Voting Rings: How Insiders Game User Generated News

How many people here ever click on "new"? How many stories just disappear without hitting the front page? How many accounts need to be involved to make a particular story get to the front page?<p>I'm sure that the answers respectively are, "rather few", "the vast majority" and "not many". And there you have the raw ingredients for a voting ring to form. As a matter of principle I would never be involved with such, and I have a natural dislike for anyone that I think is. But the ingredients are there.<p>More than that, you still have a popularity effect. People who vote on new articles have to prioritize what they read in some fashion. Speaking personally, it is natural to choose to look at articles with interesting titles, or which are submitted by someone you recognize as being a consistent source of good content. Therefore if someone like patio11 submits an article, it has a significant advantage. As does anything involving YC. (Of course promoting YC is the whole point of this site, so I don't mind that at all. And I'm guilty at looking at content from people I trust before content from people I've never heard of.)<p>Memory says that jacquesm mentioned once that he had turned down an offer of money to post certain articles from companies that were looking for good pr. (I don't swear that I correctly remember who it was.) He may have turned them down, but I'm sure they asked again, and if they asked around enough I'm sure that they found a taker. And if so, then you have the dark side here on HN.

It's interesting to me that Kuro5hin in its heydey had relatively few problems with voting rings, despite having a purely voting-driven front page. There are probably some reasons involving community size and dynamics, but my guess is that the biggest one is the fact that the site was organized around submission of original articles to Kuro5hin, as opposed to submission of links. That raises the buy-in stakes beyond what people only interested in promotion are willing to spend time on, as well as lowering the potential gains from promotion (you got your article read, but directly on k5, not via traffic to any monetizable endeavor of yours). The fact that all votes were public may have had an effect as well, making any sort of collusion easier to spot.

HN may have voting rings, but it still works because it's a niche site, and hackers have strong Internet BS detectors that counter spam/phishing/linkjacking/other mischief relatively effectively. People on HN may be killing time, but the majority still have some quality standards for what they want to read. Gaming HN isn't worth as much because A) there's fewer people, and B) you have to work harder to game it. Other niche sites can easily share this quality.<p>But for a site like Digg that wants to be the biggest social news site, it's just a race to the bottom. Gaming Digg just requires a tabloid-editor mentality where you figure out the quickest thing that will grab peoples attention and then boost it to the front page.

YC is already one giant mafia, if you'd like to think of it that way. I'm sure YC classes vote each others' stuff up.<p>I'm wondering what the recently implemented voting ring detection reveals. Are they all clustered by YC class? Are there overlaps? Or is there an outside group moving the articles up?

When you build a site with user submitted content and voting, you have two immediate problems you need to solve before you can even get started:<p><pre><code> - How are you going to deal with spam - How are you going to deal with gaming </code></pre> They're actually related problems, since the aim of both is to drive people to a given website. Since that's demonstrably valuable in terms of cash money, it's an absolute certainty that people will try to take advantage of it.<p>You really need to bake something in to handle it from the word go.

I'd bet there are voting rings on HN. Perhaps not as bad as was on Digg. But I'm sure it's here. PG made a comment about it the other day, offhand, in something about getting some code/idea help about fighting it.

There's a fine line between a couple dozen guys on IRC with similar interests and an actual voting ring. I'm not sure where one concept stops and another starts. I guess if you demanded money for voting, that'd obviously be bad. But if you IM'ed a couple dozen friends about a cool new link you saw? It gets fuzzier.<p>I have noticed voting trends by time of day on HN. I've also noticed what appears to be auto upvoting and downvoting based on the submitter. But I'm just an outsider, so what do I know? Up until recently, I have always assumed such activity to be more demographically-based. I am slowly beginning to have my doubts, though.<p>The interesting point about HN is, at the end of the day, this is PGs site. Maybe he decides he wants articles about squirrels. So we get articles about squirrels. Maybe he decides site X is trollish. So we get no stuff from site X.<p>It's been called a "benign dictatorship". Meh. Sounds a bit like "jumbo shrimp" to me. Even though HN isn't what it used to be, I still visit.

oooooh, i'm so scared... but excuse me, I've got to make a few 1000 electric sheep so I can get some traffic to my blog...