Paying for hackernews frontpage links, now?
rentacoder.com
rentacoder.com
Tamour? You out there dude? Care to explain? What do you need to promote so badly you don't trust the board to vote you up or down?
The cake is a lie.
1. A 'paid' frontpage story that is sufficiently HN related so that a moderator doesn't kill it,
2. A frontpage story showing evidence that somebody wants to game a social news site.
The second is something neither the site owners nor the site community want.
As for Digg and reddit- many of you have startups and blogs that are floundering with minimal traffic and revenue.
Instead of complaining and being all up in arms, perhaps you should accept that Digg and reddit have been gamed by numerous entities for years, and learn how to game them for your own benefit. That doesn't mean spamming, it means giving your own quality content an extra push. Back when I did that sort of thing, I got dozens of stories to the Digg and reddit front pages. After receiving, synthetically, with many accounts and proxies, the first hundred or so votes needed to get to the front page, these stories went on to receive thousands of natural, real upvotes. So much for your "algorithms". If you can't beat them, join them.
There's a fine line between "giving an extra push" and being downright unethical. I usually try to convince people (on twitter and irc and personally) to upvote my stories when I think they'll be of interest, but I would never actually contrive a script to do that for me.
I'll add that in my experience, the relatively small push of getting a few initial upvotes from friends, even on reddit, is usually enough to propel articles onto wherever they're destined to go. You don't need a 100 fake votes.
The powers that be are very good at what they do. They usually notice things that are out of the ordinary.
That said, I see no ethical distinction between asking your friends to vote for a story and asking a bunch of random people on the internet to vote for a story. Either way, you're stuffing the ballot box.
One only has to look at the myriad submissions by Alex Jones/truther "bots" on reddit to see that.
I'm just not sure how comfortable I am with users politicizing the voting process. At least spam and most fluff seems to be taken care of quickly, so it isn't really a problem.
I'd be really curious to see what the quality is like for mediocre products.
Why do you need to be dumb to click on ads? I see ads that are interesting quite often and I do click them if I'm curious.
Then submit what you want and upvote carefully. Voila.
Probably not that hard: though given the size of the community I'd hope we'd spot them.
Master of Science in Entrepreneurship?
Based off his twitter account I'm guessing he runs the website: http://www.androidster.com
[1] Maybe with the exception of a few people I read on Tumblr each morning, HN is the most authentic community of like-minded folks who seem to either (a) care about the viewpoints of other members or (b) act civilized rather than become trolls.
This isn't very scalable. If HN's userbase were of the same size as Digg's or Reddit's and most of those people were unwanted (i.e., if a large group of Digg/Reddit users were to begin frequenting HN), it would not be able to prevent them from saying/doing as they pleased.
"the application restricts functionality based on your karma"
The karma is determined by other user's ratings, right? How well is that going to work if a majority of the users are similar to your average Digg/Reddit user?
One of the big differences that makes it possible for HN to maintain its civility is its relatively small size. So far, I have not seen any scalable methods of moderating a user-contributed link aggregation website. Therefore, I can only hope that Digg/Reddit users don't find out about HN (which is mostly a pipe dream).
if somebody submits off-topic or spammy links, they will be killed. if somebody starts acting like a jerk, their account will be killed. it doesn't really matter what the average hn user thinks about it, they will be killed anyway.
the editors are very ruthless about this. it doesn't matter how many unruly users come here, they will either abide by the rules or they will be banned, period.
Reddit's management should do whatever it takes to maximise revenue, and this often means going for the lowest (or at least lower) common denominator.
HN is different, it is not directly about making money, but about getting intelligent people to have civil doscussions on tech and entrepreneurship, presumably to market ycombinator.
Looks like he might want to promote this site on Digg and Reddit.
as for HN, i suppose it was only a matter of time before someone tried to game the system (if they aren't already).