6 ms·
I think the problem is how easy it is to game HN, how effective it is to game HN, and how random and spurious it is if you don't game HN. It's really difficult
by austenallred 11y ago
I think the problem is how easy it is to game HN, how effective it is to game HN, and how random and spurious it is if you don't game HN.
It's really difficult to just have your post get to the front page organically. It's possible (and probable) that when you submit there just aren't enough people looking at the /new page, so a lot of it comes down to sheer luck. A lot of good/great posts go by unnoticed. Getting 1 or 2 friends to upvote would probably increase your likelihood of being on the front page by 90%.
I've been gravitating towards things like http://lpushx.com http://lpushx.com, both because they're smaller, and because everything has more of a chance to "survive."
Ironically, this post just exposes how helpful it is to do the behavior it discourages. When you're trying to kill a lucrative behavior (especially something that exposes a loophole), saying, "Please don't do this behavior" is probably the worst way to do so. Now several people just figured out that you can game the system. I would recommend dang kill this.
- andybak 11y agoThis just occurred to me and I'm sure it's probably already been considered. The home page should have display a sidebar or similar with the top 5 or so 'new' items. They then have a chance to catch someone's eye and get voted up to the 'real' front page. I'd love to spend more time on 'new' - I just tend to forget about it. Something that improved the visibility of new items would help me (..help HN)
- drdeca 11y agoI agree that something like this could be good. Maybe instead of a sidebar, it could have them interspersed throughout the page? (possibly with the additional requirement that they wouldn't already be on the front page)
- jsnell 11y agoThe average post in /newest is so bad that it's not clear you want to promote any of them to the frontpage randomly. I'd guess on average on a 30 item page of /newest I might click through two links, and upvote one. I actually wonder if the stats in this post can possibly be correct. Never would have guessed that anywhere near 10-20% of the submissions hit 10 points. There's a lot of spam and offtopic stuff, and it is indeed really common for great posts to get lost in the noise with just a couple of votes.
- maxerickson 11y agoIt's probably from dupe submissions counting as votes.
- dang 11y ago> The average post in /newest is so bad that it's not clear you want to promote any of them to the frontpage randomly. You're quite right. We tested this, and it was terrible.
- pavel_lishin 11y agoWhat about the first five posts from the 2nd page of /newest, with the added addition that at least one newer than it must be dead (e.g., moderators have at least looked at the queue)?
- dang 11y ago[dead] stories are often, perhaps mostly, killed by software.
- dmckeon 11y agoShowing the top 5 would just move the gaming to a different playing field. Perhaps add 1 item at random (or a per-user configurable N items) from the last few hours of 'new' to the bottom of the front page?
- minimaxir 11y ago> I think the problem is how easy it is to game HN, how effective it is to game HN, and how random and spurious it is if you don't game HN. I didn't discuss it in the original post, but HN has an anti-gaming mechanism: flagging. Flagging is much more powerful than an upvote. If a completely terrible article/startup is posted and gamed so that it hits the Top 5, the attention will cause it to get more flags faster and die even faster. Thus, it's self correcting. This also addresses your "promoting a loophole" argument.
- austenallred 11y agoYou don't know if something has been gamed unless it's blatantly obvious or they're tweeting about it. So flagging doesn't solve that problem.
- tptacek 11y agoPlease don't use flags as downvotes, though. Flag things that are inappropriate for HN. Don't flag things to try to rebalance the front page.
- woah 11y agoWeren't you the one advocating flagging of surveillance-related news articles?
- tptacek 11y agoI don't flag "surveillance articles". I flag political articles, and blogspam retreads of things that have already generated 300-comment threads earlier in the day. I think HN is really bad at discussing surveillance issues, but I don't think that makes the articles --- which are mostly about technology --- inappropriate for HN.
- woah 11y agoThis only works for blatantly terrible articles. There is a lot of gaming of ok or mediocre startup announcements. I have personally seen it being done (and even participated!) to great effect. It's called bugging your friends for up votes.
- m_t 11y agoA bit off topic. 1. Went to lpushx to see what it is about. 2. First latest post is about having a link to lpushx from HN 3. One of the comment is *LE HACKERNEWS ARMY IS HERE LOL* So my question is, should I try to visit it again tomorrow? Is it worth it?
- austenallred 11y agoYeah, people are actually pissed at me for linking to it. Give it a couple hours, things fall off pretty fast. The good stuff isn't automatically at the top (like HN presumably would be). But there's always interesting stuff in there.
- ljk 11y agolooks like there are some unannounced visitors (4chan) on the site now..
- dang 11y agoIf anyone tries to act on what you say here, they're likely to get their and their friends' accounts thwacked. > how easy it is We see a lot of people trying to game HN, and I can tell you they are not having an easy time of it [1]. Of course we don't see any who manage to fool us plus the software plus the community, but do you have reason to believe there are many of those? I doubt it's a good bet. > how effective it is I go back and look at the data when people post about how they've gotten results by gaming HN, and what I see is a trail of penalized accounts. We sometimes turn the voting ring penalty off when a story is of interest to the community, but that doesn't mean the accounts got away with it. > how random and spurious it is The randomness of what gets elevated from /newest has indeed been a problem, but we've put a huge amount of work—of both kinds, development and grunt—into addressing this in recent months [2,3]. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9857874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9857874 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9828818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9828818 3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134
- austenallred 11y agoI suppose "easy" is a relative term. Thanks for all you do; none of these problems are trivial.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- halotrope 11y agoUsually the front page of HN contains very little noise compared to most other things I know. But maybe this is some reverse psychology where seeing the thing on the front page validates it enough to be of interest for me.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]