6 ms·

Voting Rings: How Insiders Game User Generated News

34 points by MediaSquirrel 16y ago

iamwil 16y ago
YC is already one giant mafia, if you'd like to think of it that way. I'm sure YC classes vote each others' stuff up. I'm wondering what the recently implemented voting ring detection reveals. Are they all clustered by YC class? Are there overlaps? Or is there an outside group moving the articles up?
mkramlich 16y ago
I'd bet there are voting rings on HN. Perhaps not as bad as was on Digg. But I'm sure it's here. PG made a comment about it the other day, offhand, in something about getting some code/idea help about fighting it.
- Tichy 16y ago
  The comment was on Twitter, I think: http://twitter.com/paulg/status/22551773068 http://twitter.com/paulg/status/22551773068 Makes me want to look at the HN source, as I find this problem very interesting. Or hoping for a "plan for voting rings" article :-)
- fbnt 16y ago
  Since many people have dynamic IPs, I think tracking geolocation patterns of the first 10-ish votes would be enough to distinguish suspect cases and eventually put them 'on-hold' (HN dosen't really need to get stories on the front page as soon as possible, it's not exactly a breaking news site).
  - dLuna 16y ago
    Since people have to be logged in to vote, there is a much easier solution: Count votes from new users lower. And count early votes from users often voting on articles posted by a particular person lower. It can be refined quite a bit...
    - fbnt 16y ago
      True, but the problem with voting rings is that links may be submitted by different participants to the ring each time, and if they all have genuine high karma, that is difficult to track down.
jasonkester 16y ago
When you build a site with user submitted content and voting, you have two immediate problems you need to solve before you can even get started: - How are you going to deal with spam - How are you going to deal with gaming They're actually related problems, since the aim of both is to drive people to a given website. Since that's demonstrably valuable in terms of cash money, it's an absolute certainty that people will try to take advantage of it. You really need to bake something in to handle it from the word go.
- bravura 16y ago
  What you need to truly defeat this sort of spam is personalization, AKA recommendation, If the top news stories are personalized to your interests, it is more difficult to game the system. In particular, consider this scenario: I get a news result from a voting ring, and it ranks high because they all voted. But then I downvote the article because it is not interesting to me, Afterwards, the voting ring's weight is diminished in my personalized news feed. Hence, they cannot artificially rank articles for you, I would argue that without some personalization, it is impossible to 100% avoid spam. Because if you treat there as being one objective lense, it is hard to discriminate between legitimate overlapping interests and colluders who share their authority.
  - jasonkester 16y ago
    Indeed, though that would only fix it for the small percentage of users who are (a.) logged in, and (b.) vote things down. It wouldn't work on me, for example, because I hardly ever vote on anything here. In the 3 years I've been around I can't imagine I've actually voted down more than a half dozen times.
    - v21 16y ago
      Unless you rated in whether or not you read the article/comments, in which case it might still work. And of course, if downmod meant more "hide this sort of thing from me" than "I don't think this should be on HN", maybe you'd downmod more... (But this starts showing the downside to such personalization - it's a lot more effort server-side, and it dilutes a single community)
btilly 16y ago
How many people here ever click on "new"? How many stories just disappear without hitting the front page? How many accounts need to be involved to make a particular story get to the front page? I'm sure that the answers respectively are, "rather few", "the vast majority" and "not many". And there you have the raw ingredients for a voting ring to form. As a matter of principle I would never be involved with such, and I have a natural dislike for anyone that I think is. But the ingredients are there. More than that, you still have a popularity effect. People who vote on new articles have to prioritize what they read in some fashion. Speaking personally, it is natural to choose to look at articles with interesting titles, or which are submitted by someone you recognize as being a consistent source of good content. Therefore if someone like patio11 submits an article, it has a significant advantage. As does anything involving YC. (Of course promoting YC is the whole point of this site, so I don't mind that at all. And I'm guilty at looking at content from people I trust before content from people I've never heard of.) Memory says that jacquesm mentioned once that he had turned down an offer of money to post certain articles from companies that were looking for good pr. (I don't swear that I correctly remember who it was.) He may have turned them down, but I'm sure they asked again, and if they asked around enough I'm sure that they found a taker. And if so, then you have the dark side here on HN.
- jbert 16y ago
  Why not simply mix some 'new' randomly into the front page at some ratio? If one or two of the stories in the front page were (different) new stories for each visitor, you'd solve the "front page or bust" problem. You'd sacrifice a bit of "quality" from the front page, at the gain of a more variety and more exposure for new stories - entirely tunable by the ratio.
  - alextgordon 16y ago
    Or display both in two columns. Frontpage on the left. New on the right.
    - jbert 16y ago
      Well, the idea would be that the casual viewer couldn't distinguish the 'new' from the front page and so would treat them the same. Otherwise people will ignore new as they do now. (Point score could be left off of the front page to help this).
_delirium 16y ago
It's interesting to me that Kuro5hin in its heydey had relatively few problems with voting rings, despite having a purely voting-driven front page. There are probably some reasons involving community size and dynamics, but my guess is that the biggest one is the fact that the site was organized around submission of original articles to Kuro5hin, as opposed to submission of links. That raises the buy-in stakes beyond what people only interested in promotion are willing to spend time on, as well as lowering the potential gains from promotion (you got your article read, but directly on k5, not via traffic to any monetizable endeavor of yours). The fact that all votes were public may have had an effect as well, making any sort of collusion easier to spot.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  It's also what made K5 in to a huge echo chamber.
  - jbellis 16y ago
    Which "it" are you referring to?
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      >> the fact that the site was organized around submission of original articles to Kuro5hin
  - _delirium 16y ago
    I guess I didn't find that to be the case, any more than any other forum, at least. In what ways was K5 more of an echo chamber than, say, HN is?
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      If you write stuff for your 'own' audience of the K5 members, which will then write stuff as well for you to comment on and so on it's different than if 90% or more of the submitted articles is about stuff from the outside. It brings in fresh blood, outside perspective and avoid inbreeding.
dasil003 16y ago
HN may have voting rings, but it still works because it's a niche site, and hackers have strong Internet BS detectors that counter spam/phishing/linkjacking/other mischief relatively effectively. People on HN may be killing time, but the majority still have some quality standards for what they want to read. Gaming HN isn't worth as much because A) there's fewer people, and B) you have to work harder to game it. Other niche sites can easily share this quality. But for a site like Digg that wants to be the biggest social news site, it's just a race to the bottom. Gaming Digg just requires a tabloid-editor mentality where you figure out the quickest thing that will grab peoples attention and then boost it to the front page.
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
There's a fine line between a couple dozen guys on IRC with similar interests and an actual voting ring. I'm not sure where one concept stops and another starts. I guess if you demanded money for voting, that'd obviously be bad. But if you IM'ed a couple dozen friends about a cool new link you saw? It gets fuzzier. I have noticed voting trends by time of day on HN. I've also noticed what appears to be auto upvoting and downvoting based on the submitter. But I'm just an outsider, so what do I know? Up until recently, I have always assumed such activity to be more demographically-based. I am slowly beginning to have my doubts, though. The interesting point about HN is, at the end of the day, this is PGs site. Maybe he decides he wants articles about squirrels. So we get articles about squirrels. Maybe he decides site X is trollish. So we get no stuff from site X. It's been called a "benign dictatorship". Meh. Sounds a bit like "jumbo shrimp" to me. Even though HN isn't what it used to be, I still visit.
terra_t 16y ago
oooooh, i'm so scared... but excuse me, I've got to make a few 1000 electric sheep so I can get some traffic to my blog...

34 points by MediaSquirrel 16y ago

YC is already one giant mafia, if you'd like to think of it that way. I'm sure YC classes vote each others' stuff up. I'm wondering what the recently implemented voting ring detection reveals. Are they all clustered by YC class? Are there overlaps? Or is there an outside group moving the articles up?

mkramlich 16y ago

I'd bet there are voting rings on HN. Perhaps not as bad as was on Digg. But I'm sure it's here. PG made a comment about it the other day, offhand, in something about getting some code/idea help about fighting it.

Tichy 16y ago
The comment was on Twitter, I think: http://twitter.com/paulg/status/22551773068 http://twitter.com/paulg/status/22551773068 Makes me want to look at the HN source, as I find this problem very interesting. Or hoping for a "plan for voting rings" article :-)
fbnt 16y ago
Since many people have dynamic IPs, I think tracking geolocation patterns of the first 10-ish votes would be enough to distinguish suspect cases and eventually put them 'on-hold' (HN dosen't really need to get stories on the front page as soon as possible, it's not exactly a breaking news site).
- dLuna 16y ago
  Since people have to be logged in to vote, there is a much easier solution: Count votes from new users lower. And count early votes from users often voting on articles posted by a particular person lower. It can be refined quite a bit...
  - fbnt 16y ago
    True, but the problem with voting rings is that links may be submitted by different participants to the ring each time, and if they all have genuine high karma, that is difficult to track down.

jasonkester 16y ago

When you build a site with user submitted content and voting, you have two immediate problems you need to solve before you can even get started: - How are you going to deal with spam - How are you going to deal with gaming They're actually related problems, since the aim of both is to drive people to a given website. Since that's demonstrably valuable in terms of cash money, it's an absolute certainty that people will try to take advantage of it. You really need to bake something in to handle it from the word go.

bravura 16y ago
What you need to truly defeat this sort of spam is personalization, AKA recommendation, If the top news stories are personalized to your interests, it is more difficult to game the system. In particular, consider this scenario: I get a news result from a voting ring, and it ranks high because they all voted. But then I downvote the article because it is not interesting to me, Afterwards, the voting ring's weight is diminished in my personalized news feed. Hence, they cannot artificially rank articles for you, I would argue that without some personalization, it is impossible to 100% avoid spam. Because if you treat there as being one objective lense, it is hard to discriminate between legitimate overlapping interests and colluders who share their authority.
- jasonkester 16y ago
  Indeed, though that would only fix it for the small percentage of users who are (a.) logged in, and (b.) vote things down. It wouldn't work on me, for example, because I hardly ever vote on anything here. In the 3 years I've been around I can't imagine I've actually voted down more than a half dozen times.
  - v21 16y ago
    Unless you rated in whether or not you read the article/comments, in which case it might still work. And of course, if downmod meant more "hide this sort of thing from me" than "I don't think this should be on HN", maybe you'd downmod more... (But this starts showing the downside to such personalization - it's a lot more effort server-side, and it dilutes a single community)

btilly 16y ago

How many people here ever click on "new"? How many stories just disappear without hitting the front page? How many accounts need to be involved to make a particular story get to the front page? I'm sure that the answers respectively are, "rather few", "the vast majority" and "not many". And there you have the raw ingredients for a voting ring to form. As a matter of principle I would never be involved with such, and I have a natural dislike for anyone that I think is. But the ingredients are there. More than that, you still have a popularity effect. People who vote on new articles have to prioritize what they read in some fashion. Speaking personally, it is natural to choose to look at articles with interesting titles, or which are submitted by someone you recognize as being a consistent source of good content. Therefore if someone like patio11 submits an article, it has a significant advantage. As does anything involving YC. (Of course promoting YC is the whole point of this site, so I don't mind that at all. And I'm guilty at looking at content from people I trust before content from people I've never heard of.) Memory says that jacquesm mentioned once that he had turned down an offer of money to post certain articles from companies that were looking for good pr. (I don't swear that I correctly remember who it was.) He may have turned them down, but I'm sure they asked again, and if they asked around enough I'm sure that they found a taker. And if so, then you have the dark side here on HN.

jbert 16y ago
Why not simply mix some 'new' randomly into the front page at some ratio? If one or two of the stories in the front page were (different) new stories for each visitor, you'd solve the "front page or bust" problem. You'd sacrifice a bit of "quality" from the front page, at the gain of a more variety and more exposure for new stories - entirely tunable by the ratio.
- alextgordon 16y ago
  Or display both in two columns. Frontpage on the left. New on the right.
  - jbert 16y ago
    Well, the idea would be that the casual viewer couldn't distinguish the 'new' from the front page and so would treat them the same. Otherwise people will ignore new as they do now. (Point score could be left off of the front page to help this).

_delirium 16y ago

It's interesting to me that Kuro5hin in its heydey had relatively few problems with voting rings, despite having a purely voting-driven front page. There are probably some reasons involving community size and dynamics, but my guess is that the biggest one is the fact that the site was organized around submission of original articles to Kuro5hin, as opposed to submission of links. That raises the buy-in stakes beyond what people only interested in promotion are willing to spend time on, as well as lowering the potential gains from promotion (you got your article read, but directly on k5, not via traffic to any monetizable endeavor of yours). The fact that all votes were public may have had an effect as well, making any sort of collusion easier to spot.

jacquesm 16y ago
It's also what made K5 in to a huge echo chamber.
- jbellis 16y ago
  Which "it" are you referring to?
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    >> the fact that the site was organized around submission of original articles to Kuro5hin
- _delirium 16y ago
  I guess I didn't find that to be the case, any more than any other forum, at least. In what ways was K5 more of an echo chamber than, say, HN is?
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    If you write stuff for your 'own' audience of the K5 members, which will then write stuff as well for you to comment on and so on it's different than if 90% or more of the submitted articles is about stuff from the outside. It brings in fresh blood, outside perspective and avoid inbreeding.

dasil003 16y ago

HN may have voting rings, but it still works because it's a niche site, and hackers have strong Internet BS detectors that counter spam/phishing/linkjacking/other mischief relatively effectively. People on HN may be killing time, but the majority still have some quality standards for what they want to read. Gaming HN isn't worth as much because A) there's fewer people, and B) you have to work harder to game it. Other niche sites can easily share this quality. But for a site like Digg that wants to be the biggest social news site, it's just a race to the bottom. Gaming Digg just requires a tabloid-editor mentality where you figure out the quickest thing that will grab peoples attention and then boost it to the front page.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

There's a fine line between a couple dozen guys on IRC with similar interests and an actual voting ring. I'm not sure where one concept stops and another starts. I guess if you demanded money for voting, that'd obviously be bad. But if you IM'ed a couple dozen friends about a cool new link you saw? It gets fuzzier. I have noticed voting trends by time of day on HN. I've also noticed what appears to be auto upvoting and downvoting based on the submitter. But I'm just an outsider, so what do I know? Up until recently, I have always assumed such activity to be more demographically-based. I am slowly beginning to have my doubts, though. The interesting point about HN is, at the end of the day, this is PGs site. Maybe he decides he wants articles about squirrels. So we get articles about squirrels. Maybe he decides site X is trollish. So we get no stuff from site X. It's been called a "benign dictatorship". Meh. Sounds a bit like "jumbo shrimp" to me. Even though HN isn't what it used to be, I still visit.

terra_t 16y ago

oooooh, i'm so scared... but excuse me, I've got to make a few 1000 electric sheep so I can get some traffic to my blog...