9 ms·

Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

178 points by sama 12y ago

A lot of people ask us why their submission gets kicked off the front page. The answer is almost always that it trips our voting ring detector. Please occasionally read /newest so interesting stories that don't solicit upvotes can still get on the front page.

gus_massa 12y ago
I usually read the newest page, but usually it has a lot of 1-point stories, and many of them are almost-spam or almost-dupe. Another user proposed a newest page with a >2-points filter (someone else think that it’s interesting). See for example http://hnapp.com/filter/d3a308f2ac9a071c0bf174e0c1a8fd22 http://hnapp.com/filter/d3a308f2ac9a071c0bf174e0c1a8fd22
- james33 12y ago
  How does anything get on that list then if nobody ever sees the 1-point submission (without asking for votes).
  - PaulHoule 12y ago
    exactly. that's the true terror of pagerank -- not that spammers are putting in millions of junk links, but that it makes legitimate people stop linking.
  - bryanlarsen 12y ago
    A link gets a point every time it is submitted. So it's quite possible for a link to get more than 1 point without the link ever being seen. Text submissions would be stuck at 1 point, though.
- ColinWright 12y ago
  But that would mean that stories with only one point never get seen, and hence never get up-voted, and hence nothing gets to the 2-point page. It seems necessary that people should read "newest" and up-vote things they think are of value.
  - gus_massa 12y ago
    I agree. I usually read the (unfiltered) newest page, but sometime this is useful to find a story that was submitted 12 hours ago and only got 2 points. Perhaps the problem is that there are 928 stories submitted in the last 24 hours.
    - webhat 12y ago
      I use HN Search to find interesting stories I might have missed in the last 24 hours. Often these 1 or 2 point stories are very interesting and merely got lost in the stream.
    - ColinWright 12y ago
      There is much to read, especially things that only get one up-vote, or even none at all. I simply click through the "More" link on the "newest" page gestalting the titles - there's nothing I can think of that would substantially improve on that. Of course, that might simply be my lack of imagination.
- weinzierl 12y ago
  When I read the newest page I usually ignore the points. Most of the stories are 1-point or 2-point anyway. What I scan for is the comments. If the story is on newest and already has a few comments it's often worth reading in my experience.
yesimahuman 12y ago
I'd be curious to hear more about how YC companies handle voting so they get their content on the front page. From what I've heard, they get a lot of help to promote content. Totally makes sense seeing as HN is built around YC, but in that light makes it a bit disingenuous to ask the community to not solicit help from their group to promote content.
- sama 12y ago
  YC companies complain the most often because they trigger the voting ring when they ask their batchmates to votes them up :)
  - yesimahuman 12y ago
    Fair enough, that's good to know :)
  - volaski 12y ago
    As a counter argument, I haven't seen any ycombinator company NOT make it on the front page. I am not saying this is a collusion or anything but wanted to point out that there are people with knowledge who do this all the time and can get away with it because they know how it works. They would send a message like "Please go to HN and look for such and such title and vote it up. I can't post the link because of voting ring algorithm". And I see these people always show up on the front page. When this is the reality, how can one NOT do this? The people who try to play fair are the ones who will lose. I agree with you that it's not good to ask for upvotes but people who already know how it works will keep doing it, and the people who don't will just lose like they always have. Also I wonder what you do with those YC company guys who complain about getting detected as voting ring. Do you just let their posts stay buried or do you give them a second chance? If you are going to ask people to cooperate, I think it's crucial to have some transparency. Otherwise, no matter what you ask, nothing will change. As a person who discovers lots of cool projects through showHN posts, I hope you could come up with a solution for this, really.
    - dang 12y ago
compare 12y ago
Is there actually any dataset of upon which the accuracy of this detector is measured and improved? Or is it just some hard-coded rules? For example, does it really differentiate between people who ask for votes, and people who just vote up the content of someone they recognize?
simonsarris 12y ago
Sam I think you have great power to give /newest more views if you'd consider minor redesigns. Perhaps you could dither stories so the front-page list goes top/new/top/new/top/new, etc, but that is potentially very messy. Or perhaps instead, the front-page can show 30 top stories, then a line break, then 30 new stories, all on the front page. Long-scrolling pages are in fashion, after all. These aren't well-developed ideas, but the point remains that the inertia of being one click away means that a huge percentage of people will never even look at /newest, never-mind up-vote interesting stories. Please consider changes to modify the median behavior. It's within your power and would do us all good. It's worth an experiment, isn't it?
- privong 12y ago
  Another option is a 2-column layout (for non-mobile devices). The normal front page on the left, with the blast of new articles in the right column. Perhaps for mobile devices the new articles could go under the top stories, with some sort of obvious demarcation between them.
  - adamnemecek 12y ago
    This seems like the best option to me.
  - jkbyc 12y ago
    It's even already implemented as the Hacker News UX extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-ux/chngbdmhgakoomomnnhfapkpbalpmhid https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-ux/chn... I like it a lot, it would be great to have it that way by default.
- schrodinger 12y ago
  I really like this idea. Just occasionally throw in some random "new" pages to users and see what gets read / upvoted. I'm sure that most users don't check the "new" page.
- tlrobinson 12y ago
  I like the idea of simply appending a subset of the /new stories to the end of the front page. Make it clear they're brand new (should also be obvious from the low vote count).
aikah 12y ago
What does count as a voting ring? If I post a link to HN on twitter and people upvote the submission coming from twitter,does it count as a voting ring?
- mathrawka 12y ago
  Always the same people giving upvotes to a certain user.
- tptacek 12y ago
  You're never going to get a totally straight answer, because things like voting ring detectors rely in practice on obscurity; if you knew the exact details, it would be much easier to game the system.
  - angersock 12y ago
    Makes it rather hard to debug or avoid posting in a bad way.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      Yes it does. You take the good with the bad. You can always ask hn@ycombinator.com about your submission; if it gets a bunch of upvotes but winds up 30 pages down the site, that's a pretty good indicator that something happened.
      - angersock 12y ago
        Yep. I think that's just kind of an unavoidable side-effect of the service offered. It'd be interesting to know the statistics of what sort of stuff gets blocked.
- rickyc091 12y ago
  It's probably better to up vote from the feed. When you click on a link from the feed, you're generally going directly to the article. You hit the browser back button to get back to hackernews; chances are if the article seemed interesting, you would then hit the up vote button. When's the last time you hit the up vote button on a comment page?
bcohen5055 12y ago
Upvoted
Kiro 12y ago
I wonder how many false positives there are.
oskarth 12y ago
> Please occasionally read /newest so interesting stories that don't solicit upvotes can still get on the front page. In theory this is good, but in practice it's hard. Here's a suggestion for how to make it easier in practice: redirect 1/3 of the visits from the start page to /newest. As a regular and medium-karma user, I would know why this happens, and I personally wouldn't mind it.
Mz 12y ago
On a full sized monitor, most titles go only about halfway across the screen. I think with a little tweaking, you could have two columns on the front page: One with the current front page code, one with the newest stories. You might have to have titles wrap for longer titles or make some other tweaks to make this work. But that might cut back on the need to ask folks to look at new stuff. Generally speaking, if you can write the code, you can make the rules people have to follow (though it does require some deep thinking, data, etc at times). If you want to compel x behavior, then compel it. If you want to forbid y behavior, then deny the ability in some way where possible. Writing the code makes you "god" for your little world: You decide the local "physics". Deciding the local physics is going to generally get you better results than asking people to please do x or please don't do y.
- webhat 12y ago
  I did something similar for an RSS reader I was building based on bayesian filtering, a col-4 column on the right with the "live" feed and a main col-8 column with the filtered feed, meaning all the matches. It looked pretty good in landscape mode.
sharemywin 12y ago
I prefer /newest. I'd rather see stuff unfiltered. Plus you can comment on stuff without 150 other comments. so it feels like your comments are heard.
- lucb1e 12y ago
  I think they're read more than one realizes even if it doesn't gather upvotes
encoderer 12y ago
Of course, the alternative is just to submit something to HN and..... hope for the best? Sure, THAT sounds reasonable to a bunch of type-a founders. I think it's reasonable that somebody promotes their HN post. The takeaway is just to be careful about how you share and how widely and with whom. I made the front page last week (for a few hours) for a side project that I launched with a friend. Several up-votes shortly after we posted it got us to the bottom of the front page, and organic traffic took it from there.
bl4hblahblat 12y ago
What gets me is that unless you are really interested in GO, Haskell, dislike Microsoft, think you can write a real encrypted instant messaging system in JavaScript crypto, and have a libertarian leaning you will never have enough karma/points to downvote other people. It encourages group think in the extreme. Also, at around 180 gold stars/dingles it just stops. I mean seriously...there is a vast amount of consensus around a set of things here that are just impermeable. Yes I have read "the approach to comments" and it sounds like you guys think that "resisting decline" means everyone basically has the same opinion but everyone gets to restate it to each other in "civil" and interesting ways. EDIT: You also have to really be into crypto-currency...it also helps if you mention hayek while talking about it. You rebel.
- jfoster 12y ago
  Is downvoting other people an important part of HN, though? It's important that someone is doing it responsibly to keep things clean, but upvoting gems and adding value to discussion through intelligent comments seem like they would be far more valuable activities for HN.
  - bl4hblahblat 12y ago
    Well, that's kind of my point. You are at the mercy of people who disagree with you if you are in the minority. If you disagree with the consensus you will be downvoted to the point that you can't be seen anymore. I think that differing views add value. Having contrary opinions just disappear so that everyone can keep restating the same thing to each other is really frustrating. EDIT: Clarification...
    - jfoster 12y ago
      Fair enough. I see the theory of that. Does it happen in practice? Are there comments that were intelligent, adding to the discussion, not being mean, and so on... which were then downvoted to the point where they couldn't be seen? I don't think I've seen it happen on HN, but I have seen it on other sites. I hypothesize that there is actually a craving for intelligent but unusual viewpoints on HN.
programminggeek 12y ago
I remember the early days of digg and people tend to see social news sites as a mechanism to get a wave of traffic. What they don't always think about is providing value to the social sites. HN is probably better than most about not letting much crap on the home page, but these sites are almost universally terrible at surfacing new content so that it has a good opportunity to get up voted. The selfish human response is to get your friends to vote for you (just like you get your friends to vote for you in real life actually). It's just that there are so few actual people looking at the submitted stories that it wouldn't take much to astroturf your way on to the front page without a voting ring filter. The best solution is very likely to have a better interface for surfacing submitted stories to a wider audience. Or, incentivize people to actually look at the new section. Maybe extra points for voting or commenting before it hits front page. I don't think it would take much to solve this problem, but this isn't a policy or filter problem, it's a human problem and your system needs to work with the user psychology that naturally exists on HN (and similar sites). Reddit seemed to solve this by making subreddits a bigger part of the site, but I don't know how HN would incorporate such an idea without losing the site identity.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
This post just motivated me to go through /newest and upvote few things. Thank you. Everyone, let's take a minute now and go through the new submissions and move some fresh things onto the front page. Let this also become a habit, until mods tweak HN interface to reduce the effort it requires.
arikrak 12y ago
Currently, it seems you need either a lot of good luck or upvoting friends to make it to front page. Why not use some categorization so every link makes it it's category's page and has chance of reaching front page?
mhartl 12y ago
What do you think about soliciting upvotes by sending people to /newest? Among other things, as a side-effect they might upvote other stories as well.
lisper 12y ago
Some observations: 1. Almost no one reads the new page. For proof, go to the new page and count up the total number of votes that all the stories on the new page have received in the last hour. 2. There is a VERY short time window (typically about an hour nowadays) during which a story either gets enough votes to end up on the home page (half a dozen or so seems to be enough) or drops off the first new page, after which it will never be seen again. 3. Once a story arrives on the home page, there is a very good chance that it will stay there for a while (longer than an hour anyway). 4. As a result, there is an EXTREMELY strong incentive when one has posted a story to send out an email to one's friends saying, "I just posted this to HN, please take a look and upvote it if you think it deserves it." [1] 5. A story that gets a lot of votes as a result isn't necessarily a bad story. So a voting ring detector is likely to generate false positives. 6. Simply asking people to go read the new page isn't going to fix the problem. Figuring out what to do instead isn't easy. --- [1] Last year I did an experiment where I wrote a series of six blog posts all related to a single topic. I posted all six to HN. Three of them I sent out an email announcement, and three of them I didn't. The first three all ended up on the home page, ultimately garnering many tens of votes. The other three never got a single vote.
- jsnell 12y ago
  Low vote counts on the new page don't prove nobody goes there. An alternative explanation is that 90% of the new page is crap that really doesn't deserve a single vote. (Just did this experiment, and only found one of the 30 submissions interesting enough to even click on). It is true that you need to get something like 5-6 votes in the first hour to get to the front page. But that's not a very large amount, and it's definitely possible to get across that threshold without soliciting for votes, so clearly there are a decent amount of people reading /newest. (About a third of my submissions made the front page, and it's kind of obvious in retrospect why many of the others failed. I never asked anyone to vote for any of those submissions).
  - lisper 12y ago
    > Low vote counts on the new page don't prove nobody goes there. True, which is why I did that experiment. The odds of getting the results I did by accident are one in 64, which counts as a statistically significant result.
PhasmaFelis 12y ago
If legit submissions are getting booted by your voting-ring detector so often that you need to ask readers to take action to prevent it, then the detector is broken. It's not the readers' responsibility to change our habits to make up for your broken mechanisms.
schodge 12y ago
If the OP is still reading, why didn't this at least get onto the Ask HN page? I wasn't asking for upvotes, but it seemed to fall like a stone without ever having a chance to get views... ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7948001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7948001
saasdude 12y ago
everytime i hear sama write, i can hear paulgs voice? such a fucking douche
saasdude 12y ago
stop being a nazi dick
lbr 12y ago
Sam, Does saying "discuss on hn: link" at the bottom of a blog post violate your voting ring detector or any other terms of service? I couldn't find anything about that.

178 points by sama 12y ago

gus_massa 12y ago

I usually read the newest page, but usually it has a lot of 1-point stories, and many of them are almost-spam or almost-dupe. Another user proposed a newest page with a >2-points filter (someone else think that it’s interesting). See for example http://hnapp.com/filter/d3a308f2ac9a071c0bf174e0c1a8fd22 http://hnapp.com/filter/d3a308f2ac9a071c0bf174e0c1a8fd22

james33 12y ago
How does anything get on that list then if nobody ever sees the 1-point submission (without asking for votes).
- PaulHoule 12y ago
  exactly. that's the true terror of pagerank -- not that spammers are putting in millions of junk links, but that it makes legitimate people stop linking.
- bryanlarsen 12y ago
  A link gets a point every time it is submitted. So it's quite possible for a link to get more than 1 point without the link ever being seen. Text submissions would be stuck at 1 point, though.
ColinWright 12y ago
But that would mean that stories with only one point never get seen, and hence never get up-voted, and hence nothing gets to the 2-point page. It seems necessary that people should read "newest" and up-vote things they think are of value.
- gus_massa 12y ago
  I agree. I usually read the (unfiltered) newest page, but sometime this is useful to find a story that was submitted 12 hours ago and only got 2 points. Perhaps the problem is that there are 928 stories submitted in the last 24 hours.
  - webhat 12y ago
    I use HN Search to find interesting stories I might have missed in the last 24 hours. Often these 1 or 2 point stories are very interesting and merely got lost in the stream.
  - ColinWright 12y ago
    There is much to read, especially things that only get one up-vote, or even none at all. I simply click through the "More" link on the "newest" page gestalting the titles - there's nothing I can think of that would substantially improve on that. Of course, that might simply be my lack of imagination.
weinzierl 12y ago
When I read the newest page I usually ignore the points. Most of the stories are 1-point or 2-point anyway. What I scan for is the comments. If the story is on newest and already has a few comments it's often worth reading in my experience.

yesimahuman 12y ago

I'd be curious to hear more about how YC companies handle voting so they get their content on the front page. From what I've heard, they get a lot of help to promote content. Totally makes sense seeing as HN is built around YC, but in that light makes it a bit disingenuous to ask the community to not solicit help from their group to promote content.

sama 12y ago
YC companies complain the most often because they trigger the voting ring when they ask their batchmates to votes them up :)
- yesimahuman 12y ago
  Fair enough, that's good to know :)
- volaski 12y ago
  As a counter argument, I haven't seen any ycombinator company NOT make it on the front page. I am not saying this is a collusion or anything but wanted to point out that there are people with knowledge who do this all the time and can get away with it because they know how it works. They would send a message like "Please go to HN and look for such and such title and vote it up. I can't post the link because of voting ring algorithm". And I see these people always show up on the front page. When this is the reality, how can one NOT do this? The people who try to play fair are the ones who will lose. I agree with you that it's not good to ask for upvotes but people who already know how it works will keep doing it, and the people who don't will just lose like they always have. Also I wonder what you do with those YC company guys who complain about getting detected as voting ring. Do you just let their posts stay buried or do you give them a second chance? If you are going to ask people to cooperate, I think it's crucial to have some transparency. Otherwise, no matter what you ask, nothing will change. As a person who discovers lots of cool projects through showHN posts, I hope you could come up with a solution for this, really.
  - dang 12y ago

compare 12y ago

Is there actually any dataset of upon which the accuracy of this detector is measured and improved? Or is it just some hard-coded rules? For example, does it really differentiate between people who ask for votes, and people who just vote up the content of someone they recognize?

simonsarris 12y ago

Sam I think you have great power to give /newest more views if you'd consider minor redesigns. Perhaps you could dither stories so the front-page list goes top/new/top/new/top/new, etc, but that is potentially very messy. Or perhaps instead, the front-page can show 30 top stories, then a line break, then 30 new stories, all on the front page. Long-scrolling pages are in fashion, after all. These aren't well-developed ideas, but the point remains that the inertia of being one click away means that a huge percentage of people will never even look at /newest, never-mind up-vote interesting stories. Please consider changes to modify the median behavior. It's within your power and would do us all good. It's worth an experiment, isn't it?

privong 12y ago
Another option is a 2-column layout (for non-mobile devices). The normal front page on the left, with the blast of new articles in the right column. Perhaps for mobile devices the new articles could go under the top stories, with some sort of obvious demarcation between them.
- adamnemecek 12y ago
  This seems like the best option to me.
- jkbyc 12y ago
  It's even already implemented as the Hacker News UX extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-ux/chngbdmhgakoomomnnhfapkpbalpmhid https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-ux/chn... I like it a lot, it would be great to have it that way by default.
schrodinger 12y ago
I really like this idea. Just occasionally throw in some random "new" pages to users and see what gets read / upvoted. I'm sure that most users don't check the "new" page.
tlrobinson 12y ago
I like the idea of simply appending a subset of the /new stories to the end of the front page. Make it clear they're brand new (should also be obvious from the low vote count).

aikah 12y ago

What does count as a voting ring? If I post a link to HN on twitter and people upvote the submission coming from twitter,does it count as a voting ring?

mathrawka 12y ago
Always the same people giving upvotes to a certain user.
tptacek 12y ago
You're never going to get a totally straight answer, because things like voting ring detectors rely in practice on obscurity; if you knew the exact details, it would be much easier to game the system.
- angersock 12y ago
  Makes it rather hard to debug or avoid posting in a bad way.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Yes it does. You take the good with the bad. You can always ask hn@ycombinator.com about your submission; if it gets a bunch of upvotes but winds up 30 pages down the site, that's a pretty good indicator that something happened.
    - angersock 12y ago
      Yep. I think that's just kind of an unavoidable side-effect of the service offered. It'd be interesting to know the statistics of what sort of stuff gets blocked.
rickyc091 12y ago
It's probably better to up vote from the feed. When you click on a link from the feed, you're generally going directly to the article. You hit the browser back button to get back to hackernews; chances are if the article seemed interesting, you would then hit the up vote button. When's the last time you hit the up vote button on a comment page?

bcohen5055 12y ago

Upvoted

Kiro 12y ago

I wonder how many false positives there are.

oskarth 12y ago

> Please occasionally read /newest so interesting stories that don't solicit upvotes can still get on the front page. In theory this is good, but in practice it's hard. Here's a suggestion for how to make it easier in practice: redirect 1/3 of the visits from the start page to /newest. As a regular and medium-karma user, I would know why this happens, and I personally wouldn't mind it.

Mz 12y ago

On a full sized monitor, most titles go only about halfway across the screen. I think with a little tweaking, you could have two columns on the front page: One with the current front page code, one with the newest stories. You might have to have titles wrap for longer titles or make some other tweaks to make this work. But that might cut back on the need to ask folks to look at new stuff. Generally speaking, if you can write the code, you can make the rules people have to follow (though it does require some deep thinking, data, etc at times). If you want to compel x behavior, then compel it. If you want to forbid y behavior, then deny the ability in some way where possible. Writing the code makes you "god" for your little world: You decide the local "physics". Deciding the local physics is going to generally get you better results than asking people to please do x or please don't do y.

webhat 12y ago
I did something similar for an RSS reader I was building based on bayesian filtering, a col-4 column on the right with the "live" feed and a main col-8 column with the filtered feed, meaning all the matches. It looked pretty good in landscape mode.

sharemywin 12y ago

I prefer /newest. I'd rather see stuff unfiltered. Plus you can comment on stuff without 150 other comments. so it feels like your comments are heard.

lucb1e 12y ago
I think they're read more than one realizes even if it doesn't gather upvotes

encoderer 12y ago

Of course, the alternative is just to submit something to HN and..... hope for the best? Sure, THAT sounds reasonable to a bunch of type-a founders. I think it's reasonable that somebody promotes their HN post. The takeaway is just to be careful about how you share and how widely and with whom. I made the front page last week (for a few hours) for a side project that I launched with a friend. Several up-votes shortly after we posted it got us to the bottom of the front page, and organic traffic took it from there.

bl4hblahblat 12y ago

What gets me is that unless you are really interested in GO, Haskell, dislike Microsoft, think you can write a real encrypted instant messaging system in JavaScript crypto, and have a libertarian leaning you will never have enough karma/points to downvote other people. It encourages group think in the extreme. Also, at around 180 gold stars/dingles it just stops. I mean seriously...there is a vast amount of consensus around a set of things here that are just impermeable. Yes I have read "the approach to comments" and it sounds like you guys think that "resisting decline" means everyone basically has the same opinion but everyone gets to restate it to each other in "civil" and interesting ways. EDIT: You also have to really be into crypto-currency...it also helps if you mention hayek while talking about it. You rebel.

jfoster 12y ago
Is downvoting other people an important part of HN, though? It's important that someone is doing it responsibly to keep things clean, but upvoting gems and adding value to discussion through intelligent comments seem like they would be far more valuable activities for HN.
- bl4hblahblat 12y ago
  Well, that's kind of my point. You are at the mercy of people who disagree with you if you are in the minority. If you disagree with the consensus you will be downvoted to the point that you can't be seen anymore. I think that differing views add value. Having contrary opinions just disappear so that everyone can keep restating the same thing to each other is really frustrating. EDIT: Clarification...
  - jfoster 12y ago
    Fair enough. I see the theory of that. Does it happen in practice? Are there comments that were intelligent, adding to the discussion, not being mean, and so on... which were then downvoted to the point where they couldn't be seen? I don't think I've seen it happen on HN, but I have seen it on other sites. I hypothesize that there is actually a craving for intelligent but unusual viewpoints on HN.

programminggeek 12y ago

I remember the early days of digg and people tend to see social news sites as a mechanism to get a wave of traffic. What they don't always think about is providing value to the social sites. HN is probably better than most about not letting much crap on the home page, but these sites are almost universally terrible at surfacing new content so that it has a good opportunity to get up voted. The selfish human response is to get your friends to vote for you (just like you get your friends to vote for you in real life actually). It's just that there are so few actual people looking at the submitted stories that it wouldn't take much to astroturf your way on to the front page without a voting ring filter. The best solution is very likely to have a better interface for surfacing submitted stories to a wider audience. Or, incentivize people to actually look at the new section. Maybe extra points for voting or commenting before it hits front page. I don't think it would take much to solve this problem, but this isn't a policy or filter problem, it's a human problem and your system needs to work with the user psychology that naturally exists on HN (and similar sites). Reddit seemed to solve this by making subreddits a bigger part of the site, but I don't know how HN would incorporate such an idea without losing the site identity.

TeMPOraL 12y ago

This post just motivated me to go through /newest and upvote few things. Thank you. Everyone, let's take a minute now and go through the new submissions and move some fresh things onto the front page. Let this also become a habit, until mods tweak HN interface to reduce the effort it requires.

arikrak 12y ago

Currently, it seems you need either a lot of good luck or upvoting friends to make it to front page. Why not use some categorization so every link makes it it's category's page and has chance of reaching front page?

mhartl 12y ago

What do you think about soliciting upvotes by sending people to /newest? Among other things, as a side-effect they might upvote other stories as well.

lisper 12y ago

Some observations: 1. Almost no one reads the new page. For proof, go to the new page and count up the total number of votes that all the stories on the new page have received in the last hour. 2. There is a VERY short time window (typically about an hour nowadays) during which a story either gets enough votes to end up on the home page (half a dozen or so seems to be enough) or drops off the first new page, after which it will never be seen again. 3. Once a story arrives on the home page, there is a very good chance that it will stay there for a while (longer than an hour anyway). 4. As a result, there is an EXTREMELY strong incentive when one has posted a story to send out an email to one's friends saying, "I just posted this to HN, please take a look and upvote it if you think it deserves it." [1] 5. A story that gets a lot of votes as a result isn't necessarily a bad story. So a voting ring detector is likely to generate false positives. 6. Simply asking people to go read the new page isn't going to fix the problem. Figuring out what to do instead isn't easy. --- [1] Last year I did an experiment where I wrote a series of six blog posts all related to a single topic. I posted all six to HN. Three of them I sent out an email announcement, and three of them I didn't. The first three all ended up on the home page, ultimately garnering many tens of votes. The other three never got a single vote.

jsnell 12y ago
Low vote counts on the new page don't prove nobody goes there. An alternative explanation is that 90% of the new page is crap that really doesn't deserve a single vote. (Just did this experiment, and only found one of the 30 submissions interesting enough to even click on). It is true that you need to get something like 5-6 votes in the first hour to get to the front page. But that's not a very large amount, and it's definitely possible to get across that threshold without soliciting for votes, so clearly there are a decent amount of people reading /newest. (About a third of my submissions made the front page, and it's kind of obvious in retrospect why many of the others failed. I never asked anyone to vote for any of those submissions).
- lisper 12y ago
  > Low vote counts on the new page don't prove nobody goes there. True, which is why I did that experiment. The odds of getting the results I did by accident are one in 64, which counts as a statistically significant result.

PhasmaFelis 12y ago

If legit submissions are getting booted by your voting-ring detector so often that you need to ask readers to take action to prevent it, then the detector is broken. It's not the readers' responsibility to change our habits to make up for your broken mechanisms.

schodge 12y ago

If the OP is still reading, why didn't this at least get onto the Ask HN page? I wasn't asking for upvotes, but it seemed to fall like a stone without ever having a chance to get views... ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7948001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7948001

saasdude 12y ago

everytime i hear sama write, i can hear paulgs voice? such a fucking douche

saasdude 12y ago

stop being a nazi dick

lbr 12y ago

Sam, Does saying "discuss on hn: link" at the bottom of a blog post violate your voting ring detector or any other terms of service? I couldn't find anything about that.