Hacker News Reader

Comment by _xhok | Hacker News Reader

I have to ask: is it just me, or are those upvotes on the frontpage faked?

They don't even seem to have been seeded with faked values, but rather pinned to fake values. I upvoted one article and downvoted another, and several minutes later the scores remain unchanged.

I can see the upside to manually tweaking the votes until you get critical mass, but pinning the votes to faked values makes the transition more difficult than just seeding with fake values and letting the community adjust from there.

The reason your upvote remained unchanged is that anybody with 10 karma points or less bears no weight on the voting algorithms.

I'm experimenting with having higher karma-valued posters have more weight when it comes to voting.

Was that you who registered as KMag? You now have 100 karma and your votes will be counted from now on.

Creator here. The upvotes on the frontpage are indeed faked. It's quite obvious I'm sure to the HN crowd.

Please accept my apologies. I posted the site originally with just a few articles and nobody even gave it a single upvote on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7339368

I assumed it was due to the fact that "nobody wants to start a conversation with themselves" so I tried to make the site look a bit more used.

My thoughts. lobste.rs is the only really remotely viable alternative to HN and it doesn't have near that many upvotes for items on the front page, but it has some discussion.

There's articles with 40+ votes and no comments. That doesn't seem quite right to me.

I just lowered the random karma value for new auto-submitted stories.

The majority of the website is currently populated by me, the site's creator, but that will stop once it gains a large enough userbase to sustain regular submission rate.