HN Explorer

Ask HN: Does Hacker News Employ Anti-Manipulation Measures?

5 points by mamurphy ↗ HN
This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjLsFnQejP8&feature=youtu.be) (reddit comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/5une6u/reddit_is_being_manipulated_by_professional/) clearly shows that Reddit can be and is being manipulated to get stories promoted, sometimes to the front page.

This got me thinking as to whether the votes on Hacker News are being manipulated.

As an example, thinking about the front page in the past months, there seem to be some articles about cloud platforms that don't seem particularly newsworthy to me. News of the sort:

Company A's $Billions/Year Cloud Platform: Now with a new blog!

Company B's $Billions/Year Cloud Platform: Now with niche-use-case feature X.

Company C's $Billions/Year Cloud Platform: A Yearly Review.

Are there anti-manipulation measures in place? Are these types of cloud stories more newsworthy than I thought? Do you worry that vote totals of certain stories on HN are being manipulated?

4 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 9.0 ms ] thread
benologist
YC has a team of people watching HN in addition to programatic solutions. Turn on "Show Dead" in your account and look at /new and you'll see plenty of people and companies trying to exploit HN.

A site was on the front page last week selling upvotes on HN:

https://upvotes.club/ + https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676362

I suspect-without-enough-proof that that is the third 'exploit HN repeatedly' business plan I've seen this year, I made a thread yesterday to surface ideas that might be working - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718417

mamurphy
I tried searching for the thread you referenced and couldn't find it, but found this one from today on the low 2nd page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13724990).

It's good that people are becoming aware of the reddit manipulation; if Reddit is being manipulated and HN uses such a similar design, I have to imagine people are trying to manipulate HN.

benologist
HN has ~a decade of history of manipulation in the past and more traffic than ever so naturally it will be targeted more too. If you see anything you think is manipulated this is the person to contact -

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang

He's got all the data to confirm suspicions and can be reached via hn@ycombinator.com, doesn't matter how many times you're wrong either lol.

wmf
There are reportedly algorithms to detect voting rings and such.

If we consider the prototypical HN reader to be working at a startup building a cloud-hosted mobile-first location-based social app then these stories are indeed relevant.