[EGreg]

Agreed. But also, it's become very hard to get anything to get noticed organically.

It is not about quality. The same exact story submitted by different people or at different times may get 1 upvote and gets buried, or hits over 100 points on the front page. See this for example!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14929067

I suspect most frontpage people ask their friends to upvote a story in the first few minutes.

Check out my own list of submissions for some examples. The vast majority is 1-2 points. Including SHOW HN stuff I worked hard on such as this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13474714

Ironically, I got more upvotes on a comment I made, regarding this phenomenon.

[dang]

You've posted several of these off-topic complaints in off-topic places, but doing it in response to a comment about people buying spam upvotes on HN takes the cake.

There's no right to "get anything to get noticed" on HN. There is, however, a duty not to defraud the community. If people defraud the community then obviously we're going to ban them many times over.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15010431 and marked it off-topic.

[EGreg]

I posted it a couple times since I have no idea if you saw it. If you responded (as you did) I would not post it again. HN is not like Facebook, no one gets notified of follow-up comments, so I don't know if someone actually saw my comment in response to theirs.

I totally agree that the community should protect itself from being defrauded. I actually support the measures you are taking on that front. I just wanted to bring to your attention, as a pretty active and interested user of HN, that it has changed and the system pushes people to do this kind of stuff. It's fostering competition to do it, because that's what it takes to get to the front page. I suspect that this happens in most cases. Look, I could be wrong - you have way more data than me - but using just what's available to me suggests that "asking friends to give you a couple upvotes in the crucial first few minutes" happens a lot. Heck, I did it in the past once or twice and it worked. The problem is that this mentality causes the element to become necessary. That, or clickbait.

We don't want this in the community, I agree, but it's like punishing X in individual cases while the system almost requires X to get to the front page in the first place. It is not about a "right" to get anything noticed on HN. It's about the incentive structure that develops over time as the system grows and changes.

Bitcoin started out to be decentralized and now is in the hands of several miners, and fees have gone up. Saying that there is "no right to have a transaction be recorded in the ledger" doesn't mean there isn't an incentive problem with a root. The root of that problem is the escalating proof-of-work arms race.

Authorities in the drug war thought if only they got low level dealers to rat out their suppliers there would be no more drugs on the street, but the incentive structure of money to be made on drugs caused a problem. The root of that problem is an escalating arms race between the feds and the cartels caused the drug gangs become more ruthless and publicly execute the families of those who ratted people out, greatly increasing violence.

The root of this problem is an escalating arms race to get noticed as HN has grown. But perhaps there is no problem. If there is, however, this is NOT OFF-TOPIC. The topic is gaming the system. And I am saying this as someone who wants to see less of it, but recognizes that the system now encourages it more than in the past.

[EGreg]

Ok since you detached the threas I'm going to guess the downvote is yours, with no response so you think there is no problem. And this is off-topic.

Well, I've brought it to your attention, no reason to mention it anymore. Good day sir! :-)

[dang]

I didn't downvote you—no one, including mods, can downvote direct replies. But if you have concerns about HN quality or moderation you really ought to send them to [e-mail], as the site guidelines ask (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

[EGreg]

Thanks! I don't know what you mean by "direct replies" but the thing above got downvoted to 0. Anyway, it doesn't matter.

Yeah, I will send an email to [e-mail] next time it's something I think the admins should know, this time it just seemed relevant to mention this.

Anyway, Good Day! :)

[pvg]

If you want to talk to the mods, you can just email them instead of posting your complaint repeatedly in random threads and hoping someone notices.