I've started looking at the "new" page a little more these days.<p>I've seen a few brand new users submitting facebook and yahoo, which could just be new users playing with submission. Recently there were 3 in submissions from 3 brand new users in a small amount of time, and each submission had 3 votes.
This seemed a bit strange to me.<p>I'm sure a small amount of gaming of the system (or attempted gaming of the system) goes on, but I'm wondering how often it occurs.<p>Is it something that I can expect to see a bit of if I start checking out the "new" page regularly, or have I just been looking at the wrong time?
Often enough that the code has provisions against it. Usually a big red flag is when a submission is only minutes old, is of low quality and has 3 or 4 votes on it.<p>I think the main reason for this is that if you manage to get a submission on the front page in the first couple of minutes that it exists momentum will take over (the homepage is a feedback loop, once there more people see your submission, so it will get voted up and stay longer on the homepage).<p>The detection of 'voter rings' (groups of people that vote each other up consistently) is not a simple problem.<p>I think that to stop a site such as HN from being gamed completely is very complicated, related to the the click-fraud combating efforts at projects like google adsense.<p>All things considered I'm actually surprised how little it seems to happen here (compared to other sites like HN), one of the main reasons is that it is (on a relative scale) still fairly small.<p>Making who votes for what public would make it possible to spot such voter rings much quicker.<p>As for the 'NEW' page being the place to look, I almost exclusively use the 'NEW' page, the 'News' page maybe once or twice per day. A lot of good stuff passes by the homepage simply because it does not attract enough votes.<p>Another problem is the sometimes sluggish reaction of the moderators to these tricks, (see the link right below you for a nice example), any clicks from HN to a spammed site will increase the chance of repeat actions.<p>A 'barrier to entry' (say 25 points of karma before you can post your first article) would be another good thing to do.