HN Explorer

Ask PG: Hiding Submitter

5 points by gsmaverick ↗ HN
There has been some talk recently about voting rings and how to combat them. As an experiment I think it would be interesting to hide the submitter of the article or waiting until after you have voted on it to display the name of the submitter.

7 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 21.9 ms ] thread
ratsbane
There's also a minor personality-cult voting phenomenon at work here. It may just be because some HNers follow the comment threads of high-score or celebrated HNers, but I've noticed some people do get a lot more upvotes for mundane comments than I would expect.

On the other side, there is social aspect - I know a lot of HNers just by their usernames here; knowing a little of the writer's context makes a comment more relevant and interesting.

Perhaps it's worth a short experiment? What if there were a way of identifying within a thread which comments were by the same person?

gsmaverick
I think you might have misunderstood. I'm suggesting this be done just for submissions, not for comments.
ratsbane
Yes, I'm sorry; I did misunderstand. Is story rank only a factor of up/down-votes to the story weighted by time or does it also include a factor based on number, depth, and scores on comments under that story?
ScottWhigham
Would that really get around the voting rings though? I don't think so. I thought that they worked mainly by passing links around via twitter, IM, or email. Hiding the submitter wouldn't solve something like that.
duck
I had heard of the Digg "mafia"/voting rings before, but these latest threads were really the first I had read about it. From my understanding these happen through other channels and not just from a username and thus this wouldn't really change anything regarding them.

Personally, I think usernames are needed because they give HN the personality that it has. There are some people you might disagree with constantly, but you still value their input. Without names, you might not understand where they are coming from. Maybe this is more regarding comments, but sometimes submissions too.

dstein
An easier solution is to remove the points received for stories submitted.