[malandrew]

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.

[krapp]

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?

[malandrew]

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.

[krapp]

No, i'm just wondering if their effect beyond whatever efforts pg is putting in, is big enough to matter.

[malandrew]

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 ;)