I'm accidentally dominating my own contest | Hacker News Reader

I'm accidentally dominating my own contest

4 pointspooriar3 comments

Last week I released a project that allows anyone to anonymously submit project ideas and then vote collectively on their favorites. The top voted project gets built.

Before launching the project, I submitted a few of my own ideas anonymously so the first visitors wouldn't see an empty list.

Over 500 people visited the site. They submitted 39 project ideas (some spammy, but mostly interesting). And 634 votes have been cast! I'm so grateful for all these people engaging with my project.

But here's the irony: my initial ideas are absolutely dominating.

They are the top 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th ranking ideas. I don't think it's because they are so much better than the other ideas. I think they had a huge advantage because they were there right from the start and got more eyes on them.

There are still 24 hours left of voting, but it looks like it would take a miracle for me to not win my own contest at this point.

I'm sharing this here because I'm fascinated by unanticipated consequences and accidental corruption.

Would love the hear your thoughts on it!

Besides the accidental voting corruption you mention, you might also be seeing the Expert's Ideas Get More Traction effect. People might be posting ideas they just came up with and organized as best as they could, while yours were stewing and benefit from knowing you'd be writing them down some time.

There are many ways to dilute the "first posted, most voted" effect without actually changing how votes get counted. In a way, it's a very similar problem to how voting happens in sites like HN. Mostly you can change how entries are displayed (hidden votes until done?), ordered (new first? random? less voted? trending?) and discovered (tags? keywords?).

In your specific case, next time you can try making sure you add a couple clearly bad ideas (off topic?), maybe one clearly placeholder (or kinda tutorial) idea and maybe some you can remove later could give you a good starting brew to grow user submitted content.

You can also somehow put the same projects to vote again, starting with zero votes. To have two projects done instead of one, maybe that's enough of an excuse.

Thanks for your thoughtful points

> Expert's Ideas Get More Traction effect

That's a good point, I only added my favorite ideas from a list I've been keeping for years. I also tried to pick ideas that I thought would be interesting to the communities I knew I'd be sharing the app in. These are just more layers of advantage.

> next time you can try making sure you add a couple clearly bad ideas (off topic?)

Interestingly, at the beginning someone did post a pretty bad idea. It got downvoted to the bottom, (before some troll fake-voted it to the top and I had to delete it) so I guess an idea still has to have merit, not just be early.

You could also do an alternate weighting, where you decrease the value of earlier votes before more projects were added.

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