It has been frequently commented by people outside the news.yc community that news.yc is too pandering to PG. To test this, I propose the following experiment which requires PG's co-operation. I propose that PG also post comments / submissions etc under some other username and then compare the average upmods for posts under the "pg" username vs the random anonymous username.
This can be started at an unspecified time in the future and run for lets say 1 month. Only PG will know what username he is using other than pg.<p>I also propose the same for nickb and other prominent users. It may turn out that people upmod stuff from more recognizable names when they might have left it at neutral if some other user had submitted the same content.<p>Well actually it may already be the case that they are posting under multiple names.<p>Might be an interesting social experiment.<p>edit : Or is it already underway? nickb is pg :P?
I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet. If you are going to do this experiment, it needs to be _double-blind_. Meaning PG cannot know which username his post is going to show up under until after he has written it. Same goes for all the comments he writes (if you're going to measure those too).<p>If PG knows before hand what name his content is going to show up under there is a high likelihood of a bias on his part which he would be _unable_ to ignore even if he consciously tried. This is standard psych experiment stuff.
<i>"... Only PG will know what username he is using other than pg. ..."</i><p>Unfortunately I suspect more than a few will recognise his fist. Just like old school morse signallers can recognise individuals by listening. I'm pretty sure individual writing styles are recognisable.<p>My idea would be to make user names invisible on submissions to individuals, until after you vote. Only then revealing who they are to the person who votes.
An idea I just thought of would be to keep the poster anonymous until the post achieves a certain rating - after that show who the poster is.<p>If there actually is favoritism this might solve that issue somewhat and yet give people credit where it's due.
Persistent identity is an important building block in community formation. Clay Shirky goes into some detail on this in "A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" <a href="http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html</a><p>"If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in. [...] It's pretty widely understood that anonymity doesn't work well in group settings, because "who said what when" is the minimum requirement for having a conversation. What's less well understood is that weak pseudonymity doesn't work well, either. Because I need to associate who's saying something to me now with previous conversations. The world's best reputation management system is right here, in the brain.[...] If you want a good reputation system, just let me remember who you are."<p>I am not sure what the problem is that you are trying to solve, but full anonymity will undoubtedly cause the HN community much more headache than whatever you believe is afflicting is now. Whether there is a "PG bias" or not, he is accountable for his words because they are associated in a persistent fashion with his login.<p>One final point, I don't know about a pg bias, but I certainly have a positive nickb bias, because he has submitted so many good articles, I will normally follow whatever he posts even if I am not thrilled about the title. Doesn't mean I vote him up no matter what, but making the submissions anonymous would remove an important signal/attribute.
"Might be an interesting social experiment."<p>It's not an interesting experiment unless you learn something from it. There's virtually nothing that can be learned from this.<p>Plus, I like being able to follow the comments of pg and others on their threads page.
Just because people upmod more recognizable names, it doesn't mean they are pandering.<p>For example, I will be more likely to read a comment if it was written by any user that I recognize. If I'm more likely to read a comment I'm more likely to upvote it as well.
Here are the users with the top median comment scores:<p><pre><code> ("pg" 4)
("theoneill" 3)
("mechanical_fish" 3)
("garbowza" 3)
("kkim" 3)
("paul" 3)
("cperciva" 3)
</code></pre>
If there is a difference, it's not huge.
When browsing through <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg</a> I notice that his comments won't make sense without knowing that it is pg who is making them.<p>Most are clarifications as Hacker News Maintainer and Furry Investor. (or Furry Capitalist?)<p>Knee jerk vote-ups I am guilty of are for: edw519, mixmax, rms, pg and nostrademons. But I'm very sure I'd have voted those comments up even if I didn't know the commenter's id. ID gives more context... it is like I hear it in a particular voice.
I'm not entirely sure what problem you're trying to solve. Are you trying to "fix" the impression that PG-pandering is present so more outsiders make their way into the community?<p>I don't particularly care if PG gets tons of karma. I love the submissions, comments and community here.<p>I think it's best to just let it be exactly the way it is, even if there's some pandering.
It could be made so that a nickname is automatically selected per-page. This way threads he comments in could be followed. A small pool of 5 or so names could be reused so that he couldn't be exposed by finding the user that has just been created.<p>Example implementation:<p><pre><code> unames=['bob1','bob2','pg']
lu=len(unames)
secret_seed=309580435
from binascii import crc32
def hash_eq(number):
return crc32(str(number),secret_seed)
def get_uname(page_id):
return unames[hash_eq(page_id)%lu]
</code></pre>
A checkbox for manual override could also be added.
Find a psychologist, or even a psychology major with enough classes under their belt, and they can tell you that there is most certainly a bias towards upvoting those with a familiar name.<p>I don't recall the name of the principle, but doing some googling around about Robert Cialdini's work should get you all the information you need.
I would <i>hope</i> that, if PG and I wrote exactly the same words about (e.g.) Lisp, his post would be upmodded an order of magnitude higher than mine. PG knows what he's talking about as a Lisp programmer, and we all know that. (The published books, the reputation, the history with Yahoo Store, and the existence of this site are big, big clues.) I don't know much about Lisp beyond SICP, and if I claimed I did you would have no way of knowing whether or not I'm telling the truth.<p>Context, in the form of background information about the author, makes a post more valuable. That's a no-brainer.
Does anonymity defeat the purpose of social bookmarking (and social networking in general)?<p>I agree that it would be an interesting social experiment, though I'm not concerned if people are pandering to pg, nickb, or anyone else.
Even if you implement this experiment, I bet there will still be an inherent bias for PG-related material, most notably his essays.<p>I really don't have a problem with it... that's what this community is all about. Hacker News is PGs world, and if you don't like it, then go somewhere else.
> It may turn out that people upmod stuff from more recognizable names when they might have left it at neutral if some other user had submitted the same content.<p>I think when it comes to social interaction, the ability to build relationships of trust is a feature, not a bug.
Easiest way to test this would give the class 'user' to links to users. Folks could tweak their browser's CSS with a.user { display: none; } real easy.