It looks like this "Show HN" post wouldn't have a high "gag" score [1], so either the post has been flagged multiple times (unlikely), or, most likely, the majority of those early votes came from the same location, causing the voting ring safeguards [2] to kick in.
Unfortunately, I know this wasn't the case - I didn't provide the link to anyone in our office, which has it's own IP, and I know they weren't aware of the HN post until afterwards. I also wouldn't publicly use this as an example if I knew I had been rigging the votes!
So maybe it was just a case of HNers flagging the story as it became popular, as the title was fairly link-baity? I was under the impression that flagging a story kills it rather than suppresses it, but regardless, if that's the case then it makes sense.
You can't know -- just because it wasn't in your office doesn't mean it didn't happen.
One of the first readers to see it may have mass emailed his/her colleagues who all read/upvoted when they got into work in the morning, for example....
Thanks for responding, and I don't mean to waste your time, but that seems like a bug. We have a single ip, that 4 people can use, and none of them knew of the hn post until after the post was demoted. In fact, I don't think any of them have a hn account!
On top of this, I didn't share the link with anyone, and the votes appeared to be totally organic.
Our target market is not the hn crowd, and this subsequent post was merely out of curiosity, so I have very little to gain by lying.
Edit: if you or your team wanted any more information for debugging purposes I would be happy to oblige, just let me know if I can help, though I understand if this is fairly low priority!
It maybe set off the vote ring detector because your costumers seem to be located all around London. So it may be possible that some of them shared the submission with other London users or that because they know your company they up-vote it; making it look like it was ringed but it was just selection bias.
Anyway this is a tricky problem; because at the end of the day intent is a fundamental part of vote rings and that can be really hard to see by algorithms alone.
There was really no need to respond so pointedly or awkwardly, the parent posted a genuine question and it really begged a slightly more polite response.
I understand that you are an extremely busy man and I don't mean to bag on the owner of the site, but at the risk of getting hell-banned or massively down voted your response came across as being unhelpful and rude, if it had been someone else making the comment they would likely have been down voted for it, or at the very least treat with indignation and ignored.
Perhaps you didn't meant to come across this way and perhaps I'm in completely the wrong mindset about it, but such a short answer does nearly nothing to help the parent, you simply stated they had set off a trigger and gave no details as to why, what they could do in the future to prevent this or any kind of statistics or advice to aid them.
He gave an answer when he was under no obligation to do so.
Anybody that is monitoring the effect of their submissions and is asking what went wrong is asking about potentially dangerous information. HN is a pretty fine balancing act, it would not take much to wreck it and the secret sauce serves us all well.
None of us are under any obligation to give a response or answer a question put to us on this site, but the fact of the matter is that we choose to.
The key point I've taken away from this is that everyone says that the websites monitoring software is secret and details can't be given, etc. but in this case it is people who are not privy to this knowledge in the same way that PG is.
Simply put, he saw the post, he responded, yet other people have had to give the tangible and useful responses when it could have easily been subverted by PG spending a little more time to explain his comment.
If he had the time to come on HN, look at the graph presented to him, come to a conclusion and comment upon it, he must have understood much more than he gave away and an expansion upon his first statement would have been useful, for instance: "Your submission set off the voting ring detector, it believed that ... and this caused it to trigger and lower your submissions ranking on the site." would have been an order of magnitude more effective. Even if it was only one short paragraph, it would have been better.
What strikes me as rude and presumptuous is when people complain about the HN site. There is no HN Pro with a support package. We're not paying to take part in this community. It reminds me of all the stories of freemium products where the free version users are more demanding than the paying customers.
Well, this is really promotional site for Y Combinator, in the same way as Joel's blog was a promotional blog for his company (Fog Creek). So by this token we (users of the site) serve a double function - consumers and producers of content and marketing audience, i.e. we are paying for use of the site by being marketing targets.
I should state that I wasn't complaining about the website, merely about a single persons comment - the fact that it happened to be PG is largely irrelevant to my complaint, it could have been about anyone.
Although, I believe this was covered further down the discussion but don't have time left this morning to find the link, I will try to locate it once I'm off the bus.
If pg gave "details as to why, what they could do in the future to prevent this or any kind of statistics or advice" he would be giving advice on how to get around the voting ring detection. I imagine he probably does not want to help people evade the process he worked to put in place to cut down on spammy/fraudulent submissions.
In this case it points to a flaw in the system itself - if having any details of it at all allows you to game it, it only takes one lucky person to stumble across some aspect of it accidentally and we will have multiple unknown exploiters using it.
In the case it was absolutely, imperatively impossible to give no details whatsoever, then stating this would probably have been helpful.
An inconvenient truth of HN seems to be that 95% of voter ring detections are legit, while the other 5% are not. This is understandable. As jQueryIsAwesome said, it's a tricky problem.
Another inconvenient truth is, the demigods of HN often see the 95% as the 100%. No matter what defenses fellow HN users can come up with, pg likely gave his response in the way he did because he assumed something about you. Knowing pg's writings, he may have apologized or at least explained the problem if he had identified one. To say that terseness is pg's typical mode is...wrong.
I'm glad you pointed this out. pg has done a lot for this community, so we can't criticize too lightly. But it is a shame that in this instance, he didn't take that extra step for a fellow hacker.
I should state that I'm not part of the original posters team or in any way affiliated with them to alleviate any confusion ("he assumed something about you") before I go on.
I don't wish to devolve in to bitchiness and have no reason to continue criticizing PG after my original post, but I agree that thus far PG has already done a lot to help the community and that he could have done more in this case.
I'm not saying your post was bitchy, I'm saying that I couldn't think of a response which wouldn't have come across as needlessly bitchy if I continued to criticise PG after my original statement
I respectfully disagree. He pointed out the issue. Had I received that response I'd now know what to watch out for. He's not a support guy who is committed to helping all-comers to realise their HN-posting potential.
Try that with Google when you fall foul of their mystical ruleset. "you're not in the index and your business doesn't exist anymore. bye." And that's when you pay them - HN you don't pay and it's just one post, not your whole business model.
"but at the risk of getting hell-banned or massively
down voted your response came across as being unhelpful
and rude, if it had been someone else making the
comment they would likely have been down voted for it,
or at the very least treat with indignation and
ignored"
What? When did it come to this?
Has HN become a Reddit-style circle-jerk, increasingly elbowing out all dissenting opinions even when they are sensibly argued and corroborated with plentiful facts?
When did karma war chests become purses for silencing or pariah-izing, differing or even polarizing thoughts?
I have always thought you had to reason your way to the proverbial top of the heap of consensus-seeking opinions.
Not carpet-bomb your way to it.
Legitimate big wig or a green horn. Same credo.
In fact "thought leaders" should invite criticism and discourage herdism.
This is a disquieting trend.
If you can't rationally present your case or think a curt one-liner will do since your tech peerage will add some pedigree to an otherwise lousy and hollow argument, you should go elsewhere.
This should be a default understanding among all civil discussion online.
Unfortunately we live in a hyper-partisan era where discord is detrimental. A prevailing view that directly contrasts yours is a dent in your sense of self-worth.
I'm actually really sorry, but I didn't understand your comment, I'm not sure if it's too early or I lack the intelligence but I've been reading it again and again for the past 5 minutes and I can't seem to get my head around it, so I can't adequately comment on.
~ After seeing it has been rewritten slightly ~
Thanks for the response and I agree, one of the good things about this site is that everyone comes here equal, very rarely do I see any kind of elitism between the users, with the exception of the occasional PHP vs Ruby(oR) rant.
I wasn't putting down Paul for the sake of putting him down, it wasn't my intention to come across as pretentious or seeming to push morals on people and I acknowledge a comment above stating that Paul could simply have been terse in his response, I do however still assert my original comment, I believe that he could have brought a lot more to the table than he did when he posted, I nearly always think carefully about my comments before I make them.
HN is exemplary in this regard, it has quite possibly the best quality of commenting I have found so far and I hope it continues this way for a long time to come, I'm relatively new to this site, only having been on this account for 3 months now, but in that time I have been a daily user (probably reading 50+ articles per day and commenting upon several) and as such I feel it is my responsibility to help the quality of this site remain at the same level, if I feel a post does little to aid or engage with someone who requires help, it is my duty to mention it, regardless of if the persons name is green or if the persons name is PG.
Also, my karma is like a yo-yo after posting on this thread, I'm literally seeing it jump up or down after every page refresh.
He's actually defending you. He's saying you shouldn't have to write a paragraph long preamble to explain why you're second guessing PG.
Personally, I think you're way off-base. PG obviously can't elaborate on the voting ring detector or give further detail because to do so would lessen its effectiveness. I wasn't expecting the OP to even get a response.
Is not so off-base, it was kind of rude because he didn't say "The submission set off the voting ring detector", he literally said "You set off the voting ring detector" wish can be read as an accusation even if that was not what Mr. Graham had in mind.
I'm not defending his disapproval of PG's response.
Just alluding to the larger point he -- somewhat tangentially -- hit on, which is quite true.
The herdism part.
HNers incapable of presenting their own take -- worthy of some import -- often resolve to aligning with the closest agreeable opinion and / or down-voting opinions that are farther afar from them.
The problem with this is that often enough their own opinion -- if they actually took the time to properly form it -- is really not proximate to either of the viewpoints. Not even by a long shot.
They just want to express for the sake of expression.
And the least demanding form of expression is a vote, whether in favor or out of favor. PG agrees with this sentiment in one of his earlier posts concerning fine tuning the HN experience.
Herdism is bad. It gives you the Reddit quagmire.
Weak-willed people align with either of two equidistant opinions because they sense that some measure of expression of their will is more valuable than none at all.
Weak-willed people also have the established-majority bias.
When given a choice of two clear 'candidates' whose strengths ( vote tallies ) are clear for everyone to see, they are easily lured into siding with the trouncing candidate irrespective of the degree of concurrence of their opinions.
If we are to have a vibrant community, this kind of behavior (as well as those agents) should be actively repelled.
This comment gave me a slight giggle, which is good as I'm just about to start my day.
It has largely gone off topic, which is also, largely my fault and it's a shame that the original topic has been overshadowed by this instead of actual useful responses for the original poster which wasn't in any way my intention.
You try to unfairly increase the upvotes on your submission, by getting people who don't read HN to register and upvote your submission. Or, you create a bunch of HN accounts, and log into each one and upvote your submission.
Getting on the front page of HN can drive a lot of traffic to a site, which can turn into money, so there's a financial incentive to game the system.
It seems unlikely that this is algorithmic, hence, I would guess if a post is deemed to not be meeting HN standards / guidelines, moderators can "demote" a post, essentially removing it from the front page. So in this case, was the title simply too link-baity? And who judges that?
This is obviously a guess, and looking through the FAQ (Official and unofficial!), I can't seem to see it stated anywhere.
Another possibility could be user flagging, but that would seem too easy to game maliciously.
I think whilst some elements of your filtering you want to keep secret to stop spammers, it would be helpful to understand this throttling behaviour to help people submit better content. Transparency is often helpful to create less work for both sides, so if an answer could be given, I think people would be interested to know!
i don't know how current it is, but i believe that hn source is included in the arc download - see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1390685 - so you could try looking there to see how flagging is handled.
Are there any YC companies competing directly in the space? 42Floors comes to mind, although I believe they are focused exclusively on commercial real estate at the moment.
If there is a YC company that competes directly with you, I could see incentive for a mod to suppress your post. </tinfoil hat speculation>
It's not tinfoil hat speculation. Sharp dropoffs also happened when the story of an AirBNB house being robbed broke. Rather than just seeing one story dropping off we need a way to see every time this happens to make our own minds up over whether it's above board.
From everything I know about PG and YC, I highly doubt they themselves would take that kind of action unless a post was outright slander. It just seems Nixonian.
That said, there is obviously quite a bit of goodwill on HN for PG and YC. You could call it fanboyism if you were feeling uncharitable. To me, that seems a much more likely scenario - an anti-YC submission getting a bunch of flag votes, rather than an intervention by admins.
Agree, plenty of goodwill from me as well, which is why I was surprised to see a popular voted question about a YC company having trouble suddenly disappear then. Without a good explanation it makes me lose trust in the transparency of HN, whether due to flag votes or direct intervention.
Possibly, though it's not necessarily a mod trying to "suppress" a story. There's probably a social mechanism at play.
When posts on HN are flagged, their ranking gets hit a lot. And a reasonable share of people on HN are YC affiliated. Part of the value of YC is a sense of camaraderie and I suspect YC participants are more likely to support/flag posts that are supportive/dismissive of YC related enterprises.
It's a bit like if someone posts a big troll post about Ruby. I, and other Rubyists, are more likely to flag it. People who buy into the whole "Ruby community is evil" nonsense are more likely to vote it up.
There have been several YC-backed rental/property startups, but it seems a little far-fetched that pg/yc would get admins to suppress competitor stories.
I'm sure there are plenty of examples of competitor start-ups reaching, and staying on, the front page that could rule that theory out.
You 're all entrepreneurs (or wannapreneurs). Why doesn't one of you create a service that will employ mechanical turks as seed to bootstrap a new website by using it and providing honest feedback? I know i would pay for that. Being on the frontpage in HN will not guarantee seed userbase; it's more of an ego boost.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1782058 [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3894695