Ask HN: On building a Social News site and its tools for moderation | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: On building a Social News site and its tools for moderation

19 pointsiamelgringo10 comments

I'm working on a social news site built on Django, and I'm coming close to completion. But, I'd like to ask HN about specific likes/dislikes on social news sites they use:

   * What features do you like/hate about reddit/digg/hn
   * What are the most effective troll guards?
   * What are the most effective spam guards?  
   * Do honeypots work in preventing spam submissions?
   * Are captcha's annoying or useful? 
   * What should the editor/moderator to reader ratio be?
   * What things can be done to encourage self-
     moderation on sites like this?
   * I'd love to hear from the editors/moderators of HN:
     What features make it great to do your job?  What 
     tools would you like?

Any other comments on social news site joy/fail would be appreciated.

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Rapid banning of trolls seems to be an effective troll guard. It also works well with spam.

Trolling and spam are both self-perpetuating problems. Users are ruder on sites where everyone else is rude, and spammers are more likely to submit links to sites they get traffic from. So you can prevent both problems by never letting them get a foothold.

Deletion doesn't have to be manual, especially in the case of spam. Spammers smart enough to measure the traffic they get from HN quickly give up. And the dumb ones obligingly continue to post from banned accounts and IP addresses. So currently 80-90% of spam is killed by software rather than humans.

Flagging turns out to be a feature that saves a lot of work. So does rate-limiting submissions from newly created accounts (and, obviously, the IP addresses they use).

One general approach I've found very useful is not to protect against a certain type of abuse till it arises. Aside from obvious things like not letting people vote more than once, you don't need much protection when you first launch.

Thanks, Paul. That helps.

When you ban trolls, do you ban the IP address, limit the account or delete the account all together?

Re: flagging. Does that just mark a link or comment for review by an editor, or is there an automated banning process there, too?

I'd rather talk about details by email. pg at this site.

Randy Farmer did an interview with "Community Management" - where he talked about the importance of minimizing the effects of vandalism. Yahoo Answers solved their spam issue by using the community to move from 12 hours to 30 second response times.

http://thefarmers.org/Habitat/2008/06/randy_interviewed_on_c... (video and transcript)

I've been interested in this question myself for userscripts.org

The question seems tied to a reputation system (to determine who is allowed to moderate).

Joel and Jeff of Stack Overflow discuss reputation systems in a recent podcast: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/10/podcast-26/

Which makes the question for me: how do you implement a reputation system on an existing site without pissing off users?

Small details can lead to large consequences for your users, and when you have 6MM pageviews a month and 50K+ users, it seems like the wrong place to learn by making mistakes.

Perhaps transparency around actions performed by the community moderators, so those who weren't granted new powers can provide a check against abuses. Providing a mechanism to view deleted comments/userscripts (but not who as to limit retribution), others can alert admin (me) if moderation needs reversed.

Anyone have experience adding community moderation to an existing popular site?

I interviewed a bunch of reddit users for my senior thesis. One thing I found was that the karma system really encouraged participation (not too surprising but worth considering if your building a social news site).

Check out http://www.thesixtyone.com. It's a great example of how you can instill a social media site with a really fun, game-like quality. Not sure if you want to go in that direction, but still worth checking out.

As far as spamming and moderation, I wouldn't worry about it too much if your just getting started. I probably wouldn't even do email validation to begin with since you want the barrier to be low when your trying to attract your first users. You can always add that stuff later when the need arises.

Funny you mention spam as I started researching automatic spam detection. What I have so far is this list of publicly available spam and malware lists:

1. SpamCop.net's IP address checks: http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/351.html 2. PhishTank: http://www.phishtank.com/api_documentation.php 3. MalwarePatrol: http://www.malware.com.br/lists.shtml 4. Spamhaus: http://www.spamhaus.org/ 5. Google Safe Browsing: ( http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=URL )

They all have services (APIs) or downloads you can tap into, and I'm starting to put together a plan for a PHP library to check all of them. I'm looking to open source this when it's ready (not sure when yet as it's early days yet), but I'm happy to share earlier if you want. Drop me a line at http://ekstreme.com/contact .

And good luck :) Pierre

Do we really need another social news site?

1) The market is saturated with well funded companies doing the same thing

2) Theres nothing significantly wrong with Digg/reddit

3) You need a large audience for it to be useful

4) The crucial early adopters that you would need have a thousand other social sites trying to get their attention

Not having seen your site that's all I can say.

Not at all. I've heard that comment plenty.

My take on it:

* Social News sites are much better than forums for specific topics. How many forums are there?

* I'm planning on avoiding the geek news demographic and aiming at other markets: financial news, real estate news, gadgets, crafting (Did you know that crafting is a 30 Billion dollar a year industry in the US? ), non-English sites, etc...

* There's a reason that gaming Digg's front page is a big money business. Votes on Digg sell for $1-2 a piece, and it costs $2-500 to get on the front page, or at least it did last year when I looked into it. That tells me that traffic suppliers are in demand.

* If you're outside of the Tech News echo chamber no one has heard of sites like Digg, Reddit, Hacker News, Slashdot, etc... It's a meme that hasn't taken off with the general public yet, even though nerds are bored to death with it. I think there's still a lot of room to grow.

I wish I could help with your questions, but I'm more on your side of the coin (about to build a Django site with some social functionality) and so I have some questions of my own for you, if you don't mind.. :)

How have you found Django for building your site? How long did it take? Were there any specific tools / Django apps / guides that helped you out along the way?

I'd be happy to help. Just ping me at iamelgringo at google's email service.

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