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but, why wait until the last minutes? when I cheat ... I mean, if I were going to cheat, I'd want to make it look good. So, I would spread the votes out over a

but, why wait until the last minutes? when I cheat ... I mean, if I were going to cheat, I'd want to make it look good. So, I would spread the votes out over a longer period.

sunir 14y ago
Procrastination. The contest deadline could have been a motivator.
- dthunt 14y ago
  A great motivator for the dev team, sure. Not a great motivator for 'random' people. The 'constant rate' allegation is serious, but given the number of 'votes' involved if there is any truth to the claim it should be trivial to suss out. Humans suck at cheating statistics. Even someone with a good model for human behavior in these circumstances isn't going to have a good handle on faking all the metrics picked up by third party web analytics in conjunction with server logs. So, let's see what comes out of this.
  - ericd 14y ago
    Yeah, I'm very curious too. If the Webby Awards people ever respond to my request for them to inspect the data, I'll follow this up with any findings they share.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
That is a great question. One could speculate, last minute idea "Hey this is close enough, I bet we could win it with ..." or a feint of obviousness, or any number of things. The OP speculates a voting robot, however if you did it with Mechanical Turk which uses real people you might find that they procrastinate and only pick up tasks that are about to go off the lists or something. That would be especially true if price per hit went up as it approached the deadline, one could arbitrage the value vs the number of hits you could do in time to meet the deadline.
- ericd 14y ago
  Yeah, I added MTurk as a possible explanation in one of my edits before putting up the post. It would be a more expensive, but harder to trace way to do the same thing - MTurk is effectively a human bot. One giveaway would be that most of those IPs are likely to come from outside the US, and since most of these sites only serve US (and Canada/UK in the case of PM), it'd be easy to tell that something was off if you knew that fact.
Timothee 14y ago
One reason to do it at the last minute is not to leave a chance for competitors to react, as demonstrated by the parent post actually: they saw promising results early on, relaxed and went for a nice dinner and just checked later.

but, why wait until the last minutes? when I cheat ... I mean, if I were going to cheat, I'd want to make it look good. So, I would spread the votes out over a longer period.

sunir 14y ago

Procrastination. The contest deadline could have been a motivator.

dthunt 14y ago
A great motivator for the dev team, sure. Not a great motivator for 'random' people. The 'constant rate' allegation is serious, but given the number of 'votes' involved if there is any truth to the claim it should be trivial to suss out. Humans suck at cheating statistics. Even someone with a good model for human behavior in these circumstances isn't going to have a good handle on faking all the metrics picked up by third party web analytics in conjunction with server logs. So, let's see what comes out of this.
- ericd 14y ago
  Yeah, I'm very curious too. If the Webby Awards people ever respond to my request for them to inspect the data, I'll follow this up with any findings they share.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

That is a great question. One could speculate, last minute idea "Hey this is close enough, I bet we could win it with ..." or a feint of obviousness, or any number of things. The OP speculates a voting robot, however if you did it with Mechanical Turk which uses real people you might find that they procrastinate and only pick up tasks that are about to go off the lists or something. That would be especially true if price per hit went up as it approached the deadline, one could arbitrage the value vs the number of hits you could do in time to meet the deadline.

ericd 14y ago
Yeah, I added MTurk as a possible explanation in one of my edits before putting up the post. It would be a more expensive, but harder to trace way to do the same thing - MTurk is effectively a human bot. One giveaway would be that most of those IPs are likely to come from outside the US, and since most of these sites only serve US (and Canada/UK in the case of PM), it'd be easy to tell that something was off if you knew that fact.

Timothee 14y ago

One reason to do it at the last minute is not to leave a chance for competitors to react, as demonstrated by the parent post actually: they saw promising results early on, relaxed and went for a nice dinner and just checked later.