We've seen some fairly aggressive voting rings organized by publications with well known names. Only a few are actually banned though. Usually we just take away the voting ring members' ability to vote.
I deal with so many folks trying to scam our search engine every day I can't imagine the hordes at that gate here.
Reddit's response seems to be to take away the cheese in order to make the site less appealing to the rats. Its one strategy.
So far I've found that making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has changed is most effective at keeping them from getting worse. The first time we tried returning a straight error code for a robot search we got to see how fast a robot could send requests (pretty damn fast!) but we can send them the same 10 bogus serps again and again and again and they will chew their robot cud all day.
So far I've found that making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has changed is most effective at keeping them from getting worse.
Right. The quality of feedback information is one of the biggest factors in development cost. The bugs you can't reliably recreate are the biggest problems, sometimes by one or two orders of magnitude.
This should be used as a weapon in the security battle. Seems like not enough people use it.
In all likelihood, the scam initiator is not the same person as the scam implementor, so "making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has changed" is likely to inflate their costs tenfold. This also works when the scam is entirely the work of one person, but it's especially effective when multiple parties are involved.
Well, since this is a tactic that works best if the bad actor never finds out about it, isn't it possible lots of people do it without ever talking about it?
This usually fails because someone isn't strong enough to not respond. Or someone engages because it's a fun conversation for them. Examples of this on HN are some of the political discussions (eg Palestine) where people really should just flag and ignore but often people engage.
I once submitted a link from my blog to Reddit. It didn't complain, but the submission wasn't viewed by anybody, being totally absent from Reddit and I was able to see the submission only if I was logged in.
I then talked to the moderators about it and they said that my link submission history contained multiple items from my blog, so the automatic spam filtering kicked-in, with my domain being blacklisted. Because the submission was good and ontopic, one moderator proceeded to whitelist my domain again.
I don't know if the key for this silent ban was just the domain name or the combination of (username, domain name), but it was a silent ban.
That isn't a shadowban. That's just the regular spam filter. A shadow ban is a slightly different approach. A shadowbanned user, when logged in can see his posts and comments as if they were there normally, but only he can see them. Other users don't even know about the existence of them. (Mods can see shadowbanned user comments and posts in their subreddits, but normally don't approve them because each post/comment has to be approved manually.)
Sometimes. Sometimes people try to build databases of pages about people, you know search for "Kennedy, Alice" and then get all the pages we have, then "Kennedy, Bob" ... "Kennedy, Charles" etc. People then try to offer "Find out about <name>!" types of services on their web sites. Or some wordpress theme will have a sql injection vulnerability and we'll get robots trying to find every site we know about that run that particular theme. There is lots of stuff you can do when you have a copy of the Internet, not all of it 'good.'
Now we do sell API access to our index, but not for stuff like this.
When I was at Google there is a new hire class that talks a bit about security and 'bad' queries. There is an admonishment in the class notes to 'not' experiment with those queries unless you were a member of SecOps. They claimed they would notice, and they would track you down.
So to answer the meta question, all search engines have this problem. I know this is true because of the new hire class at Google (largest search engine) and because we (Blekko) offer our index through API access to a number of smaller brands you may have tried and by doing that we see what they see in terms of search queries.
Generally there is someone in an operations role at those partners with whom I can share notes and pass along the latest fashion in terms of scams.
By bad queries, you mean if you query "how to buy links without getting notice", Google will track you down, find out who you are, and try and get your sites penalized?
No, I mean queries that look for things like exposed credit card numbers or passwords, or vulnerable software. Web crawlers don't discriminate in what they index and inexperienced or inept web administrators sometimes put things out there that they shouldn't.
Criminals attempt to exploit that, using search engine results to figure out likely targets.
There are also people who try to exploit keyword searches and the advertisers who buy advertisements on them but that is less obviously criminal.
Interesting so Google has an "Internal Afairs" dept who audit themselves ie if some one looks up celbrities details internaly either for curiosity or to sell to the tabloid press.
I know that big telcos have internal security goups and British Telecoms had/has a ferocious rep.
BT got even stricter after some one got a temp job and looked up the x diretory numbers for one of the Queens residences.
After that they started doing posative vetting for team leads on major projects - that is the equivelent of TS clearance in the USA
I've spotted The Atlantic going some cheesy things, and as much as I like some of their content, it really dims my opinion of them. For instance, take a look at these two submissions on the same day:
It's not just the meaningless stubs that I found fishy. It was the same article, posted twice on the same day to two different URL's, by the same person - the author of the article.
The Atlantic is in the content business, and in case you hadn't heard, that space is having its lunch eaten. It's part of the job to produce content and figure out how to have it read. That involves playing around with things.
I don't really find it reprehensible that people write and then promote their own content, whether that's music, movies or the written word. What else should be done? Establish centralized "distribution" centres? Wait a minute...
Promoting your articles on Twitter, Facebook, Google News and other channels expressly designed for that kind of purpose is fine.
Submitting your own articles once to a place like HN or reddit is pretty shady in the first place; since that's not the intent of these sites. The intent of these sites is sharing stuff you found, not stuff you created.
Submitting your own article twice is just a dick move.
>"Submitting your own articles once to a place like HN or reddit is pretty shady in the first place"
I just disagree. These sites operate pretty well as martkets. If your stuff sucks, I likely won't stumble on it.
>"since that's not the intent of these sites"
Ironic, since we have a "Show HN" topic here, the sole purpose of which is to do what you're saying shouldn't be done.
>"The intent of these sites is sharing stuff you found, not stuff you created."
I want to read good content; I don't care who submits it. I'd rather risk people submitting their own crap sometimes than never getting a chance to read something good that nobody "found".
Spamming is one thing, and obnoxious. But I find it a tad hypocritical to accept A/B testing colours on a button to squeeze another buck from someone, but reject someone A/B testing content to find out what combination of words in the title creates the most page views. It's the same business.
> Spamming is one thing, and obnoxious. But I find it a tad hypocritical to accept A/B testing colours on a button to squeeze another buck from someone, but reject someone A/B testing content to find out what combination of words in the title creates the most page views. It's the same business.
Oh come on. It's clearly not the changing of the URL in and of itself that I was objecting to. It's the doing it for the express purpose of submitting it twice to a site which has a filter set up in order to prevent that behavior.
I can't believe you didn't understand that from the get go, so I can only conclude that you are being deliberately obtuse which is annoying.
People like seeing friendly, human-readable URLs. But it's bad practice to depend on them--if the title changes for some reason, you can break old links. That's why these URIs include both a human-readable description (which is ignored) and the unique ID of the resource, which is what's really used to render the relevant page.
I don't think there's anything surprising about it. Lots of sites (including stackoverflow) make the slug useless so they (or users) can change the title whenever they want.
SEO-friendly URL's are fine, but meaningless dynamic slugs are a really Bad Idea.
Even if you remember to implement a canonical tag pointing to the "real" page, you risk people linking to these dummy pages (producing a minor loss of link value according to Cutts) or weird mangled versions coming into existence (think escaped referrer logs that make their way public and crawlers find, etc), and then bots have to take the time to request incorrect URL's and find out they're junk. Better to return a 404 or 301 to the correct page (if you know what it should be).
See, this is actually the kind of sh*t that SEO is about: usability for bots.
If you're going to have slug-type Urls, they should at least be unique, and if they do change, the old version should at least show a canonical link and/or 301 to the new one.
Usually this means keeping a record of every variation the Url has ever been for a piece of unique content.
A feature like that is a tremendous boon to karma whores. The Atlantic probably isn't the site to accomplish this, but such a feature could be used to effectively "outsource" your site's spamming to karma whoring cabals.
The thing I don't understand is why people are actually seeking karma by these means. Sonner or later they have to get cought, no? And once you are, all that precious karma will just evaporate, no?
I can understand spammers, kind of and even trolls in their own logic. But karma whores, in my understanding WANT to belong. So such a move would be quite, well, stupid.
It's funny because if you look at the HN poster's submissions, @mattobrian, his submit history is all Atlantic, Atlantic, Atlantic, Atlantic, etc., until 7 hours ago for the last 2 months when, boom, he posts a link to Slate. Feeling a change in the wind direction?
The problem is that the atlantic tends to post things worth reading (and their articles tend to be better than most blog posts) so really if you ban them, hn suffers.
The rest, I agree! Pando and TechCrunch in particular.
Don't hold your breath, though. Banning those sites would do a disservice to YC's portfolio; one of the tangible benefits of being in YC is easier access to the trade press. I really don't expect to see 'pg do anything to alienate anybody who could potentially write a useful story about a YC company.
(I'm fine with that as a cost of "not having to run a site like HN myself".)
Well, I hope the NYT articles (even the non datavis ones) provide a benefit other than normalizing relations between hackers and the general public. If the world needs to be better informed about the affairs of hackers, the hackers also benefit from knowing more about the world.
I personally disagree with regards of wired. And not only because I submit quite regularly from them (I just found out about, so don't be to harsh!). They sometimes have some interessting stuff. For me, again this is only my personal opinion, as long as a certain article has the potential to start interessting dicussions AND isn't just bait, I submit it.
But banning what one could call mainstream media from HN wouldn't do it favour. My impression is that I'm no the only non-hacker around here, so not strictly tech issues have their justification as far as I'm concerened. And if some content shows up that just doesn't fit, well simply don't vote for it or simply flag it. I for my part don't care who submitted a certain article or from which source as long as it's a good read or a good discussions. Perfect if it's both. Just my 5 cents.
Disclaimer: Not working for any of the above mentioned news outlets, and I don't even have a wired subscription. :-)
I'd vote for keeping NYT and Wired - however it's hard to algorithmically enforce the "only post original, substantive articles" rule. (I guess that's what voting and flagging and for though.)
That depends on whether you value the HN as a set of links, or as a place to discuss topics of the day. If it's the latter, then which particular articles are put up is of less importance than the quality of the comments and moderation system here on HN. I wonder how many people actually click the links and visit articles before commenting? The numbers might surprise us.
Why is that a bad thing? If these outlets are spouting off lies/bad science then having this behaviour noted is a good thing, indeed it's a great thing IMO.
Isn't the whole point that people can submit what they find of interest and what they believe will interest others? All it takes to "ban" them is to not vote them up.
The comment looked at the relationships of the banned sites and their competitive nature with the other Condé Nast properties, and how they are in fact some of the biggest competitors to these said properties.
I don't personally think it's a bad thing to submit one's own stuff (who doesn't like DanielBMarkham's agile posts or Jeff Barr's AWS stuff?); I just like to keep lists.
What if I want to submit one of my own links one day--will I wind up on your list? And if someone out the loop happens to stumble upon your list, will they think that I am a self-promoting spammer due to my inclusion?
You should probably change this list a little. Adding a comment or two about its purpose would be welcome, and including statistics such as submission ratios by each username would be nice and help to avoid such confusion I have mentioned.
I don't think it's always a bad thing, either, but there are better and worse ways of doing it. A regular HN user who sometimes submits something they wrote, when they think it would be of interest to HN, is quite a bit different from an account that exists solely to auto-submit every post from a blog to HN, without otherwise participating.
The problem with such policies is that the definitions are squishy.
How do you define "regular" and "sometimes"? At what point do you decide someone is "participating"?
If someone submits, say, 10 links to other (presumably interesting) sites for every 1 link to his own site, is that kosher? What if it's 4:1? 1:1?
How interesting do the other sites need to be? At one extreme is neat stuff that everyone likes and makes it to the home page (which benefits the "my own stuff" not at all, but certainly helps with karma). At the other is junk thrown in as filler to make that 10:1 ratio.
These are not idle questions. Especially when I think everyone in the HN community is aware of journalists' and bloggers' need to attract attention to their articles (which they, at least, believe are relevant). The question is how one can be an accepted member of the community _and_ also let people know what he created.
I think this is an area that could still use improvement. It seems to have reached a point where the chances for an average HNer to get exposure and feedback on projects in Show/Ask HN type posts is really low. It's a shame because HN is a top-notch community, but it just doesn't feel accessible to people without pre-existing clout in the industry, popularity on the site, or the facility and willingness to use aggressive promotion tactics.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but I think innovation on this front could help to preserve and enhance HN's vibrancy.
Do they know that their ability to vote has been taken away? Or do they have to figure it out for themselves? I would guess that it would be more effective if they thought their votes still counted.
I cannot answer about reddit, but the more I read about this issue, the more similar I can see reddit voting system works to the one HN has. AFAIR Reddit was a PG startup (?) so similarities make sense...
When you are hellbanned on HN, here is what happens: nothing. And for sure you are not informed about this in any sort of way: no popup, no messages, nothing. You think everything is normal and you still can write comments, but they appear only to you, which is confusing because you assume others can see them too. You can upvote (and as usual arrow disappears) but your vote does not count. Another thing is that you are being thrown at some sort of non-cached, low-priority server that is as slow as hell. It then takes about 10-15 seconds to open any comments' page (this is confirmed by me, because once I got my account resurrected, everything start working as fast as my internet goes, same moment with no changes on my end). Another thing noticed: after your account is resurrected, your score can go up/down like before, but average score does not change (mine stays .65 for a while now). During dead period I wrote some long and, in my opinion, interesting comments, that were not displayed (especially spent some time on this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4068798 ). A nice fellow from England noticed how silly I am for keep participating in HN community but really being a ghost. I emailed info@ couple times and told them I barely get massive downvotes and my karma stay positive for a long period of time. I don't spam or troll. Nothing happened. After couple days I start emailing PG and about 12 hours later got email from someone else apologizing about being killed and my account got resurrected.
I hope that PG/HN/team will add some features so that someone killed can know about it.
edit: sorry didnt answer: as of HN, no, the system is not that hellish. Score does not go up just for you (so you would assume everything is fine).
Telling driver that he got ticket defeats the purpose of ticketing drivers? Sorry for my bias logic, but don't you think I may want to learn a lesson and become better "HNer"? Hellbanning is like the ultimate death penalty. No warnings, no tickets, no first or second degree, nothing, just "we don't want you here anymore".
If I would get some sort of warning of what I am doing wrong, I may be given a chance to learn. Isn't that the purpose behind coming to HN? To learn?
On HN, downvotes and flags are the warnings and tickets.
Hellbans are only intended for spam accounts and trolls, neither of which is going to change their behavior. Sometimes people that aren't spammers or trolls get hellbanned, but that's an unfortunate side-effect of imperfect algorithms and moderators, not intentional.
A professional/habitual troll will know about hellbanning, and techniques like your "open in incognito window". Making it hard to know than you're hellbanned hurts innocents who were misidentified far more than it hurts actual spammers.
No not entirely. It acts like its being upvoted by the banned account, and to everyone else. It just doesnt actually count behind the scenes. If all you needed was 2 reddit accounts to detect if you're banned or not, it wouldnt be a very sound system ;)
Reddit uses an "upvote fuzzing" algorithm. All up votes you see anywhere on reddit are approximations influenced by the shadowban system. Only after a story has become old and locked, do the upvote totals truly stabalize to their actual levels.
The stories position on the site is based on the actual numbers. The numbers next to the story are just approximate though, to help fool banned accounts.
This is why things like Reddit Enhancement Suite that show upvote/downvote totals for comments are largely incorrect, and nothing more than a novelty.
On reddit the vote counts are fuzzed so nobody ever really knows if their individual vote counted. Even on stories with as little as 5 votes, the actual count displayed will fluctuate between 3 and 7. The only way you can really tell if you've been shadow banned is if your whole network of puppet accounts no longer has an effect.
Interesting. Is this implemented similarly to "hellban"? Which is to say, does it appear that the votes are valid to the voting rings, or are they shown something else entirely?
It seems to me that if a publication really wants to beat the system, banning users can only work to a certain degree. If you really want to stop them from trying, banning a whole domain seems like a good way to persuade them as long as the bans are temporary.
Disclaimer: I have no idea how effective the user banning methods are, but I assume they can be outsmarted more than domain ban.
Then I would also like to see the government sponsored ones to be banned - guess that might be impossible.
One of the worst examples of that is the so-called Global Fund to fight AIDS etc - actually burring any critics on a scandal where billions of your tax payers' money earmarked for development aid disappeared with some of the worst criminals on this planet - and dozens of millions continue to die from that.
There is no perfect world with social networks - you have to take everything happening there with a "grain of salt"
How hard would it be just to expose the information on who up-voted an article? That would leave it open to easy mining to figure out up-voting trends.
The biggest issue reddit has isn't the spam, it's how the site has become a "work safe" 4chan, it caters to the lowest common denominator. reddit used to be a great site and there are parts of it that still are, but the majority of the "visible" content (stuff that you don't have to search out) sucks.
The subreddit idea is fantastic but I don't understand why they aren't making this their focus. A netflix style recommendation system for subreddits would improve the quality of reddit 10 fold and give it a chance of lasting the next few years. I'm a fairly typical and regular reddit user and the sort of spam they're banning rarely (if ever) affects me, I've never seen a link on the front page and thought "what is this doing here?", focusing on this seems misguided.
that's not reddit's problem, that's a people problem. the reason for the lowest common denominator winning is because it is the lowest common denomitator - it has the biggest ratio of upvotes vs downvotes. the answer isn't focus, it's moderation: see the great improvement in recent months in r/science, r/gaming vs r/games, r/askscience is something everyone on the internet should strive to be, etc. all those success stories have one thing in common: active, relentless, remorseless moderation. this is something pg understands well and is also the foundation of hacker news.
re recommendation system: it might work, but OTOH it might be too intrusive and/or too compute-intensive... a risk worth taking IMHO.
> see the great improvement in recent months in r/science, r/gaming vs r/games, r/askscience is something everyone on the internet should strive to be, etc.
That's exactly my point: I did not know that r/games existed until I saw a post in r/gaming recommending it, at which point I subscribed and my reddit gaming experience improved greatly and I have since submitted highly upvoted articles to that subreddit, thus improving the experience of other r/games subscribers (they got the sort of content they wanted to see).
If each individual reddit user is subscribed to 20 subreddits they care about vs. 10 default ones that are just content dumps with no real target audience then the individual redditors would have a much better experience which will in turn improve the experience of others.
I think GP comment mentioned the r/games vs. r/gaming example to emphasize the effect of moderation. For most topics, though, there's only 1 major subreddit so a recommendation system would be pretty much pointless.
moderation. this is something pg understands well and is
also the foundation of hacker news.
This maybe a silly question but is HN moderated in the officially sanctioned sense? I have been here years and not noticed anything other than peer pressure. I would like to know if I am missing something obvious like meta.news
If you turn on showdead, you'll occasionally see frontpaged posts and comments that have been killed by the mods. Visit the new queue, and you'll see an insane amount of spam that is mostly auto-culled.
>This maybe a silly question but is HN moderated in the officially sanctioned sense?
I am not sure what you mean by "officially sanctioned", but moderation on HN is among the most heavy-handed of any site with comments and upvotes and downvotes comments that I know of. And I tend to believe that that has a lot to do with its continued high quality.
Do you know how the moderation actually works? I beleive much is auto-modded - I am seeing dead links but no reasons for them. It would be nice to know.
This is mostly based on what I've seen personally, and hearsay around the community, perhaps PG would like to weigh in?
Mods have the ability to 'hellban' people, make it so all their submissions and posts are not seen by anyone except themselves, unless you turn on the "showdead" option in your profile. Users can become automatically hell banned if their comment karma is too negative.
Mods also have the ability to delete stories from the front page, (occasionally you will see popular, heavily commented stories about factually incorrect information, or just over hyped trolling disappear) or seemingly optionally send a story to the "depths" of the site via some kind of super down vote mechanism. This can also occur if a story is heavily flagged.
These actions are not transparent, or obvious, so it is easy to miss them occurring, perhaps lending to your perception there is no moderation.
>Anyone know if the mods are employed/ appointed / community members?
Someone implied that all founders accepted into YC are offered mod privileges although of course many will be too busy to do any moderation.
Also, I sort of got the impression that only founders of YC-backed companies and YC employees are mods.
ADDED. When reading with SHOWDEAD set, in order to get an accurate impression of moderation frequency, please keep in mind that if someone posts the same text twice as a comment, one of the comments is automatically killed (and in fact that is what happened to a dupe of the comment I am replying to). The autokilled dupe shows up as a dead comment.
There was a top post today about a power user getting sort of banned for making a post about HN (I think it was along the lines of editing post titles). Both the post today and the one he was referring to were taken down.
Such is the paradox of "social". As a group gains more members from the general pool of people, the group by definition trends closer and closer to average. If you read a site because its content is exceptional and the readership decides what content is displayed, you almost necessarily get inferior content as more people join (unless you control the pool from which you are recruiting users).
With a recommendations system, obscure subreddits would have the opportunity/disaster of being blown up in a matter of days, which would destroy some communities. I think for some subreddits, it's better if they're spread with the word of mounth to keep their culture. It's also fairly easy to find subreddits of one's interest anyway and I also believe most active redditors already have unsubscribed to almost all of the top 100 subreddits.
There was a recommendation system in place, 4 or 5 years ago, before even sub-reddits were introduced. The problem was that the recommendation engine wasn't very good, and that it was resource intensive as you suspected. For a long time there was talk about re-implementing it, but it's never re-appeared. I guess that's down to their growth rate and heavy reliance on cacheing.
Still I would love to see some sort of discovery mechanism for sub-reddits. The tools reddit provides for casual discovery and management are just laughably poor, but I suppose it's down to priorities a staff availability.
I personally like how it's not too easy to find subreddits, and how it happens mostly trough people mentioning them. It keeps many communities nice and small and protected from the 'lowest common denominator' effect.
Of course this means I may be missing out, but that doesn't bother me too much.
I found a couple of wonderful subreddits by just typing the most obvious subreddit address btw (r/piano ...). And once you have found one subreddit on a topic, most of them are kind enough to put links to related subreddits in their sidebar.
(only example I can think of now is r/drunk and r/cripplingalcoholics, though that's maybe not the ideal choice :-))
I've often wondered why no social news systems support a so called "smart vote." We could get a quick estimate from a user's comment history using a Flesch-Kincaid test (technically this guesses at writing grade level, but close enough) and then incorporate that into the voting system by over-weighting high scoring users vs other users. The important part in gathering top quality social news isn't that everyone has a say, it's that we simply get good content. Of course the whole 'your vote matters less than his' thing could be disastrous for an online community.
Reddit work safe? The front page of Reddit is mostly images these days with titles like ""I said, does he look like a bitch?" and "letter from conde nast to reddit - cover your genitals. Judging from that I'd say Reddit main audience is 13-year old boys.
Still, you can create your own front page and leave all of that behind. I just watch math machinelearning askscience science and RealReddit pretty much.
The biggest issue is that people still think of reddit as a single community. It's not, and you can't stereotype all of reddit by looking at /r/pics and /r/politics. You have control over your home page and can remove noisy subreddits from it.
I addressed this in my comment. I am aware that each individual user controls their own reddit, my problem is it is very difficult to find good relevant subreddits without relying on third party tools (which very few users are aware exist) or randomly stumbling upon subreddits through comments or cross posts. If there was a reddit system that could match my voting preferences to specific subreddits (for example if I upvote Minecraft content in r/gaming it recommends r/minecraft) the quality of the site for each individual user would increase. If the quality of each individuals reddit experience increased the entire site would improve.
I agree that a recommendation system would be awesome but is it really that hard to find a new subreddit? The search feature at http://www.reddit.com/reddits/ seems fine.
The r/gaming example is a perfect example of why a search system doesn't solve the problem. I'm already subscribed to r/gaming so I don't think I need to search for another gaming subreddit. Another example would be r/battlestations, a subreddit for people to post their desks, I would never think to search for "battlestations" but it's a subreddit that I like a subscribe to (which I only found because someone recommended it elsewhere on reddit).
Search only helps you find what you're looking for, it doesn't help you find things you might be interested in.
The reason you wouldn't think to search for "battlestations" is presumably because you don't visit 4chan. That entire subreddit is actually an example of a part of 4chan leaking onto Reddit.
This is a pretty interesting move, but they really need to make sure the rules are ABSOLUTELY CLEAR to those willing to learn them.
I work for ForeignPolicy.com, which could loosely be described as a competitor to the Atlantic. To avoid being spammy/bad community members, we specifically don't submit all of our pieces to reddit/HN, or even all the ones we think are relevant (Virtually our whole site would fit, say, /r/worldnews. HN less so, but occasionally FP stories do rise to the top here). Most major things get submitted anyway, and often drive a fair bit of traffic.
That said, the tradeoff here is that we lose control of the headlines that we get submitted under, and the submission timing, and have to work quite a bit harder to make sure that we see submissions to get involved in comment threads when possible.
It would be nice if we could get some sort of account that would let us submit our relevant content, but without any special privileges a la' the publisher feeds that helped ruin digg.
We _could_ just get people with well-built-out legit personal accounts to trade off in submitting our stuff, but that still strikes me as too spammy.
I know in the comments thread on reddit Alienth said that this action will only be taken in cases where they can prove that the sites knowingly offended [1], but it really worries me that the lines aren't set in stone, and a competitor could potentially make a very compelling attempt at spamming all of our links and get us banned.
There might be something workable if RSS aggregation functionality were built into reddit and subreddit moderators/owners could add approved feeds to their subreddits as a sort of "tickler" stream. So when you browse to new you would see something like "new | rising | unsubmitted". That could actually be useful for some of the low-volume, off-the-beaten-path specialist subreddits.
You do have a point about crowding, and I actually like the system as it is.
That said, as a bigger content provider, I think the system of "Someone almost certainly will submit your content anyway, but with a title and timing that that they choose, and you don't get a fair shot at preempting them" is a bit frustrating.
That's of course the nature of the internet, and I don't want an HN/Reddit where publishers have _exclusive_ control or spamability.
Is there some good reason publishers shouldn't have an API to submit their stories automatically and then let the votes do their thing? The concepts of an official content feed and democratic filtration of stories are not mutually exclusive.
The initial work-function of someone submitting a link is the first filter for if something is good/"worth other people looking at". Taking it away means more stress on the remaining levels of filtering. So if the same things are to get through the sum of all filters, either the remaining levels will need to be more robust to compensate for taking away the first filter, or the first level should just be kept in place.
More abstractly, are there to be no places where people, real humans, can talk with each other without the advertising machines wedging their obnoxious way between us uninvited? Surely you can see there is some value in having such places. If the populous of reddit wants it to be such a place, then spammers are like someone at a party trying to sell watches to everyone rather than conversing. The hosts have asked them to cool it or leave. These particular louts didn't cool it, so the hosts pushed them out the door.
The good reason is that that would be trying to present a technical solution to what is a personal conflict of interest.
The basic problem is that people's stories are competing for eyeballs - a personal conflict - and that people are not satisfied with a fair resolution with that conflict (letting the general public decide). They are seeking an unfair level of exposure.
You can't solve the basic problem of conflict technically; the best you can do is to provide fair tools. Trying to provide tools for content access, though, is unrelated (orthogonal, really) to the issue of fairness.
Changing how the content is delivered won't really change things. Either it will be fair (everyone can submit to the API) or it won't be. If it is fair, then every smart publisher will publish to the API (heck, who wouldn't want to autopublish their blog to reddit?) and the result will be a pretty useless firehose :-D
If it's not fair, then you're undercutting democratic filtration...
> That said, the tradeoff here is that we lose control of the headlines that we get submitted under, and the submission timing, and have to work quite a bit harder to make sure that we see submissions to get involved in comment threads when possible.
I think that the first two are ultimately good things. The headline and the timing can be more useful as feedback than as part of the message you control.
As for the third, the key is figuring out how to get notified when something is submitted. If it's important enough, then the "work quite a bit harder" is worth the investment.
Generally true to be sure, but every once in a while we'll write something about internet or entrepreneurship that does well here.
Like I said we make it a point not to post our own articles to social media sites ourselves, but we do make the HN front page one a month or so, and it would be nice to have the option to control over the titles and submission timing when the content is relevant (assuming, of course, that we submitted the link first =P).
...it would be nice to have the option to control over the titles and submission timing when the content is relevant...
Once the conversation starts, it's no longer yours to control. People will say what they will about your articles, and trying to find ways of controlling that rather than adjusting the articles themselves would be quite annoying.
They are asking for control about when the conversation starts. More specifically, they are the ones who know when the article is available, so they can start the conversation at that moment.
Then because they are first, they get to choose the title.
That's all they wish for, not control of the conversation itself.
I still take exception to the manipulation of ostensibly user-generated content sites by content creators. I don't come to HN to see what the editors of publication X managed to time just right, but rather what actual hackers felt like submitting, and the title under which they submitted it.
Well, yeah. That was exactly showerst's original point. They aren't doing that precisely because they - unlike theatlantic and outsideonline and others - feel it's too spammy. The question was if there was some solution which gets them more involved but without that feeling.
For example, one problem with the current system is that they "have to work quite a bit harder to make sure that [they] see submissions to get involved in comment threads when possible." This isn't controlling the conversation, this is improving their engagement with it. (Though it could also be used for evil; consider someone who wants to trash-talk on any posting to fsf.org.)
Think of the "would be nice" as being wistful, rather than a request. After all, they know how to have more control over the timing and headline now, by using "people with well-built-out legit personal accounts to trade off in submitting [their] stuff."
I'm not exactly raging against how it is now, since anything on our domain gets a big (hard earned!) credibility bump from many readers, so we do have an advantage.
My only complaint is that if I have a smaller personal site, I can write an article, then submit it somewhere relevant and with a title that fits, at a time of my choosing. On the other hand, if FP writes some great article about Australia, I can't post it to /r/australianPoliticsSubreddit with an Aussie slang title at 8am AUS time.
Oftentimes I see users submit our articles with these really spammy linkbait titles (presumably for karma?) and then they die an instant death in the new queue, even if the content would've probably been fine at 9am on a Monday with a reasonable title. Now if we'd have had a fair shot and they'd have beaten us to the punch, that's a different story =)
In the scheme of things it's not a huge deal, and even I can't think of a system that would allow this without it being abused, but it is a bit of a frustrating double standard.
Yeah timing is a big one, if someone submits one of your stories at the wrong time it could quickly fall off the map, despite being a potential top story at the right time.
As long as the good articles from The Atlantic (and many are quite good) keep getting posted here by regular participants who respond to other participants, I suppose it is okay for members of voting rings to lose voting privileges. I would hate to see whole publications banned just because of the actions of their paid supporters, when the same publications have willing readers who like the content of the publications.
If only there were some way for the publications to stop writing those checks, or somehow make them contingent on the "supporters" not spamming sites that don't want to be spammed... but what could it be? </sarcasm>
Reddit has a horribly broken spam filtering system for comments and links, which frequently catches legitimate posts, and then people have to ask subreddit moderators to mark them as "not spam".
Why? Well, moderator abuse. Moderators can mark stories and comments as spam to get rid of them. But there is always moderator abuse. So the spam filter has got trained on tons of comments and links that aren't spam.
How would they fix it? Give moderators a means to get rid of bad posts other than marking them as spam.
this has been implemented (fairly recently). there are now both "remove spam" and "remove ham" options, the latter removing a post without using it as spamfilter input.
The single most common complaint on Reddit about Reddit is its lack of original content. "Repost!" would be the rallying cry of Redditors, if ever there was one. This move takes those people who do create original content, and throws them out on their collective asses.
Rather than throw out OC, why not throw out the actual rule breakers? Those who manipulate Reddit by illicitly acquiring votes should be the target of anti-spam measures, not simply those who submit their own content.
> Rather than throw out OC, why not throw out the actual rule breakers? Those who manipulate Reddit by illicitly acquiring votes should be the target of anti-spam measures, not simply those who submit their own content.
That's exactly what was done. These publications have employees manipulating social media sites. They're not just submitting stories, they're actively spamming for traffic.
The reason (I think) is that these places are doing it intentionally from the top down instead of just some random person within their organization or pushing an agenda. If they can successfully identify when domains are coordinating this and make the bans temporary, then this is probably a good discouragement of the abuse. If their detection methods are wrong and they're either banning too many or not enough, then it probably won't.
Several of these well known content producers have been caught spamming and otherwise cheating their way onto the front page. They've been banned for that and not their content.
Isn't this heavy-handed banning approach pretty much a tacit admission that the voting algorithm is broken? Why couldn't this spamming be prevented through pattern algorithms/frequency analysis and...this is what I thought Reddit aspired to...democracy? If a lot of articles from a source are voted up by a diverse group of users, then maybe it's because the source is good?
The worst part of this is how this countermeasure reeks of the fallacy of ad hominem: who cares who the submitter is and how he/she personally benefits...as long as the content is good?
> The worst part of this is how this countermeasure reeks of the fallacy of ad hominem: who cares who the submitter is and how he/she personally benefits...as long as the content is good?
Well, the easiest answer to that is that one of the best ways to separate the good content from the bad algorithmically is to look at the submitter behavior. Saying "as long as the content is good" glosses over the practicalities of actually measuring that.
Another possibility would be prominently marking submissions from spammers. And/or all links to sites that are proven spammers. Let the users/communities have more information to cogitate with when deciding if the content is worth voting up.
reddit don't aspire to democracy. Note that the set of links on the default page aren't the most popular or up-voted; they are from a pre-selected set of reddits that e.g. include atheism but not e.g. hinduism. This gives a feedback loop -- Hindus see offensive hate speech, and go away. Atheists see an accepting community, and more come in. The types of content and community you see there is clearly engineered -- I think most incidentally, and a little intentionally.
People realize that most professional news publications now have social media editors or social media teams whose job it is to make that publications content popular on social media sites and in online communities right?
Seems like Jared Keller was doing exactly his job description and got the whole domain banned.
Yay! I've gotten annoyed at seeing the links in HN to theatlantic.com and others, posted by people who only post dozens of links to a single domain, and who never respond to comments in the thread.
nhebb gives a great example of someone who has the same name as an Atlantic writer who appears to post only links to stories on the Atlantic written by them.
(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108929)
Seems like a purely anti-competitive move considering that Reddit is owned by Conde Nast and most of those sites blocked are direct competitors to Conde Naste's publications. Conflict of interest.
Not sure how to feel about this, on the one hand if they were cheating then blocking them makes sense, on the other hand, I don't see a public list, and this could be abused by admins to block unfavorable sources (maybe not the current admins, but who knows what batch of admins we'll get in the future?)
This is interesting to me as someone who works for a subsidiary of a parent company, suffice to say we are very, very much in competition with a number of the other subsidiaries. This in turn is how the parent company benefits, by getting a slice from all of us. Not saying that's necessarily happening here, but figured worth pointing out.
I tend to post to reddit from my website once every few weeks when the article is specifically good and "redditable". I would hope that is not a potential ban target.
What probably is happening is that theatlantic / businessweek had a group of up voters that they paid (staff) that would constantly manipulate the voting.
The first thing that came to mind was that anybody might be able to get someone else's site banned from Reddit by making it look like they are trying to spam/game the site.
Content is the most important if you want to create a sustainable sharing based model.
But, generally with reddit since quite some time the frequency of which the content is repeating is shortening substantially: Try for yourself - have a look at imgur and point out the images that you have not seen during the last 24/36 months repeating over and over ( not counting the variations of cat pics, funny heads etc)
So that is their mainstream - but there are many other still functional areas underneath.
Now if we are talking mainstream that's where this ban of BusinessWeek.com, Phys.org, ScienceDaily.com, TheAtlantic.com, and GlobalPost comes into play.
When an organisation like reddit that is facing a more and more immanent lack of content bans content - well looking at that as a desperate move might be kind.
In other words - they have lost the understanding of their own business model or more precisely the underlying principle of their overall existence - sharing content.
So if those sites are the ones who share the most content - fine - IMHO at least most of them are known to have created value content for many years (some for decades and beyond).
The whole thing that a shop like reddit might achieve with that is pushing more and more of their long time supporters to the sites where the most of its content originates from.
Or in other words - sure wag the dog - or even better - post the whole thing on AOL, digg.com, myspace or name your own previous network(s)...
The major problem I have with reddit isn't censorship, although that's certainly occasionally there. It's not even the increasing stupidity of the users and the move to the lowest common denominator. It's not the astroturf advertising that pops up every day. What bugs me most is the blatant support and promotion of certain classes of bigotry and hate speech by the owners. Yet I still keep coming back...
This is the biggest caveat with community spaces. Although Redditors can subscribe to subreddits to customize their content, each subreddit remains a community space. IMO there isn't an alternative to heavy moderation when shared spaces are inherit to the design.
If Reddit wanted to end karma whoring in general (to an extent), they'd move to a slashdot system where numbers are hidden, and only vague ranges (bad, new, good, excellent) are given.
It wouldn't completely rid the site of the bigger voting rings, but it would cut back on many individuals who spam posts looking for a quick turnaround.
That's really quite funny. I used to hang out on the #fallout IRC channel with him years back. I remember just when he started doing all the gaming sites. Interesting fellow.
This is crazy, Phys.org may be a little spammy but it's one of the best sites on the Internet. It constantly pops up in my Twitter feed and rarely disappoints.
I'm glad phys.org and science daily are banned, I think /r/science and other subreddits will be better without them. They're both interesting sites, yes, but they blast out articles about X Y or Z if a scientist somewhere finds a b or c.
