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This is a very clever article. I suggest further research into whether vote-rings are actually indicative of product teams and founders with strong networks wh
by valee 11y ago
This is a very clever article. I suggest further research into whether vote-rings are actually indicative of product teams and founders with strong networks who they are able to motivate to support them. It may be that up votes from voting rings are just as useful (or perhaps more) in determining the likelihood of success of a product.
- tosseraccount 11y agoIs it still a vote ring if it's "unconscious" ?
- teh_klev 11y agoThis is/was a problem on Stack Overflow (retired mod here). Work colleagues in the same office or company upvoting each other's questions or answers. You could often tell it was fairly innocent from the activity on their accounts (active, positive participation, asking and answering with reasonably good posts) and from the spread of votes (lots of upvotes given to/from unrelated users outweighing their votering count). But sometimes the votering detection would ring bells and when contacted these users had genuinely not considered what they were doing was creating a votering, yet were willing to understand the problem at hand and back off from each other a bit.
- molotv 11y agoI'm the admin for one of the rare instance of Stack behind a corporate firewall, which doesn't have votering detection - I've noticed this happening among a few co-located sprint teams. I created a d3.js Sankey Diagram to show the volume of people voting for other people and posted it on the site to let the community discuss it and it died down.
- dataker 11y agoHm...probably not. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1647826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1647826 Voting rings undermine the exposure of truly successful products, while giving preference to a possibly inferior friend's product.
- bigtunacan 11y agoTo valee's point though. I also believe collusion ratings could be found very high in cases where this is not a "voter ring" issue, but more an issue of who has a better network and/or is better at marketing. Take Amy Hoy for instance (at least some people here on hacker news will know who she is). She has more than 16,000 followers on Twitter right now. I have 79 followers. She is good at marketing and it must have taken time for her to build up all of those followers. If she were to put several products on Product Hunt and I were to put up competitive products to each of those and we both tweeted about our Product Hunt posting naturally she will get more upvotes. Some of these upvotes will likely come from the same people, some of her most fanatical loyal customers. To the algorithm this might look like collusion/voting ring, but it is just some basic and completely ethical marketing.
- doppenhe 11y agoagreed , this type analysis only open a direction to look further in and do not provide any absolutes (as most data analysis).
- EGreg 11y agoAfter several rounds of the same people always being in the first ten people to vote, how doesnt that fit the defition of a voting ring?
- bigtunacan 11y agoI'm not saying the voting ring problem doesn't exist, but that the question of "is this ethical" is one that is more difficult to answer than this algorithm. I think the developers who ran this collusion algorithm must agree with this to some extent, otherwise there would be no reason to pseudo-anonymize the results. To give an example. If I were to create fake accounts and then do some type of automated up-voting system for my own posts; in my mind that is clearly unethical behavior. If I announce to my existing customers that I have posted something and they go of their free accord and up-vote this is clearly ethical behavior. If I ask my existing customer/friends/family to go up-vote me I believe this falls into a grayer area, but I would personally say this too is unethical.