Ask HN: Does spammy self-promotion drown out real hacker news? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does spammy self-promotion drown out real hacker news?

6 pointslogn4 comments

I've noticed that a lot of interesting news submissions never make the homepage. I think it's because a lot of companies post a blog entry that's really just pumping their own brand and get all the employees to vote it up. Meanwhile, the interesting news post doesn't have the manufactured upvotes so gets lost in the shuffle. My former company even figured out how to game the system and get by vote filters (it's fairly simple).

Looking at the HN homepage now, many are what I would consider blatant self-promotion and border on spammy. Granted, I have no problem with someone wanting feedback on their site or offering a really in-depth look at internal technology (e.g., this is how we handle failover and scale to 1MM uniques/day), but a lot of companies just manufacture reasons to blog solely to boost traffic (company memo: thanks for the blog ideas and upvoting our post, HN gave us 10K hits today! good leads!).

HN page as of now (50% are self-promotion, several IMO are legit): 1. Neural Networks for Machine Learning (coursera.org) 3. Keccak wins the SHA-3 competition (nist.gov) 5. Show HN: I built a stock market game based on the top 50,000 websites (linkdaq.net) 8. Lockitron: Keyless entry using your phone (lockitron.com) 9. Software on Steam (steampowered.com) 12. Social Login Buttons Aren’t Worth It (mailchimp.com) 16. Online Python Tutor: Learn programming by visualizing code execution (pythontutor.com) 18. How We Doubled Our Android Install Rate in One Hour (dwellable.com) 20. Show HN: Meet your cardboard buddy. (foldable.me) 21. Filepicker.io launches Alfresco, WebDAV, & FTP integrations (filepicker.io) 22. Show HN: Summaries of interesting content, written by people (tldr.io) 24. Lead Product Engineering at OrderAhead 27. How to Model Viral Growth: The Hybrid Model (linkedin.com) 29. Meet the 2012 MacArthur Fellows (macfound.org)

If you ever figure out a way to game HN, then contact PG privately, but unless you know him personally, do not expect a response from him confirming or denying the existence of the problem. HN uses a lot of anti-abuse code that is not publicly known (e.g. secret sauce), and it's best for everyone if the secrets remain secret.

I have privately reported a half dozen or so abuse problems over the last four or five years. Though I live only thirty minutes south of PG, I don't actually know him, so I always give him an "easy out" by telling him no response is necessary when reporting abuse problems. I also refuse to pry regarding the anti-abuse code, even though I have to fight my own excessive curiosity. Ya, I've always wanted to know how it works, but I also understand why I shouldn't be told. It kind of sucks for me, but it's better for everyone if the anti-abuse code continues working.

If you're good with search engines and have a ton of time to kill reading posts, then you'll find mentions of "voting ring detection" on HN, but as noted, the details are not public. Anyone who has studied discussion forum design will tell how hellishly difficult voting ring detection is to implement effectively in an open voting environment with (mostly) anonymous accounts.

As for the increasing self-promotion seen in submissions, well, it's always been a problem, and worse, it's also a very difficult problem to address effectively. If suitably formalized, you might be able to prove both of these problems to be undecidable (unsolvable, insoluble, or whatever pedantic term is currently being used for impossible). The only good news is, even when you can prove a problem can't be completely solved, there is still the potential of finding a more effective partial solution.

>it's best for everyone if the secrets remain secret.

Good old security through obscurity.

On the one hand, I think we police ourselves pretty well, but on the other hand I'm pretty sure posting to /newest is a complete crap shoot unless you are posting for a certain domain or as a certain user.

Well yeah always cheating will drown out the real thing, but still if the community actually see this new real interesting thing it will find it's way to the front page.

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