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Reddit's Favorite Scientist Just Got Banned for Cheating the Site

73 points by antr 12y ago

onedognight 12y ago
> Reddit's Favorite Scientist That's being too generous. I would vote for RobotRollCall as Reddit's Favorite Scientist.
- kmfrk 12y ago
  She hasn't posted in two years.
- iLoch 12y ago
  Then you'd be wrong - if we're talking about popular opinion.
- nhebb 12y ago
  I thought they were referring to Neil deGrasse Tyson, which made the title highly implausible.
minimaxir 12y ago
/r/subredditdrama has a more honest albeit less neutral recap of the events: http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/2c9ida/recap_unibanned_a_recap_of_the_fallout_of_reddits/ http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/2c9ida/recap... Vote cheating was only the final straw: part of it was a silly argument between Undian and another user.
- shitlord 12y ago
  The argument wasn't the reason he got banned, though. The admins don't care at all if users argue with each another like idiots. That's the subreddit moderators' problem. It was the blatant vote manipulation that did him in. The admins only ever ban users who break one of the five rules or make the site look bad. They should probably do a lot more...
codezero 12y ago
I'm pretty surprised reddit's backend doesn't just automatically devalue this kind of vote cheating. In the general case, it's really easy to detect, and if your cheater is a bit more sophisticated, it's still not that hard, it takes a really serious person to have five accounts on five different browsers/vpcs that each come from different IP addresses consistently, even then, when you see them colluding together, you can still devalue those votes simply because it's an obvious clique taking early action consistently, so even then it should be pretty detectable. I don't see a reason to ban someone over this behavior as long as you can make sure that the fraudulent votes don't actually add any value to the content, which they shouldn't.
- raverbashing 12y ago
  I think the real issue is the relative weight between the first votes and the rest
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- dang 12y ago
  > In the general case, it's really easy to detect Why do you say that? I've worked hard on this problem and would not call it easy.
  - codezero 12y ago
    When I say general case, I mean random person creates an account or two to upvote their own stuff. This is usually trivial to detect if you save a single cookie that's linked to each account, even easier if you are also using more tenacious tracking like flash cookies or localstorage or the dreaded evercookie. In the less general case, you can still determine that a particular group of accounts never take action in the same small time windows. The way I've approached this problem in the past relies heavily on meta data about the user. It's easy to determine if an IP is a proxy/VPN, which should immediately make a client more suspicious (when you're already suspicious about fraudulent voting). Initially, account ages are important but if someone is able to get away with it for a long time, they can get complacent and keep using the same accounts, and at that point you can look at things like upvote/downvote ratios (or generally the lack of diversity in voting activity) compared to some expected average activity. There's a lot of other tricks, but I don't know what your approach has been when working on this, and I know HN is a much different platform from what I worked with :P
un_publishable 12y ago
> Despite being banned, Unidan has already made a new account, called UnidanX, and has been posting for most of the day under that username. It's looking like he hasn't been banned with that username yet. What's the point of trying again, he's already lost the trust of the community and his name is a red flag. Is that subreddit super-forgiving? Or maybe the turnover is so high people will just forget?
- wamsachel 12y ago
  It's because for the most part he posts some very educational stuff. So hopefully he just learned his lesson.
  - middleclick 12y ago
    Not to be cynical, I don't think he did. He was doing what he was doing till the time he was caught. It's not like he told the community himself. He is just trying to play the nice guy game to save his image. His doing this is dishonest -- plain and simple. Don't get me wrong. He is really good in his field and knows a lot. I learned a lot from him and if he posts stuff, I will read it again. But this behaviour is dishonesty.
    - shitlord 12y ago
      He actually lied, straight-up. He said he only downvoted misinformation, but it turns out he downvoted others' submissions (to make his own submissions look better).
    - floatrock 12y ago
      > He is just trying to play the nice guy game to save his image. His doing this is dishonest -- plain and simple. If he was being honest, would it look any different? Or is the pitchfork mob just demanding blood? On the one hand a reputation takes years to create and only a second to destroy. On the other hand, holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. Personally I think if you want to be angry at something there's much more insidious manipulation going on. Unidan makes great content and gets people excited about his biology research... remember him for that, not for his amateur inability to execute a proper astroturfing botnet campaign. At the very least, let him be reborn with a new username and see what he can build. Isn't the ability to bounce back from failure and mistakes what we celebrate here on hn?
agent00f 12y ago
Why this matters: Visibility on Reddit is essentially predicated on early votes. Get a few upvotes and even mediocre comments will often remain at the top due to momentum. Less than -4 and it's doomed to oblivion (ie. downvote the competition). One of the most popular linked sites on reddit (quickmeme) got to where it was with only a few strategically placed votes for each link, and it took ages for them to be found out and similarly banned: http://www.dailydot.com/business/reddit-quickmeme-banned-miltz-brothers/ http://www.dailydot.com/business/reddit-quickmeme-banned-mil... More broadly, the algorithm reddit uses is not only known wrong/buggy: http://technotes.iangreenleaf.com/posts/2013-12-09-reddits-empire-is-built-on-a-flawed-algorithm.html http://technotes.iangreenleaf.com/posts/2013-12-09-reddits-e... but also generally defective: http://www.reddit.com/r/circlebroke/comments/vqy9y/dear_circlebrokers_what_changes_would_you_make_to/c56x55f http://www.reddit.com/r/circlebroke/comments/vqy9y/dear_circ... It's possible HN suffers from the same flaw (initial sort and feedback loop from such) since it's the natural (naive) way to produce such algorithms. The machine can't tell if it's quality content or just easy to upvote, and the latter is more common. TL;DR: Visibility == early votes from people who have no interest in depth and don't read the articles anyway. edit: fixed links
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    - agent00f 12y ago
      Thanks, fixed. Have no idea why they got broken.
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- sheetjs 12y ago
  > It's possible HN suffers from the same flaw (initial sort and feedback loop from such) since it's the natural (naive) way to produce such algorithms. I always assumed that's why blatant blogspam sometimes makes it to the front page of HN.
raldi 12y ago
Aww, I remember when Chris Slowe was reddit's favorite scientist.
kordless 12y ago
When it first launched, Reddit's founders used software to fake a large number of users to make it look like the site was more populated than it really was. I really don't see how someone doing this with their own posts is any better or worse. Does it really matter if the content is good?
- wmeredith 12y ago
  I'm pretty sure "do as I say, not as I do." Is the house rule, for, well... everywhere that humans exist.
- nmjohn 12y ago
  I think there is a very large difference. Reddit doing it, although some would argue unethical, was meant to make reddit even usable. It was one of those sites where it takes a critical mass to become usable, and without that critical mass it would be very challenging to actually get it. So they faked it until they had it - and it worked very well. Someone doing it on their own only serves to benefit them - and their karma count. The goal isn't to benefit the larger community or make the site more usable - it only is to boost their ego. > Does it really matter if the content is good? Unidan had a lot of very good content, I cannot argue with that. However he also had a lot of really shitty content that under anyone else would have been downvoted to hell. Unfortunately his user page was taken down so I can't provide examples. But the problem is, that this bad content pushed other people's content out of view.
CamperBob2 12y ago
That sucks, I always enjoyed (and learned from) Unidan's posts. What a weird thing for him to do with his hard-earned reputation.
- CamperBob2 12y ago
  Oh, sorry, I meant, "Wow, Unidan sucks. I always knew he'd turn out to be a bad egg. Good riddance." Better?
na85 12y ago
It seems the real issue is the cult of personality that develops around these people. It happens here on HN as well. There exists a large cadre of people who rally around certain well-known community figures and eventually morph into sycophantic zealots. The positive-feedback cycle stemming from early votes serves only to create an illusion of consensus, and many impressionable users begin to form thoughts like "that many upvotes can't be wrong" etc. That, IMO, is the real problem with up/downvote systems.
- nmjohn 12y ago
  I've also noticed that when someone disagrees with one of the types of people you're speaking about, they tend to get downvoted very quickly - even if they present a well thought out critique that isn't rude or negative whatsoever. Not all the time - I'm sure there are plenty of counterexamples - but enough I thought it was worth pointing out.
  - minimaxir 12y ago
    In this case with Undian, the person who was arguing with him had all her posts systemically downvoted and was harrassed. It's worth noting that Hacker News disables downvotes on submissions older than 2 weeks.
    - na85 12y ago
      nmjohn's point is valid. Disagree with pg in a comments thread here and watch the downvotes fly, even if your argument is rational and your tone polite.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  A slight but important difference is that Reddit idolizes semianonymous users, while the most-respected users on Hacker News have fully-transparent identities. The identity of the idol, and the lack thereof, can change the perception of this funny super-commenter completely. Source: I gained internet notoriety through my comments on TechCrunch under my real name. As far as I know, I don't have any sycophantic zealots.
baby 12y ago
> I had five 'vote alts' when things were in the new list, or to vote on stuff when I guess I got too hot-headed. I can totally understand that, I used to spend a huge times on forums, communities, etc... And I also used to have a bad temper. Of course I created fake accounts to upvote myself and downvote others. I'm pretty sure anyone who is a bit clever and also a sour loser/has a bad temper, has done that before. And only 5 accounts? Maybe there are others, but that's really minimal. That's "unprofessional" which is a good thing and I really think things are getting blown out of proportion. Reddit wouldn't be the same without this guy, that he acted like a kid or not. PS: What is actually sad here, is that he wasn't doing it to give to the community, but just for internet points.
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ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
If he honestly cared about sharing his knowledge with the world and not his ego, he wouldn't he would have come back under a different, anonymous name; not UnidanX.
myhf 12y ago
sigh Here's the thing. You said "vote manipulation is cheating the site." Is it in the same family? Yes. No one's arguing that. As someone who is a scientist who studies web forums, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls multi-voting cheating. If you want to be "specific" like you said, then you shouldn't either. They're not the same thing. If you're saying "vote manipulation family" you're referring to the taxonomic grouping of votidae, which includes things from posting quality original content to asking strangers for upvotes to running vote-bots through proxies. So your reasoning for calling multi-voting cheating is because random people "call the unusual votes cheating?" Let's get copypasta and image macros in there, then, too. Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It's not one or the other, that's not how taxonomy works. They're both. A bot-vote is a bot-vote and a type of vote manipulation. But that's not what you said. You said vote manipulation is cheating, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all members of the vote manipulation family cheating, which means you'd call good posting, bad posting, and copypasta cheating, too. Which you said you don't. It's okay to just admit you're wrong, you know?
- GhotiFish 12y ago
  I... Is there some context I'm missing here? It's an article taking about unidan having a bunch of alts to vote himself up. Referring to that as vote manipulation is a completely acceptable practice. Why are you being so pedandic? You must have a reason. I refuse to believe you see this as a "Terrible trend that must be stopped". Because that would be hopelessly insane. edit: >Is there some context I'm missing here? answer: YES give me a link or something, jesus -.-
  - myhf 12y ago
    Unidan's post that led to the ban: http://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/2byyca/reddit_helps_me_focus_on_the_important_things/cjb37ee http://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/2byyca/reddit...

73 points by antr 12y ago

onedognight 12y ago

> Reddit's Favorite Scientist That's being too generous. I would vote for RobotRollCall as Reddit's Favorite Scientist.

kmfrk 12y ago
She hasn't posted in two years.
iLoch 12y ago
Then you'd be wrong - if we're talking about popular opinion.
nhebb 12y ago
I thought they were referring to Neil deGrasse Tyson, which made the title highly implausible.

minimaxir 12y ago

/r/subredditdrama has a more honest albeit less neutral recap of the events: http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/2c9ida/recap_unibanned_a_recap_of_the_fallout_of_reddits/ http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/2c9ida/recap... Vote cheating was only the final straw: part of it was a silly argument between Undian and another user.

shitlord 12y ago
The argument wasn't the reason he got banned, though. The admins don't care at all if users argue with each another like idiots. That's the subreddit moderators' problem. It was the blatant vote manipulation that did him in. The admins only ever ban users who break one of the five rules or make the site look bad. They should probably do a lot more...

codezero 12y ago

I'm pretty surprised reddit's backend doesn't just automatically devalue this kind of vote cheating. In the general case, it's really easy to detect, and if your cheater is a bit more sophisticated, it's still not that hard, it takes a really serious person to have five accounts on five different browsers/vpcs that each come from different IP addresses consistently, even then, when you see them colluding together, you can still devalue those votes simply because it's an obvious clique taking early action consistently, so even then it should be pretty detectable. I don't see a reason to ban someone over this behavior as long as you can make sure that the fraudulent votes don't actually add any value to the content, which they shouldn't.

raverbashing 12y ago
I think the real issue is the relative weight between the first votes and the rest
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dang 12y ago
> In the general case, it's really easy to detect Why do you say that? I've worked hard on this problem and would not call it easy.
- codezero 12y ago
  When I say general case, I mean random person creates an account or two to upvote their own stuff. This is usually trivial to detect if you save a single cookie that's linked to each account, even easier if you are also using more tenacious tracking like flash cookies or localstorage or the dreaded evercookie. In the less general case, you can still determine that a particular group of accounts never take action in the same small time windows. The way I've approached this problem in the past relies heavily on meta data about the user. It's easy to determine if an IP is a proxy/VPN, which should immediately make a client more suspicious (when you're already suspicious about fraudulent voting). Initially, account ages are important but if someone is able to get away with it for a long time, they can get complacent and keep using the same accounts, and at that point you can look at things like upvote/downvote ratios (or generally the lack of diversity in voting activity) compared to some expected average activity. There's a lot of other tricks, but I don't know what your approach has been when working on this, and I know HN is a much different platform from what I worked with :P

un_publishable 12y ago

> Despite being banned, Unidan has already made a new account, called UnidanX, and has been posting for most of the day under that username. It's looking like he hasn't been banned with that username yet. What's the point of trying again, he's already lost the trust of the community and his name is a red flag. Is that subreddit super-forgiving? Or maybe the turnover is so high people will just forget?

wamsachel 12y ago
It's because for the most part he posts some very educational stuff. So hopefully he just learned his lesson.
- middleclick 12y ago
  Not to be cynical, I don't think he did. He was doing what he was doing till the time he was caught. It's not like he told the community himself. He is just trying to play the nice guy game to save his image. His doing this is dishonest -- plain and simple. Don't get me wrong. He is really good in his field and knows a lot. I learned a lot from him and if he posts stuff, I will read it again. But this behaviour is dishonesty.
  - shitlord 12y ago
    He actually lied, straight-up. He said he only downvoted misinformation, but it turns out he downvoted others' submissions (to make his own submissions look better).
  - floatrock 12y ago
    > He is just trying to play the nice guy game to save his image. His doing this is dishonest -- plain and simple. If he was being honest, would it look any different? Or is the pitchfork mob just demanding blood? On the one hand a reputation takes years to create and only a second to destroy. On the other hand, holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. Personally I think if you want to be angry at something there's much more insidious manipulation going on. Unidan makes great content and gets people excited about his biology research... remember him for that, not for his amateur inability to execute a proper astroturfing botnet campaign. At the very least, let him be reborn with a new username and see what he can build. Isn't the ability to bounce back from failure and mistakes what we celebrate here on hn?

agent00f 12y ago

Why this matters: Visibility on Reddit is essentially predicated on early votes. Get a few upvotes and even mediocre comments will often remain at the top due to momentum. Less than -4 and it's doomed to oblivion (ie. downvote the competition). One of the most popular linked sites on reddit (quickmeme) got to where it was with only a few strategically placed votes for each link, and it took ages for them to be found out and similarly banned: http://www.dailydot.com/business/reddit-quickmeme-banned-miltz-brothers/ http://www.dailydot.com/business/reddit-quickmeme-banned-mil... More broadly, the algorithm reddit uses is not only known wrong/buggy: http://technotes.iangreenleaf.com/posts/2013-12-09-reddits-empire-is-built-on-a-flawed-algorithm.html http://technotes.iangreenleaf.com/posts/2013-12-09-reddits-e... but also generally defective: http://www.reddit.com/r/circlebroke/comments/vqy9y/dear_circlebrokers_what_changes_would_you_make_to/c56x55f http://www.reddit.com/r/circlebroke/comments/vqy9y/dear_circ... It's possible HN suffers from the same flaw (initial sort and feedback loop from such) since it's the natural (naive) way to produce such algorithms. The machine can't tell if it's quality content or just easy to upvote, and the latter is more common. TL;DR: Visibility == early votes from people who have no interest in depth and don't read the articles anyway. edit: fixed links

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  - agent00f 12y ago
    Thanks, fixed. Have no idea why they got broken.
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sheetjs 12y ago
> It's possible HN suffers from the same flaw (initial sort and feedback loop from such) since it's the natural (naive) way to produce such algorithms. I always assumed that's why blatant blogspam sometimes makes it to the front page of HN.

raldi 12y ago

Aww, I remember when Chris Slowe was reddit's favorite scientist.

kordless 12y ago

When it first launched, Reddit's founders used software to fake a large number of users to make it look like the site was more populated than it really was. I really don't see how someone doing this with their own posts is any better or worse. Does it really matter if the content is good?

wmeredith 12y ago
I'm pretty sure "do as I say, not as I do." Is the house rule, for, well... everywhere that humans exist.
nmjohn 12y ago
I think there is a very large difference. Reddit doing it, although some would argue unethical, was meant to make reddit even usable. It was one of those sites where it takes a critical mass to become usable, and without that critical mass it would be very challenging to actually get it. So they faked it until they had it - and it worked very well. Someone doing it on their own only serves to benefit them - and their karma count. The goal isn't to benefit the larger community or make the site more usable - it only is to boost their ego. > Does it really matter if the content is good? Unidan had a lot of very good content, I cannot argue with that. However he also had a lot of really shitty content that under anyone else would have been downvoted to hell. Unfortunately his user page was taken down so I can't provide examples. But the problem is, that this bad content pushed other people's content out of view.

CamperBob2 12y ago

That sucks, I always enjoyed (and learned from) Unidan's posts. What a weird thing for him to do with his hard-earned reputation.

CamperBob2 12y ago
Oh, sorry, I meant, "Wow, Unidan sucks. I always knew he'd turn out to be a bad egg. Good riddance." Better?

na85 12y ago

It seems the real issue is the cult of personality that develops around these people. It happens here on HN as well. There exists a large cadre of people who rally around certain well-known community figures and eventually morph into sycophantic zealots. The positive-feedback cycle stemming from early votes serves only to create an illusion of consensus, and many impressionable users begin to form thoughts like "that many upvotes can't be wrong" etc. That, IMO, is the real problem with up/downvote systems.

nmjohn 12y ago
I've also noticed that when someone disagrees with one of the types of people you're speaking about, they tend to get downvoted very quickly - even if they present a well thought out critique that isn't rude or negative whatsoever. Not all the time - I'm sure there are plenty of counterexamples - but enough I thought it was worth pointing out.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  In this case with Undian, the person who was arguing with him had all her posts systemically downvoted and was harrassed. It's worth noting that Hacker News disables downvotes on submissions older than 2 weeks.
  - na85 12y ago
    nmjohn's point is valid. Disagree with pg in a comments thread here and watch the downvotes fly, even if your argument is rational and your tone polite.
minimaxir 12y ago
A slight but important difference is that Reddit idolizes semianonymous users, while the most-respected users on Hacker News have fully-transparent identities. The identity of the idol, and the lack thereof, can change the perception of this funny super-commenter completely. Source: I gained internet notoriety through my comments on TechCrunch under my real name. As far as I know, I don't have any sycophantic zealots.

baby 12y ago

> I had five 'vote alts' when things were in the new list, or to vote on stuff when I guess I got too hot-headed. I can totally understand that, I used to spend a huge times on forums, communities, etc... And I also used to have a bad temper. Of course I created fake accounts to upvote myself and downvote others. I'm pretty sure anyone who is a bit clever and also a sour loser/has a bad temper, has done that before. And only 5 accounts? Maybe there are others, but that's really minimal. That's "unprofessional" which is a good thing and I really think things are getting blown out of proportion. Reddit wouldn't be the same without this guy, that he acted like a kid or not. PS: What is actually sad here, is that he wasn't doing it to give to the community, but just for internet points.

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ChikkaChiChi 12y ago

If he honestly cared about sharing his knowledge with the world and not his ego, he wouldn't he would have come back under a different, anonymous name; not UnidanX.

myhf 12y ago

sigh Here's the thing. You said "vote manipulation is cheating the site." Is it in the same family? Yes. No one's arguing that. As someone who is a scientist who studies web forums, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls multi-voting cheating. If you want to be "specific" like you said, then you shouldn't either. They're not the same thing. If you're saying "vote manipulation family" you're referring to the taxonomic grouping of votidae, which includes things from posting quality original content to asking strangers for upvotes to running vote-bots through proxies. So your reasoning for calling multi-voting cheating is because random people "call the unusual votes cheating?" Let's get copypasta and image macros in there, then, too. Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It's not one or the other, that's not how taxonomy works. They're both. A bot-vote is a bot-vote and a type of vote manipulation. But that's not what you said. You said vote manipulation is cheating, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all members of the vote manipulation family cheating, which means you'd call good posting, bad posting, and copypasta cheating, too. Which you said you don't. It's okay to just admit you're wrong, you know?

GhotiFish 12y ago
I... Is there some context I'm missing here? It's an article taking about unidan having a bunch of alts to vote himself up. Referring to that as vote manipulation is a completely acceptable practice. Why are you being so pedandic? You must have a reason. I refuse to believe you see this as a "Terrible trend that must be stopped". Because that would be hopelessly insane. edit: >Is there some context I'm missing here? answer: YES give me a link or something, jesus -.-
- myhf 12y ago
  Unidan's post that led to the ban: http://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/2byyca/reddit_helps_me_focus_on_the_important_things/cjb37ee http://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/2byyca/reddit...