HN Explorer

Tell HN: My way of doing 'community service' on HN

30 points by jacquesm ↗ HN
As a long time user I try to do my bit in keeping HN nice and getting quality content on the homepage. With the enormous rate at which content is being submitted there are a number of things that you can do to help out (once you have accumulated enough karma to do so):

HN has a very limited amount of front page area and the new page scrolls by insanely fast.

Depending on the number of spammers active good submissions might not even be on the homepage for more than 15 minutes.

So if you want to help out then I suggest visiting the new page frequently, upvoting the good stuff (keep an eye out for dupes, and remember to check pages 2 and 3 as well) and flagging spam, those are the biggest factors in getting quality content noticed and not doing these things by enough people are a major factor in good content being lost.

How to spot a spammer...

It's a bit of a Bayesian approach but these factors help me to decide whether to flag content or not:

- new account

- no comment participation (or maybe just a 'test' comment)

- first link posted within seconds of account creation

- first link posted a political or controversial subject

- Or other low quality content

- Always submitting the same domain

- re-submitting the same url over and over again

- many submissions per day

If it's a 'mild case' then I flag the entry, if it is more serious (10+ submissions in a relatively short time for instance) then I mail the moderators.

I try to do this cycle a number of times per day and if enough people do this the homepage will be more varied and interesting.

10 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 35.2 ms ] thread
hermanmerman
The checks look simple/unambiguous enough for a bot to do the work. Maybe a dual machine/human approach is the right one: a bot scans /new every 15 min for those factors, and updates a list of suspicious links/accounts, and then humans review this list and take action. Valve does something similar to detect cheaters on CS:GO by the way.
gus_massa
There are a lot of banned sites, users, ip and keywords, that autokill the submissions. The problem is that some articles are not so easy to classify. For example "5 tips to optimize your web page conversion" is probably a SEO advertisement spam, but there is a little chance that it has some interesting content and some new unknown information.

The humans check the no-autodead submissions. The amount of very good submissions is very low, so it's not necessary to filter them from the new page.

chollida1
Just as a word of caution. I used to do exactly this and my flagging privileges were "taken away", and this was with flagging at most 5 stories a day.

My flagging privileges have since been magically returned though, so maybe I was on a year long time out? :)

Thanks for doing this by the way!

dangrossman
I used to flag bad submissions, then my flag link silently disappeared for about a year. Since I must not know how it's supposed to be used, I rarely flag anymore.
grey-area
They should allow down votes on stories - I always hesitate with flagging as I don't really know what it does.
jacquesm
Flags affect the rankings and enough flags will kill a story. Moderators may/will look at stories with more than a few flags.
minimaxir
Spammers are a lesser problem than contentless thought pieces, as the former rarely receives genuine upvotes anyways.
apetresc
If the latter is receiving genuine upvotes, then it doesn't sound like it's much of a problem.
seren
Maybe it would be adding too much complexity, but a "mark as duplicate" button could be really helpful to have more meaningful "new queue". For every major topic that is already discussed on the front page, there are a handful of submissions discussing the exact same topic in the queue. And then a few more for a few days.
l4in
I find your approach quite bad as a recent user. It is really difficult to get new content onto HN while similar posts from a subset of users gets popular.