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Ask HN: Is my account flagged? I don't earn upvotes

13 points by kurtvarner 15y ago

I noticed that for my last few posts to HN, I am not earning any upvotes. I tested this with two friends today and asked them to upvote my link from the new page. No points were registered. Any ideas as to what is causing this, or how I can correct it?

jordhy 15y ago
I have the same problem. Seem to comment and the karma doesn't increase except when the points surpass my average commenting threshold. Maybe this is the new karma system.
- jerrya 15y ago
  So I upvoted both yours and kurtvarner's posts so you can perhaps determine if your vote counts changed.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
pg 15y ago
No; there is no code that can do that. There's a lot of code for ignoring voting rings though. That's probably what's happening.
- kurtvarner 15y ago
  Thanks PG. Admittedly, I've previously asked a few friends to upvote a couple of my blog posts. My mistake. It's great that you have a system in place to keep everything on an even playing field.
- A1kmm 15y ago
  Code to ignore voting rings would be very interesting - I would imagine the way to do it might be to occasionally do some kind of maximum flow analysis on the graph between users (with arcs between u_i and u_j representing the proportion of upvotes for user u_j by user u_i as a proportion of u_i's total upvotes). Users with a high maximum flow between them could be considered part of the voting ring. The trouble is that this would be very computationally expensive, even to do offline - and the cost of storing a matrix of size n^2 for n users might be prohibitive. I was curious about what Hacker News does so looked at the code from the Arc tarball. I found this: (def biased-voter (i vote) nil) I presume this is a case of security by obscurity and the live Hacker News site has a non-public definition of biased-voter to stop people working around it? Or are you referring to the code that guards (++ (karma i!by) (case dir up 1 down -1)) (on lines 1368 to 1370)?
  - pg 15y ago
    None of the anti-abuse code is published.
infogaufire 15y ago
Exactly. My Karma is stuck at 44 for last few months. Earlier used to get good number amazing users (Hacker news sent users with high level of engagement and time spend) but then suddenly stopped getting all the traffic and Karma stopped changing even though I have shared some good stuff recently.
mark_up 15y ago
Consider yourself luck to be able to participate at all. Some of us are deemed "unsuitable" and banned without notification. Yup, I was banned on the quiet and fooled into continuing to post without the knowledge that nobody could see or respond to me. It really is shameful that someone like pg would treat people like this.
ayiteddybear 15y ago
My posts are only visible for me, you are more lucky then me. :)

13 points by kurtvarner 15y ago

jordhy 15y ago

I have the same problem. Seem to comment and the karma doesn't increase except when the points surpass my average commenting threshold. Maybe this is the new karma system.

jerrya 15y ago
So I upvoted both yours and kurtvarner's posts so you can perhaps determine if your vote counts changed.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

pg 15y ago

No; there is no code that can do that. There's a lot of code for ignoring voting rings though. That's probably what's happening.

kurtvarner 15y ago
Thanks PG. Admittedly, I've previously asked a few friends to upvote a couple of my blog posts. My mistake. It's great that you have a system in place to keep everything on an even playing field.
A1kmm 15y ago
Code to ignore voting rings would be very interesting - I would imagine the way to do it might be to occasionally do some kind of maximum flow analysis on the graph between users (with arcs between u_i and u_j representing the proportion of upvotes for user u_j by user u_i as a proportion of u_i's total upvotes). Users with a high maximum flow between them could be considered part of the voting ring. The trouble is that this would be very computationally expensive, even to do offline - and the cost of storing a matrix of size n^2 for n users might be prohibitive. I was curious about what Hacker News does so looked at the code from the Arc tarball. I found this: (def biased-voter (i vote) nil) I presume this is a case of security by obscurity and the live Hacker News site has a non-public definition of biased-voter to stop people working around it? Or are you referring to the code that guards (++ (karma i!by) (case dir up 1 down -1)) (on lines 1368 to 1370)?
- pg 15y ago
  None of the anti-abuse code is published.

infogaufire 15y ago

Exactly. My Karma is stuck at 44 for last few months. Earlier used to get good number amazing users (Hacker news sent users with high level of engagement and time spend) but then suddenly stopped getting all the traffic and Karma stopped changing even though I have shared some good stuff recently.

mark_up 15y ago

Consider yourself luck to be able to participate at all. Some of us are deemed "unsuitable" and banned without notification. Yup, I was banned on the quiet and fooled into continuing to post without the knowledge that nobody could see or respond to me. It really is shameful that someone like pg would treat people like this.

ayiteddybear 15y ago

My posts are only visible for me, you are more lucky then me. :)