HN Explorer

Ask NH: Are people hacking hacker news?

13 points by jagira ↗ HN
In recent days, I have seen a lot of stories/urls/questions, which do not deserve to be on first page of HN, but they are.

It is obvious that the story will gradually move down the list if its content has no worth, but to be on first page gives enough exposure.

If I ask some of my friends to vote my submission up within minutes of submission, it will bring the story on first page and then if I ask them to keep voting in batches, the story will stay there.

I am not sure whether HN algorithm checks for such voting patterns or not. If it does not, how can it or we prevent such acts?

11 comments

[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 40.3 ms ] thread
getonit
> If I ask some of my friends to vote my submission up within minutes of submission

If you and everyone else stopped doing things like that, the front page might start to mean something again.

jagira
It was an example. I do not know anybody else on HN. :-)
getonit
How do you know it does that, then?
sp332
OP is asking, "Does HN detect and deter voting rings?"
getonit
"it will" != "will it"
jagira
"it" refers to an hypothetical scenario.

The lack of clarity about this issue is clear by the context of the post.

getonit
You didn't try it, then?
jagira
The reason for asking this question was to know whether HN has implemented such features or are they working on such features?

Did I screw the message up? Or was it difficult to comprehend?

getonit
> Did I screw the message up? Or was it difficult to comprehend?

I chose to ignore the main question, which yes, I did comprehend and no, you didn't screw up - it just doesn't interest me. The sub-point I was interested in - the broader picture - is the one I responded to, hence the quote in my reply.

Jun8
Unfortunately your questions has now become meta, i.e. it doesn't belong on first page, but alas, as of now it is.

I normally do not comment on the "recently I've noticed HN is going down the drain" type posts and questions, since I think doing so is akin to a reply-all with a "please remove me from this list" message to an email posted to the wrong list: it just makes a bad thing perpetuate (man, this happened recently in my company, and it took three days for the idiotic removal requests to die down).

Getting worked up about the quality of this or that newsgroup is, I think, similar to language police mentality, i.e. trying to get rid of (generally English) loan words. Canada (Quebec), France, and now China is trying to do it, but (i) it's futile, since language (and newsgroups) are dynamic entities, shaped chaotically by a large group of people and (ii) you look ridiculous in trying to do what cannot be done.

Why is this so hard to understand?