ice-cream, lots of other people probably like ice cream, so it's a good post for HN." Journalistic feature-creep, if you will.
My point being that yes, we are all tax-payers more or less, but that doesn't mean everything paid for with tax revenues is germane. Syllogistic posting rationales tend to cast a wider and wider umbrella, sometimes venturing into the realm of slippery slopes.
EDIT: fixed quote-italics
Additionally, i do feel that i have some sense of the hacker news demographic having both been a part of it, and watching the sort of content that does generate discussion.
So i'm cognizant of the problem, and i'd like to think that gives me at least some ability to compensate from the bias.
1) Match peoples' interests
2) Write really really well
So, you can either submit articles like "BubbleTwit (YC '08) gets $14B in funding, announces Natalie Portman is new CEO" or you can just keep writing and writing and writing until you get really good.
I'm mostly suggesting this because it's what I wish I would do. I'm not that good yet.
I peeked at your post... I think it is a fascinating subject, but your title and opening paragraph don't work that well. "Sustainable" doesn't mean anything without context. Your opening paragraph doesn't really create any kind of desperate need. What is the specific crash going to look like? Paint us a picture of destruction, and then lead us out of it. Great writing grabs people and holds their faces in front of something real.
I don't doubt that you've got real things to show people, so just keep working on the craft, and you'll get there.
credit where credit's due, i didn't author the original piece, and there are several things i would change about it if i had.
But yeah. i should blog more too :P But self promotion is frowned upon at HN.
The only cure I know for that is to lower the signal to noise ratio, and I don't know a better way to do it than to make submissions harder, or at least, more chancy for the shotgun-submission approach.
If every submission is something that people care about, then I believe (again, right or wrong) that more people are going to be willing to hit the 'newest' page instead of waiting for things to hit the home page, and there should be far fewer submissions.
Of course, this is all predicated on the assumption that auto-post bots are dumb, and that they'll lose you more karma if it's penalized than you gain, but that's an assumption I can't really stand behind, not having seen the numbers.
I think this is actually a pretty complex issue (social dynamics, reputation, incentives) so let us keep Mencken's Law firmly in mind
For every complex problem there is an answer that is
clear, simple, and wrong.In the scheme I'm trying, it costs you karma to upvote or downvote, which gets converted to non-spendable clout. You get a small portion of karma everyday, which increases as you have more clout (and followers, another aspect I added). If you have spent all your karma, you cannot submit stories until you earn some. Here I was trying to limit the effect of users that are new, and of those that have not contributed appreciated content or comments.
That said, you've got me rethinking the idea of karma for submissions... It might be better to have submissions only increase clout. -Therefore, it will only slightly increase a user's karma-earning rate. Good comments will be the best way to get karma. Yes. I am going to try that. Thanks!
It just foolish that some high profile story give someone lots of karma advantage then good commenters because someone submitted it first.
> Any chance we can disassociate upvotes on articles from user karma?
Interestingly, Oxford University used to mark final exams for Mathematics and associated schools (such as Computer Science) in this way. Questions would typically start with parts that were largely "book work" and move on to parts that required more careful thought. In addition, you could answer as many questions as you like. Therefore, to avoid people getting lots of marks by just answering all the book work, the papers were scored by squaring the scores for each question and then summing those squares.
That is: overall_score = sum(q in Questions | score(q)^2)
This practice stopped in ~2003 (now you can still answer as many as you like, but the mark for the paper is the sum of your top 3 marks for individual questions, so it's only really worth answering 3 as well as you can).
The only case I could see where your point is valid is if "karma abusers" withhold lower quality submissions in the hopes that they'll submit a really popular one. Do you know if they do this? Or am I misunderstanding the rationale?
Assuming that people are chasing karma (let's leave why to the side for a second, because I don't understand it either), then it's far more efficient to submit lots of low-scoring stories than to even bother thinking about high-scoring ones.
So it was an interesting experiment, I'm glad I did it, I'm pleased I learned something from it, and I'm sorry it seems to have caused Jacques some grief.
For that I apologise unreservedly. We have had a chat off-line and I believe there's no on-going problem. I have, of course, disabled the bot.
But the questions raised are interesting. I suggest that the "first submitter gets all the karma" situation means that people submit without thinking, worried that unless they do so they will miss out on that one item that earns gobs of karma, that they saw first, but didn't submit quickly enough.
Just sharing the karma between submitters won't work, because then if someone sees something gaining traction they just submit it themselves and share in the imaginary profits. Simple, clean, clear solution that's wrong.
No solutions, just problems.
When reading Jacques' post on his blog, I immediately thought RiderOfGiraffes must be up to one of his social experiments with the community.
FWIW, I find your 'work' interesting and the chilled out approach to it, doubly so.
I also think that it would be prudent for anybody that intends to run any kind of bot on HN to ask PG for permission.
(Of course, lately, I get the vast majority of my interesting reading from here anyway, but still...)
I don't blame you for bot-submitting Jacques' stuff. His posts are always good and - after all - always hit first page at a dead run. People here do actually find them interesting.
People take this karma thing waaaay too seriously.
I know I find the site dangerously distracting, and a large part of that is watching the up or downvotes on my comments -- it's kind of a realtime indicator of whether I have my finger on the pulse of the community. So I'm as much to blame as others.
I've said a few times that somebody should monetize this karma nonsense. Set up an auction clearing house where karma can be auctioned off for cash.
It probably wouldn't amount to much, but it's just the kind of out-of-the-box thing that HN should be messing around with. I'm just trying to guess a number, but I think you could pull 5 percent off each trade and make a nice bit of chump change, without changing the look and feel of HN at all. (If it bothers purists or interferes with the running of the board, then simply keep a separate list of "natural" karma hidden from everybody and use that for the system stuff)
If you post anything in a thread with a clear bias towards something, you can just post something in the same vein, and, depending on the popularity, people will upvote the hell out of you.
Another is to just post something in a very popular thread, and you're bound to receive a lot of upvotes. Even people who would normally have been downvoted through the floor would wind up with a lot of karma. (EDIT: The same applies to popular comments: that's why you see so many people responding to it, because they'll earn some extra karma by piggy-backing on the specific comment.)
I think people take karma way too seriously. There isn't any perfect solution except to change your mind set about what the karma is and does. Compared to reddit, HN is much more rewarding, because there aren't idiots who keep downvoting you for no reason other than latent misery and hatred towards mankind, or whatever may possess them. Downvoting sends very bad signals and stifles the incentive to participate in the community a lot, so the comment would need to be very inappropriate to warrant a negative karma score.
The only suggestion I'd like to make is to make per-thread karma inversely proportional to the popularity of the number of thread upvotes, so the comment karma (quality) isn't a function of the number of views in the thread. (Perhaps the same with child comments versus parent comments.)
If pg can do this retroactively, I think we'll already see some interesting changes for the better - albeit no end-all solution.
Or maybe it just represents "points" -- little cookies -- for the user. You can never have too many cookies.
I don't know. That's why I suggested the experiment.
I think the idea that it represents peer acclaim is not very useful, at least to me. I've heard other high karma folks say (and I agree) that probably more than anything it just represents spending too much time online.
(It's annoying to see obvious trolls and spam sitting at 1 and not be able to do anything about it. I'm still a few hundred points away, unless the threshold has gone up again.)
The problem is that submission is winner takes all, i.e. first submitter reaps all the upvotes. Also, HN does not reward finding new sources of material more than posting from the predictable sources.
The logical endpoint of these two facts is auto-submission bots rising to the top of the Karma tables. If Karma is used as a way of anti-gaming (need karma threshold to downvote, etc.) then this is a way to circumvent that for a sufficiently motivated manipulator. They can make a bot that auto-submits from the known sources, and use it to build up an arbitrary number of accounts, from which they can then boost the articles they want (or bury the comments they don't like). For all we know, this could already be the case.
I have two suggestions that can sidestep this problem to a certain extent:
1. Reward articles from predictable sources less than articles from rare sources.
2. Split the karma benefit between the first submitter and the people who upvoted the article early (of course, this needs to take into account how selectively and successfully the user upvotes to avoid blanket upvoting 'just in case').
This all is still gameable, but probably not as easily.
Not really... because they just add to the noise on the new page when it isn't something for HN. HN is curated by hand (with votes) for that reason.
1. When a link is submitted, it doesn't actually appear on HN until a certain (fixed?) time T has elapsed after its first submission.
2. Everyone who submits it within that time is noted.
3. Karma from article upvotes is shared equally between all those users. (Or perhaps unequally in a way that weights earlier submitters slightly more highly -- but not winner-takes-all as at present.)
4. If the same link has been submitted N times before time T elapses, the delay is truncated at that point.
Effects:
1. There's very little incentive to submit something super-quickly. Therefore, there's more incentive to read it carefully first. (Good.)
2. Super-quick submitters don't hurt slower submitters' karma so much. (Good.)
3. Submissions no longer have hugely higher potential karma gain than comments, as they do at present. (Good.)
4. "Obvious" submissions probably no longer give anyone very much karma. (Good.)
5. Breaking news doesn't appear on HN as quickly as it does now; but if lots of people are submitting it, it still gets in pretty fast. (Maybe good, maybe bad.)
I think that with suitable choices of T and N -- perhaps 1 hour and 20, or thereabouts -- this would be a considerable improvement on what we have now.
On the other hand, I'm not clear if would slow things down that much, so much as delay. In any event, this isn't a breaking tech news source for many obvious reasons.
My thinking is that if I write and give my work away, it is no longer up to me to decide how it is to be used. That's because my words are free as in speech, not just free as in beer. Of course, copyright violations are a different matter, but I can't tell people whether to submit a post to HN, I can't tell people whether to bookmark it, or tweet it, or whether to use it as part of a corpus on guessing the sex of the author.
If there's a race for meaningless karma by bot authors, that is irrelevant to me as an author. IF it is a problem--and I do not grant that it is a problem--THEN it is HN's problem, not my problem as an author.
I give my words away. That inevitably means someone will use it in a way I didn't intend. That's the point.
FWIW, I think there is a problem if multiple bots attempting to autosubmit end up inadvertently creating a voting ring. But that can and should be fixed by changing the way HN treats submitting an article that has already been submitted.
Other than that, I only think bots are a problem for HN when submitting spam rather than ham. I am in favour of bots provided they don't play fast and loose with accounts. I would be ok with each bot having its own account, or all bots using their creator's accounts. I would consider it fraudulent to create bots that periodically give themselves new accounts to evade filtering.
If bots all used a stable account, pg could throttle or ban those that submit too much spam. But if a bot is constantly submitting articles that are upvoted by humans.... I'm happy to see it seed the new page.
JM2C, I don't make the rules, I just play by them.
Without wanting to be mean, it's kind of crazy that this meta-discussion about someone's inability to remain off the HN scoreboard is number one right now.
Sycophantism and idle self-promotion are boring pursuits.
EDIT: I think we should be able to down-vote uninteresting articles.
These are artifacts of the way the 'new' and the 'news' page work, the cumulative effect of those is larger than the actual quality of the submissions.
What do you think?
edit: the first version didn't make much sense, I got interrupted in the middle of the message
In the same vain, it's not easy enough to lose karma. By being active here, you will in the end always have good karma, even if your contributions are bad; it's very rare to see comments with lower than -5 karma, but it's easy to get a +10 comment, even if it's nothing special (I mean I know I've had a lot of those...)
They have averages of 26.23 and 18.93, respectively. This, to me, aligns with my expectation that their comments are high value, well thought, and usually worth reading.
Compared to my own measly karma average of 4.57, which is comprised, often, of throwaway remarks and dumb questions, I think it's a fair representation of a user's contribution.
The actual number itself, I agree, is all but meaningless.
I don't think you should worry too much about it either. Your posts seem to keep gathering a high number of votes whenever they appear on HN, so this is a sign that they are useful and relevant to the community. If an irrelevant link gets posted and it only gathers a few votes on the new page, then what have you lost? What has the community lost?
This used to happen with 37signals too - I'm glad to see it stopped happening there. Time to stop autosubmitting jacquesm as well!
Not having those items on the 'news' page would seem to be the best solution.
Really, people should at least read the articles they submit and judge them for content before submitting them to HN, especially when they're associated with the better known (ex)HN'ers.
Probably Sivers, Patio11, Tptacek or any one of the people that seem to be featured a lot here could write an article about 'Condé Nast acquiring HN' (in a desperate move to re-acquire Reddits' audience that has left for HN, thereby realizing the fears of all true Hackers, the proof that this would make 'HN more like Reddit' is left for the reader) (there goes my April 1 post ;)) and it would get upvoted without much consideration.
One possible (technical) solution would be to let the karma boost be dependent on the average of all posts from a domain, submit a 'below average' link and your karma will drop!
Maybe submission upvotes in a short time shouldn't front-page an item. I don't see why not putting these links on the news page should make a difference - if anything it would make it impossible to get non-bot upvotes, if I understand what you mean.
And maybe having a (daily?) article submission limit per user at the same time would keep people from submitting articles just for the sake of it.
It crossed my mind allowing users with more karma to have higher submission limits, but that might aswel be gamed at some point by some users.
So perhaps the best thing is having a CAPTCHA to avoid bot submissions and some kind of limit to avoid manual spamming.
Truth is, HN article quality has been slowly declining in the last few months and we keep seeing the same sources over and over again on the front page.
a) It is hard enough to submit from a smartphone already. Much of my news browsing is on my phone while cooking and eating my breakfast.
b) Adding a CAPTCHA at this point seems like a big hammer to solve an small problem, one that was solved by jacquesm (at least this time) via a little detective work and personal contact (thanks for the deft handling of the situation, Jacques).
c) PG already does voting ring detection, it seems like autosubmitbots should be detectable too if this becomes a problem again.
Hmm ... interesting ...
ADDED IN EDIT: HN voting makes me laugh sometimes - I have no idea why this got a downvote. Thank you - made my day.
This is not, let me hasten to add, a request for more. Some things are funny just the once. More than that and I'll really start to question my understanding of the world, let alone just the HN community.
Submitting content for sake of karma is spamming, no matter who wrote the content. Why not share with others something you think they will find useful or noteworthy? People tend to ask themselves first WIIFM and if they find the benefit, they share. Let us remember that sharing is about others.
There's two separate problems: too much dead content, which imo, is ok, because the good stuff will usually rise to the top - you need some junk to find the gems; and bots automatically picking up and submitting content - no human discernment as to whether the link is actually HN-worthy. I think the mindlessness is more the issue being addressed here
Even more so if more of this audience were old enough to remember when Daryl Hannah was hot.
VVV ahh indeed! Why then we're in violent agreement!
That was the intent of my post. Building a bot that earns 10,000+ karma ought to be an achievement. If for any reason it isn't particularly difficult, then it ought to be taken that earning 10,000+ karma as a human isn't an achievement either.
* When multiple bots submit the same link, "submission" is basically the same thing as "upvoting".
One would hope nobody here is irrational enough to seek 'easy/automatic' karma ... I mean the nice thing about karma for submissions is it's basically a whole lot of smart people saying 'well done for finding this, it's definitely valuable.' If there's no real finding involved then what's the point? You're the only person your karma matters to.
> the nice thing about karma for submissions is it's
> basically a whole lot of smart people saying 'well
> done for finding this, it's definitely valuable.'
There is no doubt in my mind that the community has been diluted in its intent, purpose and interest. Often the new people have insightful and interesting things to say, but the focus is largely gone as compared to what attracted people in the first place.
One can no longer assume that just because an item has a high score, it must be of value. The interesting thing is that this is true of the Classic page as well.
And I've checked my snapshots from 2 years ago, and it really does seem to have changed.
People are upvoting things not because they are valuable, but because they are entertaining.
That's the biggest change I've noticed as well, and I would expand your observation to cover comments too. it seems like jokes get upvoted significantly more often now than they did a year or two ago.
The last few Dave Winer posts I've seen here have been submitted by davewiner. Since he's a dude who rolls his own blogging tools, I'd be not at all surprised to find that he wired up the ability to simultaneously publish and post a link to HN.
I can see good reasons for doing this for one's own blog, but if this practice were widespread or built into normal people's blogging tools then it would (among other things) cause the "new" page here to be useless.
reading the ~160 comments on the topic, however, sounds weird to me because being indian, karma is not just a number against your online profile, but a fact of life - a word that you hear from people several times during a normal day - and they've probably never even been online.
i get that its about measuring the overall place of a person in a community, and that "karma" is as good a tag as any to condense that concept into one word, but it just seems very weird when there's so much debate around it. true karma is not exactly the "double-entry book keeping of life", nor does it have a leaderboard (which, btw, i realized existed on hn only recently).
on hn, the linked content's mostly great and its always useful to check the comments before loading up the link itself. that should be enough, imo.
ps: yes, i feel the same way watching "my name is earl", although i do enjoy the show itself.
My vote/suggestion is to hide Karma from all users once it reaches a fairly low cap. I know I am in a minority here but to me personally Karma beyond the level needed to downvote and basic functionality is hardly an issue.
Thanks for proving it! I do like the term of "harvesting karma".
In reel life, that would be a good deed automatically actioned based on a set of inputs? Such as grabbing the mail of the neighbour on the way in?
Really people? That is the only way to stand out from the crowd? An integer? :)
cough TechCrunch cough
...not that I have any problem with it. I'm just amazed at how quickly TechCrunch (and similar) articles find their way onto HN.
I can understand this "function" on StackOverflow (even though I don't have much karma there either) cause karma at StackOverflow can bring in new chances.
My question: Do anyone use HN karma as measurement to see if this guy is worth to hire or worth for something else?
edit: I didn't realise having a name common in Francophonic nations was a downvotable offence.
That way we only get really clever bots that are indistinguishable from really good submitters.
If a bot had its own novelty account, say "ragnawald_speaks" that submitted everything I wrote, what would be the harm to HN?
People keep talking about "spam." How is it spam if a bot submits an article that has an excellent chance of making it to the top ten? That's the opposite of spam, it's all signal and very little noise. If people think that a bot auto-submitting a feed with excellent signal is spam, then I have something very serious to tell them: humans are pattern-matching machines too.
In fact, I seem to recall Digg is going to/already has pulled back it's feature where you can register an RSS feed to post all your content for this very reason.
If everyone wrote bots that auto-submitted feeds from authors who consistently get upvotes from HN readers? How is that a problem?
If the problem is submitting articles that HN readers don't find interesting--spam, not ham--banning bots is unlikely to help. How do you stop me from submitting every article I write?
There is a huge amount of content out there loosely relevant to HN readers. Bits overwhelming the new page are a symptom, not a disease. The disease is that the new page doesn't scale well to handle a large volume of submissions. As HN grows, the number of submission si going to grow as well, with or without bots.
Behind the scenes, there must be some changes to accomodate this, such as algorithmically showing users new stories they are most likely to find interesting, or showing users a random selection fo new stories from the last hour.
Bots merely accelerate the decline of the new page's usefulness. Banning bots that auto-submit high quality feeds isn't going to work if we allow HN to grow at its current rate.
People often behave like sheep - the fact that a lot of articles are voted up isn't a reflection of quality, it's a reflection of familiarity and unthinking, sycophantic behaviour.
A large majority of these articles aren't actually discussing anything interesting - and it seems that their main purpose is to generate buzz and self-promote.
If this is true, then the problem is with the users of the site, not with bots that correctly submit stories garnering upvotes. Remember, this post is not about bots that submit spamvertising for Rolex knock-off watches, it's about bots that accumulate karma by submitting stories that consistently hit the top of the page.
Why are we trying to game the behaviour of HN readers by artificially throttling the submission of stories they find interesting? Far better to take a step back and ask whether HN is in danger of experiencing its Eternal September.
If the behaviour of HN is such that posts can hit #1 while still being undesirable for some reason--like the 47th straight article slamming an overfunded startup--then there is an issue, but surely it isn't the bot's fault any more than it would be a person's fault if they submitted it by hand.
But bots do the bidding of humans ;)
As well as sheep-like behaviour, we're often also egotistical and care deeply about the tokens that are used to pass judgement on our place in the world; tokens such as karma.
I think that there's a lot of content on HN that isn't about interesting ideas; there's a lot of mediocre content that is created to self-promote, because some authors' find it gratifying to see their posts do well within the community. Imo, this kind of behaviour is dull.
Perhaps the solution would be to allow people to vote-down articles they deem uninteresting.
I think you're right, but don't forget the irresistable temptation of playing the game. Imagine you build a box with an LED display that shows a number, let's say 42. On the box are various switches, sliders, levers, knobs, &c. You place the box in a public area, suitably hardened against vandalism. Inevitably some bored person decides it is not a bomb and flicks a switch. The number goes to 50. He plays with the controls and the number rises and/or falls.
I put it to you that people will treat it as a puzzle where the goal is to display the biggest number, even if you don't say so. Some folks will try to display the smallest number, a little like trying for the low hand in hi-low poker.
As I said, I think you're right, but I wouldn't discount the number of people who simply treat karma as a game simply because... It's a number they can influence through the knobs and switches of submissions and comments.
But then, success == triumph == a satisfied ego.
I think it's foolish to forget that ultimately ego often fuels people's motivation.
Quite a lot of the time, if ego can be singled out as a motivator - the activity in question probably has dubious value.
Or perhaps I missed something during the last few weeks?
I just figured that since I submitted this article myself it would be pretty silly to stay out of the comments. Don't take it as a religious thing, I've cut down the time spent on HN by over 90%, I have lots more time to write about other stuff now and I have more time for the people around me. On top of that my out-of-band contacts with HN'ers seem to have only strengthened.
Win-win.
But that's ok.
(posts get the karma, not people)
One is an anomaly, two independent occurrences is a trend?
In other words, interesting, on-topic, and frequent comments are important, not your absolute karma number, even though of course you're likely to have a high karma if you're a frequent poster of good comments.
That's also why the average is more important than the absolute karma.
submitted early during a discussion's lifecycle