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Hacker News Upvote: Add to Cart
- collapse 10y ago"Anchoring is a powerful psychological weapon": http://upvotes.club/buy/hacker-news-comment/ http://upvotes.club/buy/hacker-news-comment/ "Why so expensive compared to Reddit": http://upvotes.club/buying-hacker-news-growthhackers-upvotes-expensive-compared-reddit/ http://upvotes.club/buying-hacker-news-growthhackers-upvotes...
- KirinDave 10y agoReddit's easier to game because the user's downvotes & upvotes received are much more powerful in their ranking there. HN's also more expensive because there is less demand.
- collapse 10y agoMore expensive because there is less demand? Doesn't that usually go the other way?
- echelon 10y agoI imagine there's less supply as well. Am I mistaken in thinking that they outsource to other people? (I'm having trouble loading their website due to the load.) Also, doesn't HN rank upvotes based on karma and account age? You can't downvote until reaching 500(?) and having your account for a certain duration of time.
- projektir 10y ago> Also, doesn't HN rank upvotes based on karma and account age? You can't downvote until reaching 500(?) and having your account for a certain duration of time. That sounds about right. There seem to be some additional rules, too. For instance, there are certain comments I don't see a downvote button for, and I have no clue why.
- jsnell 10y agoComments older than a day can't be downvoted.
- spooneybarger 10y agoIf there is less demand then there are most likely fewer "quality" accounts that have been set up for HN which in turn, makes the account more valuable.
- austenallred 10y agoI can create 100 accounts for Reddit and they'll be used 100x/month, or I can create 100 accounts for HN and they'll be used twice/month. Both take the same amount of time to create. Which should be more expensive?
- FeatureRush 10y agoWouldn't it rather depend on the value to the buyer? I mean as a general rule of operating businesses you try to pay production costs for things you need and price for customer value for things you sell?
- austenallred 10y agoWell, both matter - it's a supply/demand curve. The seller here seems to be assuming that the demand is relatively inelastic, and the opportunity cost of the seller's time (which is apparently finite) needs to be factored in. So in essence what you have is a seller determining which type of the two accounts to make. He will not be able to re-use the HN accounts as much, and therefore he makes less per unit of time from them, and must charge more to make them worth his time.
- KirinDave 10y agoIf you're ever curious how the folks at reddit's r/the_donald maintain control of the sub and why they so often disable moderation, services like this are both how and why. Intermediates who sell upvotes are happy to run jobs for both sides of a given debate. This site is really expensive compared to some options I've seen sold. I think my favorite part of all this is the billing screen. "Doesn't have to be your real name."
- firenz 10y agoHuh, I thought they were mainly using bots.
- KirinDave 10y agoThere are unique groups there and it's hard to tell their origin. Many more seem like they're not exclusive to the_donald. Much of the pro-trump digital infrastructure is quite mercenary in origin.
- Natsu 10y agoI don't use Reddit much, and I've never moderated a sub, so can you explain more? Why would the mods need vote bots to control their own sub? Can't they just moderate it?
- hehheh 10y agoThe bots (if there are any, I don't know) were designed to upvote the posts enough that they'd flood the "all" page, which is an aggregation of many subreddits.
- Natsu 10y agoDidn't Reddit remove them from /r/all? I saw mods saying that they were among the ones removed from /r/popular at least.
- 10y ago
- Normal_gaussian 10y agoSo are there any reasonable methods to combat this? Is it a legal possibility (regardless of feasibility) to bring charges against people for manipulation of this kind? (Does HN even have a User Agreement? I can't remember if I had to do anything when I signed up)
- boulos 10y agoIt seems like being on the front page is DDoS'ing them, so that could work :).
- benologist 10y agoEveryone should be vigilant about flagging content that feels forced trying to convert HN users into newsletter subscriptions, SaaS subscriptions, job applicants, routed through affiliate links etc. If you click the domain name beside submissions it shows you domain history, there's a similar page for users' submission history.
- supremesaboteur 10y agoProof of work systems were originally designed to combat these types of 'spammy' behavior. Give a challenge string and ask the user submitting an upvote to compute a nonce that when added to the string would produce an hash with 10 leading zeros. User submits the calculated nonce, the server computes the hash for challenge string + nonce and the upvote is registered. This makes it computationaly expensive for an upvote provider to submit hundreds of upvotes
- comboy 10y agoI don't think this idea works in practice. Average user has much less computing power available than such services. CPUs are really cheap to rent nowadays, so it would hardly influence the price of an upvote while possibly making quality of experience much worse for mobile users.
- teleclimber 10y agoYeah but if you're using a botnet comprised of other people's cpus to submit your upvotes, you already have a distributed computing environment for which you pay zero dollars for computing time. So your cost is still zero.
- minimaxir 10y agoUpvote manipulation doesn't work on Hacker News because both the voting ring detector is strong, and flagging is significantly more powerful and serves as counteracting force to upvotes and serves as a check to submissions which legit aren't good for the site. (both of these are in contrast with Product Hunt, which turns a blind eye to voting manipulation and asking-friends-for-upvotes-but-not-explicitly is often recommended as a promotion strategy on that site: https://medium.com/startup-grind/my-startup-launch-on-product-hunt-was-disappointing-ff5c8e70860 https://medium.com/startup-grind/my-startup-launch-on-produc...) There is also a Hacker News "growth hacking" tactic of linking to /newest on Facebook/Twitter instead of linking to the submission directly to avoid the voting ring detector, which also doesn't work and is blatantly obvious: http://i.imgur.com/08pAFOw.jpg http://i.imgur.com/08pAFOw.jpg
- nadermx 10y agoI'm sure where there is a will, there is a way...
- austenallred 10y ago> Upvote manipulation doesn't work on Hacker News I'm pretty sure that's unequivocally false. It's difficult enough to make it work that it probably wouldn't be worth it, but I'm close to 100% sure I could force something to the top if I wanted to. I don't particularly want to spend the time automating accounts to make them "look natural" and I don't really want to shell out the money to spend on IPs. But I know for a fact the same thing is happening on Reddit with great success every day. I could spell out how, but I don't think the HN mods would be too keen on that. Any hacker should be able to figure it out, though. Furthermore, if you produce something solid, all you'd really need is the first <10 upvotes to get on the front page and let it catch on "organically." I can promise you that is happening _all the time_ on HN. I'm glad you keep your Twitter search running and keep calling people out that blatantly ask for upvotes; the easiest way to kill spam is just to make it difficult, but to say that manipulation doesn't work is just not true.
- minimaxir 10y ago> I just don't have the time or the money to shell out and buy IPs. You need a Hacker News account to upvote, and obviously having a large number of new accounts upvote something would trip a voting ring detector. > Furthermore, if you produce something solid, all you'd really need is the first <10 upvotes to get on the front page and let it catch on "organically." Much easier said than done. The median score of a HN submission is 1-2 points last time I checked. (the discoverability of HN submissions on /newest is an issue, but that's another topic) And if it's actually solid, it's not the market for vote brigading. I agree manipulation does happen, but it doesn't mean it works and instead silently penalizes the submission to death.
- ErikVandeWater 10y agoDo you have any evidence for your accusation?
- mickronome 10y agoWhy do you call it an accusation, do you have proof the parents is not knowledgeable on the topic ?
- minimaxir 10y agoThe burden of proof is on the accuser.
- iscrewyou 10y agoThat's a strong word. Also what are you accusing OP off? Everything OP has said? Maybe you should clarify things before coming off as butthurt.
- dang 10y agoThat doesn't sound like a good-faith question, which predictably leads to a low-quality argument. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676504 and marked it off-topic.
- kr7 10y agoIs there a good-faith way to ask that question? I'm legitimately curious if KirinDave has evidence that r/t_d buys upvotes.
- dang 10y agoSure. Ask in the spirit of good conversation, not cross-examination, e.g. "how did you come to that conclusion" or "why do you think that"—the way people put things in a friendly in-person conversation. Make it clear that you're just curious, and find some way to indicate that you assume good faith on the part of the other. In face-to-face conversation, most good-faith signals are sent with tone of voice and physical expression. We don't have those channels in text so it's necessary to encode them some other way.
- nickysielicki 10y agoI don't know how this website actually works, but if I wanted to make a website like this, here's how I would do it. The first thing on my mind would be avoiding detection. You can't spin up 5 DO droplets and do your work from there-- every IP you use needs to be a residential IP, and you need thousands of IP addresses. You could go to the trouble of building your own botnet, but that's illegal and very difficult. Luckily, there's an application called Hola that has convinced 20 million people to willingly join their botnet, and you can buy yourself access to it right here: https://luminati.io https://luminati.io . You'd think that would be the hardest part, but that service means it's the easy part. Now I'd need to go learn PhantomJS and start creating accounts-- being sure to keep each account appearing at a particular IP address. The hardest part is generating some credibility for these accounts. They should always look like they're active-- so I'd be sure to have each account load far more posts than they vote on, and I would upvote plenty of things that I wasn't paid to upvote. Just to generate some randomness. But that only gets me part of the way there-- these accounts would also need to contribute. My first thought is that you could just scan for reposts in the default subreddits and then repost popular top-level comments from the previous post. I've actually seen this pointed out a few times on reddit. With the amount of comments reddit gets, they probably don't have the resources to detect duplicates. Hackernews would be significantly harder-- I have no idea how you could generate relevant comments without doing it by hand. That's my guess as to what they're doing.
- mej10 10y agoThe problem you described reminds me of this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
- milankragujevic 10y agoYou don't have to use Luminati, just RE hola and take out the keys and then you can make unlimited accounts on there for free, like I used to do.
- brilliantcode 10y agowat do you mean by RE?
- peter422 10y agoA service like this could never work long term. HN admins could just spend $10 to upvote something, see what the behavior is like and then fix it.
- Retr0spectrum 10y agoIt sounds like they already do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676960 "That's also why we haven't buried the OP (which, in case users are wondering, we do know about and have lots of data on)."
- vinchuco 10y agoI was really hoping this store was selling stickers.
- stOneskull 10y agoThis person very good in club. Five stars.
- stOneskull 10y agoThis person very good in club. Five stars.