Gaming social news sites has been going on for quite some time now, although I don't see why anyonenwould bother gaming HN- the traffic is minimal and too savvy to click on ads.
As for Digg and reddit- many of you have startups and blogs that are floundering with minimal traffic and revenue.
Instead of complaining and being all up in arms, perhaps you should accept that Digg and reddit have been gamed by numerous entities for years, and learn how to game them for your own benefit. That doesn't mean spamming, it means giving your own quality content an extra push. Back when I did that sort of thing, I got dozens of stories to the Digg and reddit front pages. After receiving, synthetically, with many accounts and proxies, the first hundred or so votes needed to get to the front page, these stories went on to receive thousands of natural, real upvotes. So much for your "algorithms". If you can't beat them, join them.
Getting your friends to vote you up is one thing... getting a network of proxied spam bots to do so is another.
There's a fine line between "giving an extra push" and being downright unethical. I usually try to convince people (on twitter and irc and personally) to upvote my stories when I think they'll be of interest, but I would never actually contrive a script to do that for me.
I'll add that in my experience, the relatively small push of getting a few initial upvotes from friends, even on reddit, is usually enough to propel articles onto wherever they're destined to go. You don't need a 100 fake votes.
If you're going to game a site, might as well make it a high traffic site- I'm sure Digg and reddit get the vast majority of the bots/fake users.
That said, I see no ethical distinction between asking your friends to vote for a story and asking a bunch of random people on the internet to vote for a story. Either way, you're stuffing the ballot box.
One only has to look at the myriad submissions by Alex Jones/truther "bots" on reddit to see that.
I think you can ethically ask your friends to vote up your stories, as long as they actually have accounts used for more than voting up your stories. It would be like asking your school friends to vote for you if you were running for a school office.
I'm just not sure how comfortable I am with users politicizing the voting process. At least spam and most fluff seems to be taken care of quickly, so it isn't really a problem.
It's not really unethical, but it is generally frowned upon to have your friends vote up stories. There is a slippery slope with asking your friends to vote up stories; that is basically how digg works.
No... Ed W and I did an interview with Andrew Warner and Andrew seemed surprised that we basically had no method for getting stories to the front page. At the time of the interview I hadn't had a high point story for a month.
The powers that be are very good at what they do. They usually notice things that are out of the ordinary.
Actually the traffic here may not be really high, but it's exceptionally high-quality for the right products. Of course, the right products probably wouldn't need to purchase upvotes in the first place.
I'd be really curious to see what the quality is like for mediocre products.
I imagine it's probably not that difficult to game HN. The community's not that big, the big gaming boys work elsewhere on much larger sites so scaling down to HN won't be hard. If the article doesn't fit HN though, that's a different question.
Create 50 or 60 accounts and keep them ticking over (i.e. voting on random articles daily - maybe even comment from a few & submit the odd semi legit link).
Then submit what you want and upvote carefully. Voila.
Probably not that hard: though given the size of the community I'd hope we'd spot them.
I've gotten to the first page with that number of upvotes, so it's definitely doable, you just need to have the link voted on shortly after submission.
It's inevitable. The theory is that the algorithmic protection and a little bit of oversight can remove the irrelevant stuff. If someone wants to pay to submit relevant stuff, then I don't see a problem.
I do. I come here to read stories that are authentic. When or if I figure out that someone "paid" to get their post or article to the front page of a site like this, I'll start to lose something that I consider the best part of HN: honesty and respect. [1]
[1] Maybe with the exception of a few people I read on Tumblr each morning, HN is the most authentic community of like-minded folks who seem to either (a) care about the viewpoints of other members or (b) act civilized rather than become trolls.
Digg/Reddit used to be civilized and intelligent as well, but then they grew in popularity and everything went downhill from there. It is definitely possible for the same thing to happen to HN if something (I have no idea what) isn't actively done to prevent it.
difference between digg/reddit and HN is that HN users typically actively police, and the application restricts functionality based on your karma. you're not allowed to do certain things unless you have a certain level of trust, which isn't the case on digg/reddit.
Actually I think the main difference is that Reddit is a business and HN is not.
Reddit's management should do whatever it takes to maximise revenue, and this often means going for the lowest (or at least lower) common denominator.
HN is different, it is not directly about making money, but about getting intelligent people to have civil doscussions on tech and entrepreneurship, presumably to market ycombinator.
This isn't very scalable. If HN's userbase were of the same size as Digg's or Reddit's and most of those people were unwanted (i.e., if a large group of Digg/Reddit users were to begin frequenting HN), it would not be able to prevent them from saying/doing as they pleased.
"the application restricts functionality based on your karma"
The karma is determined by other user's ratings, right? How well is that going to work if a majority of the users are similar to your average Digg/Reddit user?
One of the big differences that makes it possible for HN to maintain its civility is its relatively small size. So far, I have not seen any scalable methods of moderating a user-contributed link aggregation website. Therefore, I can only hope that Digg/Reddit users don't find out about HN (which is mostly a pipe dream).
i don't think you've been here long enough to know how this site works.
if somebody submits off-topic or spammy links, they will be killed. if somebody starts acting like a jerk, their account will be killed. it doesn't really matter what the average hn user thinks about it, they will be killed anyway.
the editors are very ruthless about this. it doesn't matter how many unruly users come here, they will either abide by the rules or they will be banned, period.
Tamour? You out there dude? Care to explain? What do you need to promote so badly you don't trust the board to vote you up or down?