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Links definitely cannot be downvoted, which presents an interesting asymmetry that incentivizes spamming with links and stories I wonder if the constant repost

• jcr 14y ago
  Blog spam (adds nothing to original) and endless coverage of the same topic by everyone in the supposed "press" is still a big problem, and I'm not convinced there's much difference between the two. There's the mostly unsolvable problem of "old-news versus news-to-me" at work which can skew voting and unfairly reward reposting or posting some new regurgitation (blog-spam/press-spam). The reason why the blog/press spam exists is to take advantage of incomplete knowledge, and sadly, it works. And worse, the better the echo-chamber works, the louder the noise gets. As for giving an incentive to spam, it's a tough balancing act. Any new event is by definition, news, even if it is also promoting something. The litmus test is the voting, and HN as a whole still does fair job of up-voting interesting stories most of the time.