Hacker News Upvote: Add to Cart
upvotes.club
upvotes.club
There is also a Hacker News "growth hacking" tactic of linking to /newest on Facebook/Twitter instead of linking to the submission directly to avoid the voting ring detector, which also doesn't work and is blatantly obvious: http://i.imgur.com/08pAFOw.jpg
I'm pretty sure that's unequivocally false. It's difficult enough to make it work that it probably wouldn't be worth it, but I'm close to 100% sure I could force something to the top if I wanted to. I don't particularly want to spend the time automating accounts to make them "look natural" and I don't really want to shell out the money to spend on IPs.
But I know for a fact the same thing is happening on Reddit with great success every day. I could spell out how, but I don't think the HN mods would be too keen on that. Any hacker should be able to figure it out, though.
Furthermore, if you produce something solid, all you'd really need is the first <10 upvotes to get on the front page and let it catch on "organically." I can promise you that is happening _all the time_ on HN.
I'm glad you keep your Twitter search running and keep calling people out that blatantly ask for upvotes; the easiest way to kill spam is just to make it difficult, but to say that manipulation doesn't work is just not true.
You need a Hacker News account to upvote, and obviously having a large number of new accounts upvote something would trip a voting ring detector.
> Furthermore, if you produce something solid, all you'd really need is the first <10 upvotes to get on the front page and let it catch on "organically."
Much easier said than done. The median score of a HN submission is 1-2 points last time I checked. (the discoverability of HN submissions on /newest is an issue, but that's another topic)
And if it's actually solid, it's not the market for vote brigading.
I agree manipulation does happen, but it doesn't mean it works and instead silently penalizes the submission to death.
Correct, but what if I gave myself a couple or few months to prepare accounts? Do a search on blackhatworld (or another spam forum) for "aged accounts" and you'll see that you can generally buy them in tiers - the older they are the more expensive they are.
I'm not saying it's worth it or I think it's something people should do, but saying it's not possible or doesn't work is absurd.
It directly affects the cost of the promotional service
Basically the algorithm looked like:
Score = (p-1) / (t+2)^g
p = points (the -1 is to negate the point of the original submitter)
t = time
g = gravity (or some gravitational constant)
So the p value matters a lot; especially when there's a smaller t (a new story). This gives newer stories a chance to bubble up with fewer points against the ones that have 1,000 points but have been on the front page for days. It's a pretty ingenious algorithm, actually.
It makes sense, given that formula, that even if all p values are weighted equally, moving p from 3 to 4 would make a big difference, and would be able to push something new to the front page. You'll see them now and then with 2-3 upvotes on the front page, because they're very new and the front page is relatively stale.
Anyway, I'm ~100% sure spammers can get around the vote ring detection, but I don't think that's happening on HN in a major way.
It's possible that flags, voting ring detector, or spamkiller were negatively impacting the other story, but it definitely isn't a straight votes & time formula anymore.
What makes you sure? If you know something we don't, we need to hear it—the community relies on us to get this right. It's also personal: I've poured countless hours into combating vote manipulation, and if you know my code isn't working, you bet I want you to spell out how.
The upside of a public discussion outweighs the downside because (1) if you tell us things we don't know, we can start investigating for them—it's what we don't know that's worrisome; and (2) community members might respond with valuable knowledge of their own. That's also why we haven't buried the OP (which, in case users are wondering, we do know about and have lots of data on).
For what it's worth, I don't think HN is in any immediate danger, nor do I know of any active, large-scale vote manipulation happening currently. But to say something like "vote manipulation on HN does not work" is a very bold claim.
But it sounds like you have a bit of understanding when it comes to this topic, which I'm very interested in understanding more about generically speaking. I've always been curious how vote manipulation detection _actually works_, and the kinds of things that can be done to combat vote hacking of various kinds.
I say this as someone vaguely considering the idea of making a small HN-like forum at some point (still figuring out the why and how).
You say this, and it may or may not be true, but of course, Hacker News isn't releasing the code to prove it.
And I understand why - the problem is that votes mean something to startups that post here, they have a potential real money value. But it's unfortunate that any insight into how the HN staff deals with the problem of being gamed is denied to the community at large, out of fear of being gamed even more. Plenty of people here would be willing to learn Arc, audit and contribute to the codebase if you let them, and that scrutiny could be beneficial, not just harmful.
As you yourself note, however, I can't see any possible way to make what you're describing practically work out: there is absolutely NO way to tell the good guys from the "growth hackers". :(
The other problem is that the bunch of people willing to do this work - which (I say this non-critically, please note!!) is similar to IRL work for a community organization or similar, in that it's not attractive or "widely scoped shiny impact that looks awesome on paper" - is much, much smaller than the bunch of people with evil grins just waiting for more tidbits to use against everyone else.
The first thing on my mind would be avoiding detection. You can't spin up 5 DO droplets and do your work from there-- every IP you use needs to be a residential IP, and you need thousands of IP addresses. You could go to the trouble of building your own botnet, but that's illegal and very difficult.
Luckily, there's an application called Hola that has convinced 20 million people to willingly join their botnet, and you can buy yourself access to it right here: https://luminati.io .
You'd think that would be the hardest part, but that service means it's the easy part. Now I'd need to go learn PhantomJS and start creating accounts-- being sure to keep each account appearing at a particular IP address. The hardest part is generating some credibility for these accounts. They should always look like they're active-- so I'd be sure to have each account load far more posts than they vote on, and I would upvote plenty of things that I wasn't paid to upvote. Just to generate some randomness.
But that only gets me part of the way there-- these accounts would also need to contribute. My first thought is that you could just scan for reposts in the default subreddits and then repost popular top-level comments from the previous post. I've actually seen this pointed out a few times on reddit. With the amount of comments reddit gets, they probably don't have the resources to detect duplicates.
Hackernews would be significantly harder-- I have no idea how you could generate relevant comments without doing it by hand. That's my guess as to what they're doing.
If bots become very intelligent and do create quality content, the money would be in manipulating social media not in running a social media service because nobody will be happy showing ads to bots - no matter how insightful comments they post. Reddit/Facebook/Twitter etc. will want their algorithm to cure the content even if the content itself is create by machines.
As fraud becomes ubiquitous, the harder the tech giants will fight.
That's brilliant.
This site is really expensive compared to some options I've seen sold.
I think my favorite part of all this is the billing screen. "Doesn't have to be your real name."
They still will show up on /r/all of the post was never stickied.
"That's also why we haven't buried the OP (which, in case users are wondering, we do know about and have lots of data on).""Why so expensive compared to Reddit": http://upvotes.club/buying-hacker-news-growthhackers-upvotes...
HN's also more expensive because there is less demand.
Am I mistaken in thinking that they outsource to other people? (I'm having trouble loading their website due to the load.)
Also, doesn't HN rank upvotes based on karma and account age? You can't downvote until reaching 500(?) and having your account for a certain duration of time.
That sounds about right.
There seem to be some additional rules, too. For instance, there are certain comments I don't see a downvote button for, and I have no clue why.
So in essence what you have is a seller determining which type of the two accounts to make. He will not be able to re-use the HN accounts as much, and therefore he makes less per unit of time from them, and must charge more to make them worth his time.
Is it a legal possibility (regardless of feasibility) to bring charges against people for manipulation of this kind? (Does HN even have a User Agreement? I can't remember if I had to do anything when I signed up)
Give a challenge string and ask the user submitting an upvote to compute a nonce that when added to the string would produce an hash with 10 leading zeros. User submits the calculated nonce, the server computes the hash for challenge string + nonce and the upvote is registered. This makes it computationaly expensive for an upvote provider to submit hundreds of upvotes
But that gets user-hostile, so it's not the best idea.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676504 and marked it off-topic.
I'm legitimately curious if KirinDave has evidence that r/t_d buys upvotes.
In face-to-face conversation, most good-faith signals are sent with tone of voice and physical expression. We don't have those channels in text so it's necessary to encode them some other way.