[dang]

This post got nailed by the voting ring detector, but I'm restoring it because we want to see original work on HN.

A "voting ring" is when people get friends to upvote their stuff. This is against the rules. We want stories to be on HN because they're good, not because they were promoted.

It's sadly common for a great Show HN post to get demoted because its creators, eager to get it on the front page, tried to game it. I've noticed a pattern, too: usually their gaming technique is pretty weak. Perhaps that's because they're creators, not promoters. Unfortunately, it has the side-effect of making it certain that the ring detector will nail their otherwise good post, while we carry on the usual cat-and-mouse game with people pushing crap.

I've got what I believe will be a sweet solution to this problem, but it awaits time for implementation.

Please everybody, don't ring-vote your posts; just take your chances with HN's randomness. If a post is solid and hasn't gotten any attention yet, a couple of reposts is ok. Be careful not to abuse that, though, since we penalize accounts for reposting too much.

I'm going to demote this comment as off-topic so it won't get in the way of the real discussion. Send any moderation questions to [e-mail].

[jsmthrowaway]

Which do you think is more likely:

- I know! We'll set up a voting ring to game my blog post about a garage door opener onto the front page of Hacker News, even though I don't get any kind of benefit aside from exposure to my cool project!

- Hey $socialnetwork friends, check it out, I submitted last weekend's project that you helped me on to Hacker News!, followed by folks finding the link there upvoting it because it's cool.

You, and pg before you, apparently default to option 1. Even in the way you've worded this comment you are implying malicious intent, as if the author of the blog post tried to game the article onto the front page. Honestly, unless there's a tangible benefit to the traffic such as advertising or leads, there's no reason to game HN and most of the "voting ring" stuff you are likely observing is organic-ish, not intentionally gamed upvotes from social sharing.

Option 2 is something I have personally observed dozens of times and you should account for it in your thinking and code.

[wikwocket]

Um, actually I believe that dang's post is him literally saying that cases of Option 2 are mistakenly classified as Option 1, and that this is unfortunate. And that people should know about the voting ring detector so they don't accidentally trigger it. Oh and that in his spare time he is working on a better detector.

Having a voting ring detector is a good thing. It is no doubt hard to tell organic friendly votes apart from sophisticated voting ring bots, and lots of good posts probably get flagged for this. But without such a detector, there would be a programmatic way to ensure posts get to the top of HN, which defeats the whole voting system.

[dang]

Neither we nor our software can tell much (if anything) about intent from the data, but I certainly don't think it's always malicious—I know for a fact that it's not.

The ring detection algorithms are vital to the quality of HN. I've looked at a tremendous amount of data on this, and I don't think it supports your interpretation. But certainly the algorithms and moderators both make mistakes. As I mentioned above, I think I may have a way to compensate for that, but I don't know when we'll be able to implement it.

[SamReidHughes]

Option 2 is literally a voting ring. Why else would somebody tweet about the empty HN discussion thread they've created?

[k-mcgrady]

Option 2 shouldn't be a link to an empty HN post. It should be a link to the content. If the people who read it then decide it should be submitted to HN/upvoted they can go and do that.