5 ms·

I'm not sure I fully "get" it. Wouldn't more popular posters (like PG here on HN) be immediately considered in a voting ring, because the same people upvote the

I'm not sure I fully "get" it. Wouldn't more popular posters (like PG here on HN) be immediately considered in a voting ring, because the same people upvote their posts regularly? or an even more basic / stupid question - what exactly is a "voting ring"? does it mean people having some kind of a pact to always vote for each other?

antoinec 12y ago
I think it's more something like posting on Facebook: "Hey guys here is my HN submission, please upvote!", ie: making people upvote your content for another reason than because they find it interesting
tlb 12y ago
It's a spectrum, there's no black-and-white definition. On one end there are posts that get votes from people who visit the front/new page, vote for multiple things and make comments that get upvoted, and on the other end there are posts that get direct visits from accounts that only ever view and vote for posts from that one author. In the middle, there's a weighting function with empirically tuned parameters. While there are a few clever voting rings, the vast majority are just one guy with many sockpuppet accounts upvoting self-serving crap. HN doesn't need anything as fancy as HyperLogLog. Most voting rings are apparent within the first 20 votes so elementary data structures work fine. (I know how the HN system works and anecdotally how Reddit's used to work, but I'm being a bit generic here to avoid revealing that One Weird Trick to Get to the Top of HN.)
- cyphunk 12y ago
  if a ring introduces noise (meaning they attempt to avoid the "not clever" trap you describe) how does this effect the measurement? I can assume that introduction of noise is somewhat counter to the greed and objective of the ring leader. But now the objective would change to be meerly introducing enough noise to putting the metric on this ring in a state of question. With that though, of course this is better than a model that requires no noise. Forcing noise from the edges reduces the set of entries requiring human review and, still, human review might reveal with sufficient weight the existence of a possible ring. But, this is an evolution to the cat+mouse stage. Hence, rings could still survive if clever? With that question (ring survival with measured noise) set aside, it seems if the cat+mouse were to come in earnest that reputation dependent models would be a driver for mapping user "types" (social, political, behavioral models) in a much more accurate manner than the current driver of advertising (google wanting to increase price of adds)
tyho 12y ago
It would be more effective if only the first 100 votes were looked at because voting rings are used in the beginning to kickstart the post. In which case, the author wouldn't have an excuse to apply HLL.

antoinec 12y ago

I think it's more something like posting on Facebook: "Hey guys here is my HN submission, please upvote!", ie: making people upvote your content for another reason than because they find it interesting

tlb 12y ago

It's a spectrum, there's no black-and-white definition. On one end there are posts that get votes from people who visit the front/new page, vote for multiple things and make comments that get upvoted, and on the other end there are posts that get direct visits from accounts that only ever view and vote for posts from that one author. In the middle, there's a weighting function with empirically tuned parameters. While there are a few clever voting rings, the vast majority are just one guy with many sockpuppet accounts upvoting self-serving crap. HN doesn't need anything as fancy as HyperLogLog. Most voting rings are apparent within the first 20 votes so elementary data structures work fine. (I know how the HN system works and anecdotally how Reddit's used to work, but I'm being a bit generic here to avoid revealing that One Weird Trick to Get to the Top of HN.)

cyphunk 12y ago
if a ring introduces noise (meaning they attempt to avoid the "not clever" trap you describe) how does this effect the measurement? I can assume that introduction of noise is somewhat counter to the greed and objective of the ring leader. But now the objective would change to be meerly introducing enough noise to putting the metric on this ring in a state of question. With that though, of course this is better than a model that requires no noise. Forcing noise from the edges reduces the set of entries requiring human review and, still, human review might reveal with sufficient weight the existence of a possible ring. But, this is an evolution to the cat+mouse stage. Hence, rings could still survive if clever? With that question (ring survival with measured noise) set aside, it seems if the cat+mouse were to come in earnest that reputation dependent models would be a driver for mapping user "types" (social, political, behavioral models) in a much more accurate manner than the current driver of advertising (google wanting to increase price of adds)

tyho 12y ago

It would be more effective if only the first 100 votes were looked at because voting rings are used in the beginning to kickstart the post. In which case, the author wouldn't have an excuse to apply HLL.