Ask HN: If you wanted to manipulate HN, how would you go about it?

5 points by 58 9 years ago | 2 comments

By manipulation I mean either the suppression or promotion of certain information / discussions, gaming the ranking algorithm, astroturfing, etc.

As just one example, I've wondered if for instance there was a front page article about a bad quarterly report, or a corruption scandal, and I wanted it to drop off the front page fast, would it work to simply introduce some flame-war-inducing topic via a tangential comment? If the company in question was Microsoft, for example, you could pretty easily slide in some dig against Linux, begin a flame war, and then as I understand it (and as I've witnessed many times) the HN ranking algorithm would start to push it down.

Of course this discussion is not meant to encourage any bad behavior, but as a security exercise it seems useful. I also am unaware of and interested in what HN has made publicly known about their ranking algorithm, and how this squares with best practices as far as thwarting manipulation.

pmontra 9 years ago |

A large number of accounts you control. It must be so large that you can use small and different subsets each time you need them. Make those accounts post and reply sometimes to get points and be plausible users. Maybe some passably intelligent bots. Don't register them at the same time. You probably need one year or two to ramp up the accounts.

greenyoda 9 years ago |

I'm not sure why someone would go to great lengths to manipulate HN regarding something like a bad quarterly report or a corruption scandal. HN is not really a significant news source if you're interested in financial or political news, so keeping it off HN's front page won't make any difference - how many people are there whose only news source is HN?

Another way of thinking about it is that HN is a news aggregator, so any article on HN has already been published somewhere that probably has a much higher readership than HN (mainstream media, tech media, etc.). So why bother to manipulate HN?

That said, it's clear that there are articles posted here that have political, social or commercial agendas behind them, so one has to read skeptically (as is true for all media sources).