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by ari_elle 4792 days ago
Please no...

Why should this become a place of witch-hunting?

You give no reason why it should be implemented other than that gaming sites has become more sophisticated.

That is not enough justification, especially since

-) i don't see clear signs for HN degrading in Quality

-) i am sure that pg is concerned about HN and has implemented some measurements to guarantee the high quality of this site for the future

No need for such drastic measurement just yet.
1 comments
malandrew 4792 days ago
Maybe because there is witchcraft being practiced? It's not like we suspect voting ring craft is merely a belief like witchcraft was. Voting rings most certainly exist and there is no doubt that they are manipulating the site right now.

If the data is anonymized and there are no details published that can be used to identify the real user involved, it's no harm no foul. This wouldn't be about witch hunting but simply pattern matching.

We wouldn't be identifying witches but the act of witchery. We would never know who the witches were, only pg would. There would be no elements of shaming or individual people called out. This would be entirely ad hominem free.

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krapp 4792 days ago
Voting rings most certainly exist and there is no doubt that they are manipulating the site right now.

Where's the evidence that these rings, if they exist, are having a detrimental enough effect on the frontpage to warrant something like this? Why is it so bad that PG, his fiddly algorithms and his staff of moderators can't deal with it?

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malandrew 4791 days ago
We know they've existed in the past (such as the voting ring around The Atlantic), so are you asking if we've succeeded in catching them all? I highly doubt it.
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krapp 4790 days ago
No, i'm just wondering if their effect beyond whatever efforts pg is putting in, is big enough to matter.
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malandrew 4789 days ago
Personally my motivation isn't just to improve the front page, but just to do this in the interest of science. We probably have one of the best communities on the internet insofar as percentage of members interested in data science. Providing this data would probably result in several HN worthy write ups on how someone went around detecting voting rings from the data made available.

Science should be a good enough reason to do it ;)

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