A new shop opened on Diagon Alley this week. It is called Merlin's Marketing Marvels. Their owner is a an emancipated house elf who has a curiously eccentric rule: you only ever get to buy one thing from his shop.
I submit that, if you choose the Wand Of Always Hit The HN Front Page, you've made a clearly suboptimal choice, and if you've chosen Wand Of Sometimes Complain About HN Front Page, that's just nuts.
There may or may not be voting rings. A particular article may or may not have them behind it. If the truth of the universe about either of these facts changed, would that affect what is the rational course of action for your business today? I strongly suggest that it wouldn't.
In a universe with or without vote rings, one would be well-advised to start building a permission channel under one's own control, such that one can routinely get into contact with people who will like what one has to offer. Get folks' email addresses. Send them stuff they'll like.
I will guarantee you, from a wee bit of experience, that the business value of X00 people who are actually in your market greatly exceeds the value of an HN frontpaging, and you can send things to a mailing list bi-weekly, whereas a) waving the magic wand of HN frontpage bi-weekly is taxing even if you can do it and b) you will probably burn out your wand's welcome.
If you hate email, you're handicapping yourself unnecessarily, but you can do similar things with RSS feeds or Twitter accounts. (But seriously, email ROFLstomps those alternatives.)
Another option is finding a "beat" for yourself (journalism term) and owning the "'$(#'% out of it. I'd tend to suggest high-value beats with low-competition adjacent to spaces of commercial interest for you. You'd be amazed how short the path to being "the acknowledged expert" on a particular subject is if you pick your subject well. After you're the expert, you'll start just showing up in places without actively inserting yourself there, and your perceived expertise will tend to snowball. (Both because organic mentions of you tend to be perceived as more credible than tooting your own horn, and because you will be given credibility-enhancing opportunities by other people because they perceive benefit from association with you. You can also explicitly pitch that to them.)
"Get folks' email addresses. Send them stuff they'll like."
Let me add to that.
Find any reason you can to reply to both customers and non-customers (we happen to get misdirected inquires all the time. We try to convert these inquires that we take the time to answer with a coupon and a "use us next time" blurb).
Anyway, for customers, this "legit" spam if you want to call it that takes the form of helpful, personal, genuine "follow up" emails (pre-written in a conversational tone in advance and with things that make them look as if they are unique (we use quicktext on thunderbird but there are other ways to do this obviously)) which could say something like "we made that address change that you requested let me know if you need anything further" (more involved but basically just a nice note). So see the idea is not to always have everything to be "self service". If you can afford the labor hit, or the labor hit leads to actual sales maybe encourage customer co-dependency because it gets them to contact you. Of course this is going to totally depend on the business you are in and of course you don't want to annoy customers by doing it to much.
The bottom line is "always be selling". Use any interaction by email as a chance to either enhance the customer relationship or make a suggestion for something else they might need.
It's also way the heck easier to get emails, provided that you give them some motivation to sign on. It's inherently a private, low-risk transaction (provided that your signaling is consistent).
As to domain expertise, "well-known value-producing field" x "very specific customers whose needs you deeply understand" is both sufficient and awesomely effective.
Cheating's understandable, especially on HN. You only need to get a couple of votes early on to edge onto the bottom of the frontpage. And once you're on the frontpage you get seen by a lot more people, so you tend to get upvoted and stick around for a while.
I'd even say that it's not that sleazy, since anything which sticks around on the frontpage is, at least, obviously of interest to enough people to keep it there. Unless you've organized a huge fake-voting ring, I suppose.
EDIT: I am slightly surprised at the downvotes. :P
I would say that cheating is sleazy even if it isn't at the top level of sleazy. A four-person upvoting ring might not seem as sleazy as a thousand socket puppets and twenty Turkers but, like the gp says, the first is a step towards the second.
The best that can be said is that there should be a way for more-effort to be translated into somewhat more publicity.
If an reddit-or-HN-like-site had a system of "minor leagues" where smaller groups got together, decided their favorite posts and then sent them to a larger group, those who put in more effort might wind-up with more results without the sleaze factor. Of course, then the larger would have to rate the value of each smaller group, keeping things somewhat honest.
There's also the difference between an "upvoting ring" and "I'll tell my friends I submitted something, because I know they'll be interested". Which is to say no difference at all in effect, but a slight difference in motivation.
Part of recognizing that there is a line between what is acceptable or not in biz-dev has to be an understanding that other people will draw that line in other places... it's human nature. Complaining about this is like complaining that people cut you off in traffic, it rains sometimes, or anonymity encourages misbehavior. If you believe strongly enough in how you do what you do, stay busy doing it!
There is a long and storied history of sites 'cheating' for some definition of cheating...
• collecting emails for signups for features (or entire sites) that don't exist yet
When is gaming actually cheating? Some people analyze when to submit posts for maximum likelihood of making the front page. Is that a bad thing if it pushes another worthy post out of contention for eyeballs?
I sometimes write a blog post, but instead of submitting it myself, I check the new queue waiting for someone else to submit it, then I pounce with an upvote, giving it a second vote in a short period of time. Is that gaming the system? Is that pushing another worthy submission down that really deserved a better chance?
> then I pounce with an upvote, giving it a second vote in a short period of time. Is that gaming the system?
One person, one account, one vote, and no co-ordinated voting by a group. Thus, no cheating.
It's also noteworthy that someone else thought the content was good enough to post.
Voting, logging into a different account, and voting again is obviously cheaty. Having ten different accounts to vote would obviously be cheaty. Having a facebook group who upvote articles submitted by their members is obviously cheaty. Paying for upvotes is obviously cheaty.
It's a shame Atlantic decided to cheat. They had good content.
Is that pushing another worthy submission down that really deserved a better chance?
HN POWER USERS read the [new] tab, and not the front page, so it doesn't really make much difference. There are a few people that I have bookmarked and I check their submissions once a week or so to see if there's anything interesting there. Admittedly this is sub-optimal.
Honesty, cheating etc. is defined in relation to what one's behavior is that is making the judgement. Someone who crosses a line that you wouldn't cross is viewed as a cheat. Someone who doesn't even do something that you would do is viewed as being "honest". (Religion also works this way you tend to view people in terms of what you yourself do.)
Nothing that you are doing to me appears to be cheating.
"then I pounce with an upvote, giving it a second vote"
One of the things I've noticed is that the posting of the same link someone else has posted will also increase by 1 vote.
So if you post your own link and then someone sees it (not by way of HN) and hits "submit" and it's been posted it will increase by 1 vote.
I've see several things that I've submitted go up in value because others see them after and submit the same link (and there is no discussion and it didn't make page 1 or 2.)
Let's start by defining cheating: "Cheating refers to an immoral way of achieving a goal."
Is it possible to cheat a system that has no rules? (remember, there are only guidelines here, there's a difference). I don't know how to assess the morality of HN, but clearly the goals of the general populous of HN has shifted. The community was started by a group of people looking to share information with each other, not promote their companies (although clearly that has been an indirect benefit).
Point is - who cares if it's immoral, or if it's gaming, or if it's cheating, it detriments the original intent of the community. I want the motivation of scoring to be a meritocracy. Within this meritocracy you are more than entitled to your own upvote.
Human opportunism should not be confused with "seeking opportunities" as such, or "making use of opportunities when they arise". Opportunism refers rather to a specific way of responding to opportunities, which involves the element of self-interestedness plus disregard for relevant (ethical) principles, or for intended or previously agreed goals, or for the shared concerns of a group.[2]
Somewhat confusingly, opportunism is sometimes also redefined by businessmen simply as the theory of discovering and pursuing opportunities.[3] These businessmen are motivated by their dislike for the idea that there could ever be anything wrong with capitalizing on opportunities. According to this redefinition, "opportunism" is a euphemism for "entrepreneurship".
Although human opportunism often has a strong negative (pejorative) moral connotation (in contrast to e.g. biological opportunism, used as a neutral scientific description), it may also be defined more neutrally as putting self-interest before other interests when there is an opportunity to do so, or flexibly adapting to changing circumstances to maximize self-interest (though usually in a way that negates some principle previously followed).
Opportunism is sometimes also defined as the ability to capitalize on the mistakes of others: to utilize opportunities created by the errors, weaknesses or distractions of opponents to one's own advantage.[4] In a war situation or crisis, this may be regarded as justifiable, but in a civilized situation it may be regarded as unprincipled ("taking unfair advantage of the situation").
Taking a realistic or practical approach to a problem can involve "weak" forms of opportunism. For the sake of doing something that will work, or that successfully solves the problem, a previously agreed principle is knowingly compromised or disregarded - with the justification that alternative actions would, overall, have a worse effect.
Though it may be disapproved of, or criticized ("There ought to be a law against it..."), opportunist behaviour is not necessarily criminal, corrupt or illegal.
Simple: once most participants aren't aware of it, once their lack of awareness is (ab)used by a small group of players, it becomes cheating.
However, this isn't a "game", but simply some users pretending to express their opinion (by upvoting), while actually paying back favors, in exchange for future ones, thus corrupting the system.
Its a good point. What is cheating? If I have a Twitter following for 50K people, or 5,000 friends on Facebook and something of mine gets put on here, and then I share it on my networks too... its almost 100% certain to hit front page then and stay at the top for a bit. Is that cheating? I don't know.
It is really easy to tell these stories. They have 30 or 40 votes and few comments. They are very often from YC companies. The better submitters will engage in the comments immediately to give a more organic lift, basically making the discussion more interesting to boost the story.
But these posts don't last very long. They will quickly get off the front page unless there is actually something interesting here.
It is funny, after all this strategy chatter, I happened to gripe about Quora on my blog, and that got more votes than anything else I've submitted, by far. A community of distributed actors with solid software filters makes for a pretty hard to game forum. After you have reasonable traction, it is probably better to spend your effort on more scalable channels.
Actually, there's been a fair few of my articles which got submitted (I then upvoted, and mentioned the article on #startups), then rose organically to some number of upvotes, even up to 100, but had relatively few comments. Some articles are just not very good at gathering comments.
However, I agree that in the general rule, articles with more upvotes tend to have more comments.
The proposed "solution" would only exacerbate the problem. The author basically proposed that the cheaters can not only put articles on the front page, but they're rewarded by also increasing each others' trust scores. Why is that good?
There are tons of solutions to this, largely in the domain of statistics and machine learning. They're flawed, but communication is not a precise beast.
I could not agree more. If the op isn't comfortable airing the laundry here, then join a resistant force and do it there (GitHub).
While it wouldn't help the community, it would help the quality of content to hackers if we open sourced something like a user script to override HN's algorithm and simply blanket out this entire consortium.
An explicit, and specific blacklist for these jokers along with their snake oil websites and ideas. Oh? You're offended by your being listed on The Blacklist? Earn our trust back so we could pay a small bit of mind to your vaporeware or opinion like we used to, when we called it vaporeware and a bad opinion.
I apologize for the rant, but at least i'm offering an idea to put the brakes on the gradual degradation of this website.
I am not sure there is anything suspicious but I often see stories from the same sites making the front page of HN News. I am guessing that most of these stories are there because they are of interest but sometimes I wonder...
The Atlantic, NY Times, Techcrunch, Extreme Tech, TheNextWeb, Github, bbc are the main ones off the top of my head.
Unless someone has already done it it, it would be very interesting to see the break down of front page stories by source and by poster.
I think there's a bit of a self-fulfilling effect going on: readers know that stories by these sites do well on Hacker News, so when they see an interesting one that hasn't been published, they submit it.
I've seen this first hand: many of my blog posts are submitted to Hacker News shortly after I tweet them. Sometimes I know the submitter, and sometimes I have no idea who he/she is.
This of course is independent from what the article discusses. It's possible there are sites who make an effort to get hundreds of votes on HN but I doubt that's the case with TC, the NYTimes, etc.
Cheating HN is something that comes with the growth. HN has enough traffic to attract all the people and companies that have or would like to have gamed reddit and before that digg, and plenty of companies are already doing their best to make sure they get their share of the traffic - Ziff Davis (ExtremeTech, Geek and PCMag), MacObserver, BGR etc all have multiple, undisclosed employees spamming HN.
Then there's the heavy/blind submitters who make damn sure whatever you submit isn't long for this world because it's super important we get everything straight from their feed reader, probably automatically for the heavier dudes.
Then there's the easy topics that get easy votes like TorrentFreak and TechDirt's constant manipulation, anything YC, and the endless soft-serve entrepreneur-porn written for HN just because it's got a good chance of being popular on HN.
The big difference is HN doesn't have reddit etc's resources to combat it, and on top of that as a marketing tool for YC startups it's rife with conflicts of interests as a democratic news site.
This is already something the HN maintainers spend a lot of time thinking about and working on. They're just not going to talk about it publicly, because the ensuing arms race is expensive.
Another variant of "build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door"?
I thought we'd debunked that old chestnut enough times by now. Most of the most successful startups have used some techniques which later (or earlier!) got classified as "dark patterns", "cheating", or what have you. I have at least 2-3 articles on swombat.com that specifically cover the idea that in many contexts where the appearance of success is a precondition to success, you should "fake it till you make it".
Entrepreneurship is about finding and exploiting business opportunities. Finding loopholes in the world of promotion and marketing is an important part of that art.
Nope, the need to cheat is based on the individual's sense of ethics.
Some people create valuable products, write valuable posts, but feel the need to cheat. Some others may write not-so-valuable posts, but they will not cheat.
Of course, the ideal HN scenario is for people to write great posts, not cheat and have those posts on the front page. Unfortunately, voting rings make that a bit more difficult than it should be.
It seems that someone can create a new sockpuppet account, and everyone in the ring can vote up the sockpuppet. This would probably be a lot harder to detect.
Maybe if there was a 24hr waiting period before a new account can submit articles or comment, it might curtail this, somewhat.
Not really, it's just a case of measuring correlations of voting habits. Plus new accounts with no comment history submitting stories is a spammer red flag anyway.
Widespread cheating reveals a bigger problem. These sites are commonly used for self promotion but they lack a mechanism to give everyone a minimum amount of attention so they can see if there is any interest in their product/content.
I wouldn't discount voter ringers as unethical cheaters just because they don't follow some lazily contrived rules set up by people who don't have promotional problems.
The technology behind these up/down vote sites really hasn't moved and they will run into ever bigger problems as people get accustomed to them and learn to cheat bigtime just as content farms learned to cheat search engines. Actually content farms cheat HN pretty well already. They spew out so much crap people never learn what quality content looks like and upvote the crap.
I'm a techie, and for me, it's always been natural to build stuff like LangPop.com, made for other techies.
But with LiberWriter, I really branched out into something that is not at all for people who read this site: they could figure it out themselves pretty easily, by and large. So I'm almost proud to say that when I get prominent links to my site here, I get almost 0 conversions. In and of itself, that's not that hard - just have something no one wants. But I do get a lot of conversions from other sites that are more relevant to my target audience. I'm proud that I managed to do something that was for "regular folks" rather than an apple that did not fall far from the tree.
The Tour de France analogy is priceless. I wished the final conclusion were true "As always, for long term sucess the most important factor is working hard to create a good product.". It all starts with marketing unfortunately.
RE: Trust Score -- Am I missing something?! The trust score would not fix the problem of people gaming HN by organizing to vote on your friends submissions. If there is indeed a group of people that are organizing their votes then this would most likely benefit them rather than deter them.
For example -- if a group of people start to vote on a "new start up" blog post of something that the group wants to push to the top.. you are only increasing their trust score and pushing the casual users out.
Not only that, but more generally it seems to me that this "trust" system would cause a "bandwagon" effect on all posts. Other users would be afraid to downvote anything that was taking off, since they would knowingly be causing their own "trust" score to drop.
This is something that is rampant right now on HN. As someone who writes his own new content for this specific community, the voting rings are just big turn off. I dont participate in them, and will not upvote when a fellow engineer asks me to do so (disclaimer: I have done it three times, but stopped because it felt wrong). I do, however, don't think that it will ever be stopped. It just pushes me to write better stuff and to improve my use of analytics.
Gaming websites like Reddit and HN seems similar to "shilling" in online auctions. While people eventually find ways around most things we put in place, it's pretty effective to group users by associations and crack down on ones that shill for their associates.
It might be less effective for these forums because there's no risk involved, but I bet there are still patterns in users bumping people off the "new" page.
As long as there's an awesome system like Hacker News, there'll be people trying to hack it. HN wins to the degree that it can counteract that and MAKE SURE that the 'best' ideas organically flow to the top. And pg is all over this.
I really like the idea of 'trust' / influence making your upvotes worth more than my upvotes or someone else's if you're proven to give good stuff. Hmm..
I've often wondered why it is that a 400 comment, 200+ point submission submitted within a few hours sits below a 60 comment, 100 point submission submitted 8 hours ago.
I don't know if it's flagging, or user trust - but it's not clear to me that there is a direct relationship between score+age+comments and how high profile a submission is.
It's possible the HN algorithm detects a steady, consistent stream of users, an above-average percentage of which upvote something compared a flash-in-the-pan type of posting.
Stop worrying about voting rings. I don't have a startup or a blog, and contribute only intermittently to HN, but have little difficulty in engagement with the HN community. Just ride your own horse to wherever you're going; the fact that others may passing you by in the same direction does not make it a race.
Just what evidence does the OP base this claim on, esp. for HN? The proof seems to be: Well, the motivation is definitely there, so it must be happening. That an a random email from a scammer/spammer.
> 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 submit that, if you choose the Wand Of Always Hit The HN Front Page, you've made a clearly suboptimal choice, and if you've chosen Wand Of Sometimes Complain About HN Front Page, that's just nuts.
There may or may not be voting rings. A particular article may or may not have them behind it. If the truth of the universe about either of these facts changed, would that affect what is the rational course of action for your business today? I strongly suggest that it wouldn't.
In a universe with or without vote rings, one would be well-advised to start building a permission channel under one's own control, such that one can routinely get into contact with people who will like what one has to offer. Get folks' email addresses. Send them stuff they'll like.
I will guarantee you, from a wee bit of experience, that the business value of X00 people who are actually in your market greatly exceeds the value of an HN frontpaging, and you can send things to a mailing list bi-weekly, whereas a) waving the magic wand of HN frontpage bi-weekly is taxing even if you can do it and b) you will probably burn out your wand's welcome.
If you hate email, you're handicapping yourself unnecessarily, but you can do similar things with RSS feeds or Twitter accounts. (But seriously, email ROFLstomps those alternatives.)
Another option is finding a "beat" for yourself (journalism term) and owning the "'$(#'% out of it. I'd tend to suggest high-value beats with low-competition adjacent to spaces of commercial interest for you. You'd be amazed how short the path to being "the acknowledged expert" on a particular subject is if you pick your subject well. After you're the expert, you'll start just showing up in places without actively inserting yourself there, and your perceived expertise will tend to snowball. (Both because organic mentions of you tend to be perceived as more credible than tooting your own horn, and because you will be given credibility-enhancing opportunities by other people because they perceive benefit from association with you. You can also explicitly pitch that to them.)