Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News(goorapid.com) |
Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News(goorapid.com) |
Why am I not surprised?
1. HN Upvotes 2. Product Hunt Upvotes 3. Github Stars
Why? Because it's all part of their marketing con. For some software companies, they rely on the hivemind to drive the purchase of their vaporware.
At $40 for 50 upvotes it's hard to NOT buy upvotes for a small company trying to acquire customers.
I think I give people here a lot more of the benefit of doubt than most other places.
I’m not sure I agree with this. HN is probably better than most sites, but I frequently see gray comments with no responses.
Case closed.
On the other hand I reflexively downvote everything with even a slight wiff of shilling (especially crypto) or anything boot licking and fanboyism.
I may even upvote comments with which I disagree if I feel they're unfairly downvoted.
It would be fun to use chatgpt to make some throwaway SaaS mvp and then get these guys to promote it to see what the experience is like (and then write it up for HN).
> Anima, a no-code tool that turns designs into code, raises $10 million Series A • TechCrunch Sep 01, 2021
> Seed
Strangest spelling of bridge I’ve ever seen
I'd be surprised if that's a unique case.
But, really, upvotes are always easily exploitable and often lead to a sort of herd mentality among commenters. This is why Reddit is the definition of "echo chamber." HN is much better, but it would still be improved if upvotes and downvotes were done away with entirely.
If you compare the level of “interestingness” of the front page and the first page of new, it’s night and day for me. I still go to new sometimes, but when I do, I feel like I’m doing community service to try to surface the most interesting items for the community.
It would be more than difficult to figure out a way to do this without a "frontpage" but anyone who cracks that, would have me as a user.
I feel like voting for the content itself but keeping the comments section flat and sorted by time would lead to less gamified and much better comments sections than what we have now.
Maybe keep upvotes around as a positive reinforcement without having an effect on the position of a comment, and obviously mod flagging for things that break rules, but upvoting and downvoting being equivalent to "I agree" and "I disagree" leads to users gaming the system to hide things they disagree with.
1. "shadow moderation" (Robert Hawkin's term, see https://www.reveddit.com/#spread_word)
2. "The masses" entered. When the site was smaller, diversity was expected (as well as the average technical proficiency of the users). With larger numbers, diverse thought held by minorities is harder to hear.
Then, don't show such posts on the frontpage.
i suppose number of comments would work as an alternative measure, but that doesn't work for stories that are interesting but don't generate much discussion. and it potentially would just push people to post fake comments instead, creating more moderation work.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
If this worked reliably at these prices, it would be trivial to burn the accounts behind it: you'd just buy upvotes (cheaply, it turns out!) for a marginal story and watch who votes for it. It's most probably a scam, feeding on people who themselves hope to scam the site.
As for /new - it's pretty hard to get by that gate if you're making a blatant attempt of trying to get on the front page. And I think a lot of HN users would easily recall a time they flagged something on /new because it's clearly spam even if it doesn't look like it at first glance.
Now, the irony here would be if this is actually a gamed submission itself and the provider is showing that they can get your story on the front page regardless.
Any sufficiently large site will have to deal with bad actors and bots, HN is no different. HN has not been a small site for 3-4 years now.
The real hack is knowing the audience hn is comprised of, and creating great content for that audience. There's several great startups doing just that and very finely so too in HN
I think my social media story might be pretty common. Early on, all my social graphs across various platforms were well managed mappings of my real life friends. Today, all my social graphs are a mess. Platforms seem to push to make it easier to discover and find new friends. I want the opposite of this.
I want to have to go through a series of steps in real life in order to add someone to my contact list. I want to classify this friend in some way that acknowledges what the level of trust is. Is this person a casual acquaintance or a trusted family member?
When content is "shared" and I'm receiving it in my news feed, I don't just want to see how many "likes" it has. I want to heuristics on how my personal network responded to that piece of content. And, of course, I want to own that data and I want my hardware to crunch the data. So this could be built in a decentralized way.
This paradigm is far less susceptible to Sybil attacks, such as paid upvotes on a sites like Hacker News. It would isolate us, in a way, from the zeitgeist. But it would connect us more closely with our real world social network.
But the Internet is also the real world, yes? I'm not sure trivialising Internet-based relationships is the solution to a real problem.
Also you have to consider what we used to call keyboard kourage. Many people will say things online they never would in real life.
To quote Mike Tyson- 'Social media made you all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it'.
Or, to put it in another way, whose to say that they deliver at all?
The site appears barely functional, their own social media accounts have laughably small follower/subscriber numbers considering what they claim to offer and unless I am mistaken, there appears to be an active effort, beyond the often cited meassure that ensures voting on directly linked posts does not affect the vote count[0], to keep everything honest.
[0] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...
I pay one upvote per article worth seeing more of. And one upvote for good comments.
Being asked to defend your work in public and why it's worth being upvoted or talked about is something that folks building should have to go through.
People vote based on how they feel about a product not on the merit of the product itself. In my experience, votes are about 90% subjective, 10% objective. You will not find someone upvoting something they dislike just because they believe it's objectively true, likewise you will not find someone downvoting something they like just because they believe it's objectively false. Votes have very little to do with the thing being voted on and very much to do with the way the voter feels when voting. It's much easier to act on instinct than logic. There is a nontrivial number of people in this world that never realize the difference between their perception of reality and reality itself.
The most popular things are often the simplest or easiest to digest, not necessarily the best for the given purpose. Popularity is not a proxy for quality.
Also, there's a certain set of topics where I can watch the tally go, very predictably -- up, then it gets smashed, and then finally there's some Johnny Come Latelies who vote up again.
Personally, agreement is easy and congruent ("This is correct"); disagreement is quite different ("This is incorrect, and here's why ..."). I think you ought to be able to "agree" with an upvote, but disagreement? That's when words are more useful. Downvotes are too easily brigaded and provide nothing in the way of discussion.
Plus, if you're trying to build a genuine community around your product or idea, you need their honest feedback and support to truly understand what they want and how to improve. So, I'd say that buying upvotes is not a sustainable strategy and could actually harm your chances of success on the road to PMF.
If you're too harsh on content heavily promoted by voting rings and content with lots of low-quality comments, posting tons of low-quality comments and making a bad attempt at a voting ring becomes an useful strategy against your competition.
A lot of link aggregators / newsletters source from HN as well, so making the front page usually means a trickling of other mentions over the following ~week. Anecdotally these tend to produce less traffic, but have a higher conversion rate.
For $100 million, you can boost a post with fake upvotes.
(Hey, it could be the big break that turns into a $1B startup. And the cost to provide this service is high, since YC thrives on reputation, which this erodes.)
Now that it has a price tag, sue others for theft of service.
YC-funded companies get special hiring threads which appear on front page of HN.
In terms of backlinks and traffic to website, those should function similarly to buying upvotes.
Hmm. It's not obvious they've actually visited.
I've elsewhere said that useful/not useful and agree/disagree should be two different buttons, similar to how LessWrong does it. However, it is a community with even higher SNR and a very different look and feel compared to HN, so I don't know if the same thing would work here.
Once user action is signed, trust must be assigned to networks of users. (Of course, individual users can be trusted, but it would be easier to manage if users are bundled into networks somehow.)
Key management is the hard problem for this to work. User need to be able to have many keys that are revocable. Blockchains like Ethereum are advocating for chain centralized solutions, but I see no reason why that must be the case. It can be done, from top to bottom, in a totally distributed way. From the blockchain perspective, a "multi-chain" solution is the right one.
In any case, I don't get the hate for comment up/downvotes: yes, some people will try to game it, but overall, it tends to get good stuff to the top, and is better than having to wade through comments randomly.
I suppose we can start by splitting up introvert and extrovert brands of interesting. Entrepeneurialness for example comes in both pondering alone time and the gathering of crowds.
If we could succeed at creating or uploading a digital dang people would be able to bench their publications in advance and create the SEO click bait hell all over until eventually (like google) success has it that the only remaining signal of quality is how high it was ranked previously back when the algo still worked. Counting click-though is specially terrible there.
Only setting real goals and tuning against exploits could produce hard numbers. It's much easier if the goal is selling a product but even then there is the short and the long game.
I don't know what the original site guidelines said, but the earliest version I could find in the wayback machine (July 2, 2014) starts exactly the same as the current content. [1]
Hacker News Guidelines
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
This has been marketing 101 for at least a decade. Reddit, hacker news, any site with user content is bought and paid for.
I lost 10 year old account by offhandedly mentioning it existed in a thread like this criticising the behaviour.
It's weird they don't want to talk about it but I do understand not linking it. There's mod accounts to some very big national subs up for sale.