Could a competitor have its employees flag a submission? Does HN have automatic vote manipulation detection? Does HN have automatic flag manipulation detection?
I looked into whether it was employees doing the flagging, but I didn't include that in the GP because I can't tell for sure who was or wasn't an employee. What I did find is that of the flaggers, most haven't ever voted for a stripe.com submission (before or since). There were two flaggers who have voted for quite a few stripe.com submissions, but not enough to trigger any manipulation detectors. They both had voted for many thousands of submissions over many years, so I didn't find any evidence of abuse. In the case of one of those two users, there is a bio in the profile which makes it seem unlikely that they worked for Stripe. In the case of the other one, I don't have any info.
FWIW, looking at the flagging data on that post pattern-matched to 'normal' in my brain, not to 'suspicious'. I realize that won't (and shouldn't) carry any weight for users who aren't already inclined to trust what I'm saying, but (a) we do have a ton of experience looking at suspicious voting and flagging patterns, and (b) it's true, so I figure I might as well say it.
Edit: I just thought of another way to investigate this, which I overlooked earlier: I looked at everything else that those users had flagged. That was easy enough, because none of them has flagged more than a few dozen submissions over the years. There were no other cases of people flagging Stripe-related submissions, except for this one, which was a pro-Stripe story:
Stripe has democratised online payments and reshaped the digital economy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18153909 - Oct 2018 (43 comments)
I assume the accounts in this flagging event were otherwise active and "healthy"? On Reddit, accounts are created years in advance so they seem legitimate when put to use for nefarious purposes later on.
- This is your job and from everything I see you already put a whole lot of thought into it and I don't think I can outsmart you here.
- IMO things have become better the last decade so it seems to me some adjustments (either technical or in the user base) have already happened. [1]
That said, maybe we as a community could become even better at not flagging things that others enjoy?
[1]: alternative explanation, I've learned to look at /active instead
If I hadn't checked /active today I would have missed the story about Google classifying 1 and 0 as copyrighted.
Is there a reason why flagging that story shouldn't count as abusing flags?
It is just that I spend quite a lot of time on HN and I missed it until I checked /active.
So either I didn't notice it at first or I had a 13 hour break from HN ;-)
That said, doesn't some stories with a 5-600 hundred upvotes linger on the front page for days? Am I mistaken? (And if not - do you have time to explain why I can find a <700 points story here the next day but not this one?)
It's actually kind of a shocking exercise to do, because it brings home how there is no "real" HN - we all think we're seeing "the" front page, but it's a Heraclitus (Heraclitian?) river.
> doesn't some stories with a 5-600 hundred upvotes linger on the front page for days?
That should be very rare. The software downweights any story that has been on the front page for more than 15 hours, unless we specifically tell it not to (which we might do if the community was particularly enjoying it). If the upvotes are massive enough, a story can linger on the front page despite that penalty, but then moderators will notice it and push it below the front page.
> do you have time to explain why I can find a <700 points story here the next day but not this one?
I have time, but I don't understand the question!
I have realized I was probably wrong again ;-)
Given the quotes it seems poster was aware that the word wasn't perfect.
I'd try something along the lines of "I guess the word you are looking for here is fraudulent or abusive".
I am surprised so many people decided to flag a post just because it is Enterprisy. It may also be the case some people create account for submission, voting and flagging purposes. And only participate in minor discussions to gain / wash karma points.
I have a theory which I didn't post yesterday because it's speculation—but it's speculation that fits my intuition about how HN works, so maybe I'll share it in case anyone's interested.
I speculate that some users upvoted Bolt's post because they thought it would be funny to see "How Bolt does fraud detection better" in a cage match with Stripe's "Improved fraud prevention" on the front page at the same time, as briefly happened—see #5 and #6 here: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418212112/https://news.ycom.... In other words, classic internet drama.
The two titles are so similar that I wonder if Bolt had seen Stripe's post on the front page and rushed their article out to challenge it with that baity title. (If you look at https://web.archive.org/web/20180418211511/https://blog.bolt..., you'll see that the article itself had a completely different title.) That would certainly have been clever! Either that or it was just a coincidence, but either way, some users would have seen both, would have found the collision hilarious, and would have upvoted for that reason.
Since that has nothing to do with article quality, you would expect other users to then see the article on the front page, go "WTF is this doing on HN", and flag it. This is standard HN dynamics: baity title -> upvotes -> annoyed users -> flags. That's how the front page operates all day.
If this is what happened, then Bolt only made HN's front page in the first place because Stripe's article was already there—which would add considerable irony to yesterday's antics.
I agree and speculate the same as well. Although I generally do upvote post that gives different opinion on the subject. In the hope that HN's view does not become monolithic.
Dang you should really write a book on how to moderate Internet discussion.