20 ms·

We've seen some fairly aggressive voting rings organized by publications with well known names. Only a few are actually banned though. Usually we just take aw

by pg 14y ago

We've seen some fairly aggressive voting rings organized by publications with well known names. Only a few are actually banned though. Usually we just take away the voting ring members' ability to vote.

csphy 14y ago
how do you detect these "Voter rings?"
jaaron 14y ago
Which seems a much better approach than outright banning/censoring domains.
- mayneack 14y ago
  It seems to me that if a publication really wants to beat the system, banning users can only work to a certain degree. If you really want to stop them from trying, banning a whole domain seems like a good way to persuade them as long as the bans are temporary. Disclaimer: I have no idea how effective the user banning methods are, but I assume they can be outsmarted more than domain ban.
- koglerjs 14y ago
  HN doesn't have nearly the mass and concomitant crowd problems of Reddit, though. Not that it banning domains is ideal, but effective implementation is often more important.
rudiger 14y ago
Interesting. Is this implemented similarly to "hellban"? Which is to say, does it appear that the votes are valid to the voting rings, or are they shown something else entirely?
tomjen3 14y ago
The problem is that the atlantic tends to post things worth reading (and their articles tend to be better than most blog posts) so really if you ban them, hn suffers.
- benologist 14y ago
  If it's really worth reading someone else will submit it.
  - gameshot911 14y ago
    The entire domain is banned, not the users submitting the link.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      At Reddit. Not here. Though, personally, I think we'd benefit from losing VentureWire and ITWorld.
      - coderdude 14y ago
        and Extreme Tech, PandoDaily, TechCrunch, New York Times, Wired, GigaOM, CNN, CNBC, and so on. It's not like HN would be worse without them.
        tptacek 14y ago
        We'd be worse off without the NYT datavis posts. The rest, I agree! Pando and TechCrunch in particular. Don't hold your breath, though. Banning those sites would do a disservice to YC's portfolio; one of the tangible benefits of being in YC is easier access to the trade press. I really don't expect to see 'pg do anything to alienate anybody who could potentially write a useful story about a YC company. (I'm fine with that as a cost of "not having to run a site like HN myself".)
        danso 14y ago
        Well, I hope the NYT articles (even the non datavis ones) provide a benefit other than normalizing relations between hackers and the general public. If the world needs to be better informed about the affairs of hackers, the hackers also benefit from knowing more about the world.
boreacrat 14y ago
According to a Reddit admin they contact the offenders before banning. This type of action would merit some type of direct contact with the individuals or company who run the domain. http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v03qc/physorg_is_not_allowed_on_reddit_this_domain_has/c505j43 http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v03qc/physor...
WillyF 14y ago
Do they know that their ability to vote has been taken away? Or do they have to figure it out for themselves? I would guess that it would be more effective if they thought their votes still counted.
- alexanderh 14y ago
  That is typically how "shadow banning" on reddit works. You have no idea you've been banned, and everything appears to work as normal.
  - Evgeny 14y ago
    So do they see the vote counter going up as well, while for everyone else it remains the same?
    - notatoad 14y ago
      On reddit the vote counts are fuzzed so nobody ever really knows if their individual vote counted. Even on stories with as little as 5 votes, the actual count displayed will fluctuate between 3 and 7. The only way you can really tell if you've been shadow banned is if your whole network of puppet accounts no longer has an effect.
    - joering2 14y ago
      I cannot answer about reddit, but the more I read about this issue, the more similar I can see reddit voting system works to the one HN has. AFAIR Reddit was a PG startup (?) so similarities make sense... When you are hellbanned on HN, here is what happens: nothing. And for sure you are not informed about this in any sort of way: no popup, no messages, nothing. You think everything is normal and you still can write comments, but they appear only to you, which is confusing because you assume others can see them too. You can upvote (and as usual arrow disappears) but your vote does not count. Another thing is that you are being thrown at some sort of non-cached, low-priority server that is as slow as hell. It then takes about 10-15 seconds to open any comments' page (this is confirmed by me, because once I got my account resurrected, everything start working as fast as my internet goes, same moment with no changes on my end). Another thing noticed: after your account is resurrected, your score can go up/down like before, but average score does not change (mine stays .65 for a while now). During dead period I wrote some long and, in my opinion, interesting comments, that were not displayed (especially spent some time on this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4068798 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4068798 ). A nice fellow from England noticed how silly I am for keep participating in HN community but really being a ghost. I emailed info@ couple times and told them I barely get massive downvotes and my karma stay positive for a long period of time. I don't spam or troll. Nothing happened. After couple days I start emailing PG and about 12 hours later got email from someone else apologizing about being killed and my account got resurrected. I hope that PG/HN/team will add some features so that someone killed can know about it. edit: sorry didnt answer: as of HN, no, the system is not that hellish. Score does not go up just for you (so you would assume everything is fine).
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- creativityland 14y ago
  This worries me. I'd love to hear an official statement on this from Reddit.
  - skeletonjelly 14y ago
    I'm not sure what the deleted comment said but there is plenty of official reddit admins commenting in the linked thread http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v03qc/physorg_is_not_allowed_on_reddit_this_domain_has/ http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v03qc/physor...
    - creativityland 14y ago
      The comment looked at the relationships of the banned sites and their competitive nature with the other Condé Nast properties, and how they are in fact some of the biggest competitors to these said properties.
      - timdorr 14y ago
        But reddit isn't owned by Condé Naste anymore: http://blog.reddit.com/2011/09/independence.html http://blog.reddit.com/2011/09/independence.html
        creativityland 14y ago
        reddit Inc. is now owned by Advance Publications (which also owns Condé Nast)
  - maxerickson 14y ago
    Do you really think they are that out of touch with their capricious user base? They would have to be barking mad to think they would benefit from trying to control the site in favor of Advance.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
I deal with so many folks trying to scam our search engine every day I can't imagine the hordes at that gate here. Reddit's response seems to be to take away the cheese in order to make the site less appealing to the rats. Its one strategy. So far I've found that making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has changed is most effective at keeping them from getting worse. The first time we tried returning a straight error code for a robot search we got to see how fast a robot could send requests (pretty damn fast!) but we can send them the same 10 bogus serps again and again and again and they will chew their robot cud all day.
- stcredzero 14y ago
  So far I've found that making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has changed is most effective at keeping them from getting worse. Right. The quality of feedback information is one of the biggest factors in development cost. The bugs you can't reliably recreate are the biggest problems, sometimes by one or two orders of magnitude. This should be used as a weapon in the security battle. Seems like not enough people use it. In all likelihood, the scam initiator is not the same person as the scam implementor, so "making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has changed" is likely to inflate their costs tenfold. This also works when the scam is entirely the work of one person, but it's especially effective when multiple parties are involved.
  - dkordik 14y ago
    Some following this thread might find Tarpits interesting if they don't already know about them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarpit_(networking) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarpit_(networking) Do you guys know of any other techniques that waste the malicious actor's time making it think everything is a-okay?
    - DanBC 14y ago
      Disciplined users - (http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/UsAndThem http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/UsAndThem) This usually fails because someone isn't strong enough to not respond. Or someone engages because it's a fun conversation for them. Examples of this on HN are some of the political discussions (eg Palestine) where people really should just flag and ignore but often people engage.
nhebb 14y ago
I've spotted The Atlantic going some cheesy things, and as much as I like some of their content, it really dims my opinion of them. For instance, take a look at these two submissions on the same day: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4074345 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4074345 -- and -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4074230 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4074230 These point, respectively, to the following url's. Notice the slight url difference in what is actually the same article. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/what-country-has-the-worst-youth-unemployment-its-not-spain-or-greece/258139/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/what-cou... http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/what-country-has-the-worst-youth-unemployment-not-spain-or-greece/258139/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/what-cou...
- rachelbythebay 14y ago
  This will really blow your mind, then: www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/this-part-actually-does-not-matter/258139/ Feel free to change the next-to-last part to whatever you like.
  - stcredzero 14y ago
    A feature like that is a tremendous boon to karma whores. The Atlantic probably isn't the site to accomplish this, but such a feature could be used to effectively "outsource" your site's spamming to karma whoring cabals.
    - hef19898 14y ago
      The thing I don't understand is why people are actually seeking karma by these means. Sonner or later they have to get cought, no? And once you are, all that precious karma will just evaporate, no? I can understand spammers, kind of and even trolls in their own logic. But karma whores, in my understanding WANT to belong. So such a move would be quite, well, stupid.
  - simonbrown 14y ago
    I don't think there's anything surprising about it. Lots of sites (including stackoverflow) make the slug useless so they (or users) can change the title whenever they want.
fpp 14y ago
Then I would also like to see the government sponsored ones to be banned - guess that might be impossible. One of the worst examples of that is the so-called Global Fund to fight AIDS etc - actually burring any critics on a scandal where billions of your tax payers' money earmarked for development aid disappeared with some of the worst criminals on this planet - and dozens of millions continue to die from that. There is no perfect world with social networks - you have to take everything happening there with a "grain of salt"
campnic 14y ago
How hard would it be just to expose the information on who up-voted an article? That would leave it open to easy mining to figure out up-voting trends.
taylorbuley 14y ago
I've been collecting examples of people who at-a-glance submit mostly their own stuff or stuff from their employer. It's not short. https://gist.github.com/461a1a7ab5cc82df02d5 https://gist.github.com/461a1a7ab5cc82df02d5 I don't personally think it's a bad thing to submit one's own stuff (who doesn't like DanielBMarkham's agile posts or Jeff Barr's AWS stuff?); I just like to keep lists.
- possibilistic 14y ago
  I'm kind of unnerved by this. What if I want to submit one of my own links one day--will I wind up on your list? And if someone out the loop happens to stumble upon your list, will they think that I am a self-promoting spammer due to my inclusion? You should probably change this list a little. Adding a comment or two about its purpose would be welcome, and including statistics such as submission ratios by each username would be nice and help to avoid such confusion I have mentioned. Finally, how does someone get 'off' your list?
- _delirium 14y ago
  I don't think it's always a bad thing, either, but there are better and worse ways of doing it. A regular HN user who sometimes submits something they wrote, when they think it would be of interest to HN, is quite a bit different from an account that exists solely to auto-submit every post from a blog to HN, without otherwise participating.
  - boopsie 14y ago
    The problem with such policies is that the definitions are squishy. How do you define "regular" and "sometimes"? At what point do you decide someone is "participating"? If someone submits, say, 10 links to other (presumably interesting) sites for every 1 link to his own site, is that kosher? What if it's 4:1? 1:1? How interesting do the other sites need to be? At one extreme is neat stuff that everyone likes and makes it to the home page (which benefits the "my own stuff" not at all, but certainly helps with karma). At the other is junk thrown in as filler to make that 10:1 ratio. These are not idle questions. Especially when I think everyone in the HN community is aware of journalists' and bloggers' need to attract attention to their articles (which they, at least, believe are relevant). The question is how one can be an accepted member of the community _and_ also let people know what he created.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
danenania 14y ago
I think this is an area that could still use improvement. It seems to have reached a point where the chances for an average HNer to get exposure and feedback on projects in Show/Ask HN type posts is really low. It's a shame because HN is a top-notch community, but it just doesn't feel accessible to people without pre-existing clout in the industry, popularity on the site, or the facility and willingness to use aggressive promotion tactics. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I think innovation on this front could help to preserve and enhance HN's vibrancy.
Tichy 14y ago
Any advice on good papers to read about identifying voting rings?

by pg 14y ago

csphy 14y ago

how do you detect these "Voter rings?"

jaaron 14y ago

Which seems a much better approach than outright banning/censoring domains.

mayneack 14y ago
It seems to me that if a publication really wants to beat the system, banning users can only work to a certain degree. If you really want to stop them from trying, banning a whole domain seems like a good way to persuade them as long as the bans are temporary. Disclaimer: I have no idea how effective the user banning methods are, but I assume they can be outsmarted more than domain ban.
koglerjs 14y ago
HN doesn't have nearly the mass and concomitant crowd problems of Reddit, though. Not that it banning domains is ideal, but effective implementation is often more important.

rudiger 14y ago

Interesting. Is this implemented similarly to "hellban"? Which is to say, does it appear that the votes are valid to the voting rings, or are they shown something else entirely?

tomjen3 14y ago

The problem is that the atlantic tends to post things worth reading (and their articles tend to be better than most blog posts) so really if you ban them, hn suffers.

benologist 14y ago
If it's really worth reading someone else will submit it.
- gameshot911 14y ago
  The entire domain is banned, not the users submitting the link.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    At Reddit. Not here. Though, personally, I think we'd benefit from losing VentureWire and ITWorld.
    - coderdude 14y ago
      and Extreme Tech, PandoDaily, TechCrunch, New York Times, Wired, GigaOM, CNN, CNBC, and so on. It's not like HN would be worse without them.
      - tptacek 14y ago
        We'd be worse off without the NYT datavis posts. The rest, I agree! Pando and TechCrunch in particular. Don't hold your breath, though. Banning those sites would do a disservice to YC's portfolio; one of the tangible benefits of being in YC is easier access to the trade press. I really don't expect to see 'pg do anything to alienate anybody who could potentially write a useful story about a YC company. (I'm fine with that as a cost of "not having to run a site like HN myself".)
        danso 14y ago
        Well, I hope the NYT articles (even the non datavis ones) provide a benefit other than normalizing relations between hackers and the general public. If the world needs to be better informed about the affairs of hackers, the hackers also benefit from knowing more about the world.

boreacrat 14y ago

According to a Reddit admin they contact the offenders before banning. This type of action would merit some type of direct contact with the individuals or company who run the domain. http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v03qc/physorg_is_not_allowed_on_reddit_this_domain_has/c505j43 http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v03qc/physor...

WillyF 14y ago

Do they know that their ability to vote has been taken away? Or do they have to figure it out for themselves? I would guess that it would be more effective if they thought their votes still counted.

alexanderh 14y ago
That is typically how "shadow banning" on reddit works. You have no idea you've been banned, and everything appears to work as normal.
- Evgeny 14y ago
  So do they see the vote counter going up as well, while for everyone else it remains the same?
  - notatoad 14y ago
    On reddit the vote counts are fuzzed so nobody ever really knows if their individual vote counted. Even on stories with as little as 5 votes, the actual count displayed will fluctuate between 3 and 7. The only way you can really tell if you've been shadow banned is if your whole network of puppet accounts no longer has an effect.
  - joering2 14y ago
    I cannot answer about reddit, but the more I read about this issue, the more similar I can see reddit voting system works to the one HN has. AFAIR Reddit was a PG startup (?) so similarities make sense... When you are hellbanned on HN, here is what happens: nothing. And for sure you are not informed about this in any sort of way: no popup, no messages, nothing. You think everything is normal and you still can write comments, but they appear only to you, which is confusing because you assume others can see them too. You can upvote (and as usual arrow disappears) but your vote does not count. Another thing is that you are being thrown at some sort of non-cached, low-priority server that is as slow as hell. It then takes about 10-15 seconds to open any comments' page (this is confirmed by me, because once I got my account resurrected, everything start working as fast as my internet goes, same moment with no changes on my end). Another thing noticed: after your account is resurrected, your score can go up/down like before, but average score does not change (mine stays .65 for a while now). During dead period I wrote some long and, in my opinion, interesting comments, that were not displayed (especially spent some time on this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4068798 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4068798 ). A nice fellow from England noticed how silly I am for keep participating in HN community but really being a ghost. I emailed info@ couple times and told them I barely get massive downvotes and my karma stay positive for a long period of time. I don't spam or troll. Nothing happened. After couple days I start emailing PG and about 12 hours later got email from someone else apologizing about being killed and my account got resurrected. I hope that PG/HN/team will add some features so that someone killed can know about it. edit: sorry didnt answer: as of HN, no, the system is not that hellish. Score does not go up just for you (so you would assume everything is fine).

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

creativityland 14y ago
This worries me. I'd love to hear an official statement on this from Reddit.
- skeletonjelly 14y ago
  I'm not sure what the deleted comment said but there is plenty of official reddit admins commenting in the linked thread http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v03qc/physorg_is_not_allowed_on_reddit_this_domain_has/ http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v03qc/physor...
  - creativityland 14y ago
    The comment looked at the relationships of the banned sites and their competitive nature with the other Condé Nast properties, and how they are in fact some of the biggest competitors to these said properties.
    - timdorr 14y ago
      But reddit isn't owned by Condé Naste anymore: http://blog.reddit.com/2011/09/independence.html http://blog.reddit.com/2011/09/independence.html
      - creativityland 14y ago
        reddit Inc. is now owned by Advance Publications (which also owns Condé Nast)
- maxerickson 14y ago
  Do you really think they are that out of touch with their capricious user base? They would have to be barking mad to think they would benefit from trying to control the site in favor of Advance.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

I deal with so many folks trying to scam our search engine every day I can't imagine the hordes at that gate here. Reddit's response seems to be to take away the cheese in order to make the site less appealing to the rats. Its one strategy. So far I've found that making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has changed is most effective at keeping them from getting worse. The first time we tried returning a straight error code for a robot search we got to see how fast a robot could send requests (pretty damn fast!) but we can send them the same 10 bogus serps again and again and again and they will chew their robot cud all day.

stcredzero 14y ago
So far I've found that making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has changed is most effective at keeping them from getting worse. Right. The quality of feedback information is one of the biggest factors in development cost. The bugs you can't reliably recreate are the biggest problems, sometimes by one or two orders of magnitude. This should be used as a weapon in the security battle. Seems like not enough people use it. In all likelihood, the scam initiator is not the same person as the scam implementor, so "making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has changed" is likely to inflate their costs tenfold. This also works when the scam is entirely the work of one person, but it's especially effective when multiple parties are involved.
- dkordik 14y ago
  Some following this thread might find Tarpits interesting if they don't already know about them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarpit_(networking) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarpit_(networking) Do you guys know of any other techniques that waste the malicious actor's time making it think everything is a-okay?
  - DanBC 14y ago
    Disciplined users - (http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/UsAndThem http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/UsAndThem) This usually fails because someone isn't strong enough to not respond. Or someone engages because it's a fun conversation for them. Examples of this on HN are some of the political discussions (eg Palestine) where people really should just flag and ignore but often people engage.

nhebb 14y ago

I've spotted The Atlantic going some cheesy things, and as much as I like some of their content, it really dims my opinion of them. For instance, take a look at these two submissions on the same day: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4074345 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4074345 -- and -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4074230 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4074230 These point, respectively, to the following url's. Notice the slight url difference in what is actually the same article. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/what-country-has-the-worst-youth-unemployment-its-not-spain-or-greece/258139/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/what-cou... http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/what-country-has-the-worst-youth-unemployment-not-spain-or-greece/258139/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/what-cou...

rachelbythebay 14y ago
This will really blow your mind, then: www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/this-part-actually-does-not-matter/258139/ Feel free to change the next-to-last part to whatever you like.
- stcredzero 14y ago
  A feature like that is a tremendous boon to karma whores. The Atlantic probably isn't the site to accomplish this, but such a feature could be used to effectively "outsource" your site's spamming to karma whoring cabals.
  - hef19898 14y ago
    The thing I don't understand is why people are actually seeking karma by these means. Sonner or later they have to get cought, no? And once you are, all that precious karma will just evaporate, no? I can understand spammers, kind of and even trolls in their own logic. But karma whores, in my understanding WANT to belong. So such a move would be quite, well, stupid.
- simonbrown 14y ago
  I don't think there's anything surprising about it. Lots of sites (including stackoverflow) make the slug useless so they (or users) can change the title whenever they want.

fpp 14y ago

Then I would also like to see the government sponsored ones to be banned - guess that might be impossible. One of the worst examples of that is the so-called Global Fund to fight AIDS etc - actually burring any critics on a scandal where billions of your tax payers' money earmarked for development aid disappeared with some of the worst criminals on this planet - and dozens of millions continue to die from that. There is no perfect world with social networks - you have to take everything happening there with a "grain of salt"

campnic 14y ago

How hard would it be just to expose the information on who up-voted an article? That would leave it open to easy mining to figure out up-voting trends.

taylorbuley 14y ago

I've been collecting examples of people who at-a-glance submit mostly their own stuff or stuff from their employer. It's not short. https://gist.github.com/461a1a7ab5cc82df02d5 https://gist.github.com/461a1a7ab5cc82df02d5 I don't personally think it's a bad thing to submit one's own stuff (who doesn't like DanielBMarkham's agile posts or Jeff Barr's AWS stuff?); I just like to keep lists.

possibilistic 14y ago
I'm kind of unnerved by this. What if I want to submit one of my own links one day--will I wind up on your list? And if someone out the loop happens to stumble upon your list, will they think that I am a self-promoting spammer due to my inclusion? You should probably change this list a little. Adding a comment or two about its purpose would be welcome, and including statistics such as submission ratios by each username would be nice and help to avoid such confusion I have mentioned. Finally, how does someone get 'off' your list?
_delirium 14y ago
I don't think it's always a bad thing, either, but there are better and worse ways of doing it. A regular HN user who sometimes submits something they wrote, when they think it would be of interest to HN, is quite a bit different from an account that exists solely to auto-submit every post from a blog to HN, without otherwise participating.
- boopsie 14y ago
  The problem with such policies is that the definitions are squishy. How do you define "regular" and "sometimes"? At what point do you decide someone is "participating"? If someone submits, say, 10 links to other (presumably interesting) sites for every 1 link to his own site, is that kosher? What if it's 4:1? 1:1? How interesting do the other sites need to be? At one extreme is neat stuff that everyone likes and makes it to the home page (which benefits the "my own stuff" not at all, but certainly helps with karma). At the other is junk thrown in as filler to make that 10:1 ratio. These are not idle questions. Especially when I think everyone in the HN community is aware of journalists' and bloggers' need to attract attention to their articles (which they, at least, believe are relevant). The question is how one can be an accepted member of the community _and_ also let people know what he created.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

danenania 14y ago

I think this is an area that could still use improvement. It seems to have reached a point where the chances for an average HNer to get exposure and feedback on projects in Show/Ask HN type posts is really low. It's a shame because HN is a top-notch community, but it just doesn't feel accessible to people without pre-existing clout in the industry, popularity on the site, or the facility and willingness to use aggressive promotion tactics. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I think innovation on this front could help to preserve and enhance HN's vibrancy.

Tichy 14y ago

Any advice on good papers to read about identifying voting rings?