I also propose the same for nickb and other prominent users. It may turn out that people upmod stuff from more recognizable names when they might have left it at neutral if some other user had submitted the same content.
Well actually it may already be the case that they are posting under multiple names.
Might be an interesting social experiment.
edit : Or is it already underway? nickb is pg :P?
It's not an interesting experiment unless you learn something from it. There's virtually nothing that can be learned from this.
Plus, I like being able to follow the comments of pg and others on their threads page.
If the quality is the same but the points are different (between his real acct and anon acct), then you've found a bias.
Edit: To take this idea a step further, maybe have a random chance of any post being attributed to pg and keep track of which ones are actually pg, to see if there's any difference between them.
Context, in the form of background information about the author, makes a post more valuable. That's a no-brainer.
A master and a novice might sometimes come to the same conclusions, but seldom because they followed the same thought process. And I sure hope you aren't upmodding posts that don't share any of the thought process behind what they're saying, the reasons why they conclude what they conclude.
Knowing context might make a post more valuable, in the sense that you understand better how it fits into the wider world, but it won't generally make the content any smarter, more valuable, or more correct.
Have you ever wondered why, thousands of years after the ancient Greek experts on rhetoric noted the existence of the "argument from authority" fallacy, we're still awash in authorities? Are we all hopelessly stupid, that we cannot learn to avoid this mistake?
Perhaps. But another problem is that argument from authority is almost never "plain and simple". There's no bright shining line between an argument from authority and an argument based on an overwhelming accumulation of evidence. At some point it comes down to a judgement call.
Suppose a mythical person named Graeme Paul (let's call him "GP" for short) arrived here on news.YC and submitted a one-sentence essay: "Most of the smart programmers that I've met would rather work in Lisp than in Java." My reaction to this would be straightforward: GP is a troll. A very boring troll.
Now let's suppose that GP's post is a bit longer: It begins with his autobiography, in which he talks about his young days as a programmer, and his first encounter with Lisp, and describes the various things he has built in both Lisp and Java. He then gives a detailed, prioritized breakdown of the design of the Java language, comparing Java's features with analogous features in two or three different varieties of Lisp. During this discussion, it becomes clear that GP understands the technical compromises, that he's seen the insides of many real-world Lisp and Java projects, and that he's a gifted explainer. Finally, GP wraps up by summarizing his personal discussions with the designers of Scheme, Java, Ruby, and C.
GP is no longer a troll. He's now making a serious and detailed argument, with many facets, that goes on for pages and pages. He may still be wrong -- history is replete with examples of obsessed experts who were wrong -- but he's got a much better argument.
Now let's suppose that, instead of typing all that information in one monolithic 193-page post, GP spread it out over several hundred blog posts and news.YC comments, posted over several years. At the end of that time, he comes along with a one-sentence post in some language-war thread: "Most of the smart programmers that I've met would rather work in Lisp than in Java."
Because this single sentence is a summary of a long-standing, well-established series of arguments from GP, I might (in the right context) mod it up. Then, no doubt, I would be accused of "not judging this sentence on its merits alone".
The puzzle question here is: Since GP's huge body of published work arguably establishes him as "an authority", is my deference to GP an "argument from authority"? Well, if I've never read any of GP's work but I upmod him anyway because he's famous, the answer is "yes". If I've read GP's earlier work and know that it backs up his latest claim, the answer is "no". Can you, gentle reader, tell the difference between these two cases? Not unless you know my reputation, and/or ask me to provide up to a dozen pages of rationale and clarification.
And there's a huge grey area: If I've read GP's writings on Lisp, and he comes out with a statement about (e.g.) Ruby, how shall I value his expertise when weighing the credibility of his latest statement? It's a judgement call.
Well, someone as good as or better than you could tell if you're telling the truth. Of course, unless he himself wanted to know if it's the truth then someone as good as or better than himself would have to validate his validation of your claims. So it's a recursive chain-of-trust problem thing.
PG is not exactly the last word on lisp, for example I think a good implementation of Common Lisp knows more about it than he does ;P
Perhaps -- but despite decades of effort and ambition, that implementation of Common Lisp still doesn't write very good essays about itself. ;)
("pg" 4)
("theoneill" 3)
("mechanical_fish" 3)
("garbowza" 3)
("kkim" 3)
("paul" 3)
("cperciva" 3)
Having said that, a community attracts people like the people it already contains. The more it grows, the greater variety of interests it contains, and therefore the greater number of people with certain, but now differing, interests it attracts.
If you think of it like ripples on a pond, if I'm way out on one edge, I'd likely be vastly different to a user on another edge, though we'd both find some common ground toward the centre. The closer you are to the centre the more you have in common to a greater number of people.
PG is the centre of the pond, so you would expect more people to be more 'like' him, which would lead to more votes. Not bias. Just community.
It would be interesting to see who is controversial, who makes very passive comments that are always agreed with, etc.
"If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in. [...] It's pretty widely understood that anonymity doesn't work well in group settings, because "who said what when" is the minimum requirement for having a conversation. What's less well understood is that weak pseudonymity doesn't work well, either. Because I need to associate who's saying something to me now with previous conversations. The world's best reputation management system is right here, in the brain.[...] If you want a good reputation system, just let me remember who you are."
I am not sure what the problem is that you are trying to solve, but full anonymity will undoubtedly cause the HN community much more headache than whatever you believe is afflicting is now. Whether there is a "PG bias" or not, he is accountable for his words because they are associated in a persistent fashion with his login.
One final point, I don't know about a pg bias, but I certainly have a positive nickb bias, because he has submitted so many good articles, I will normally follow whatever he posts even if I am not thrilled about the title. Doesn't mean I vote him up no matter what, but making the submissions anonymous would remove an important signal/attribute.
But the other is that, people who are followed will naturally get more votes, just because they get more views. Is that a bad thing? I dunno. But what if it got to a point where there were enough different people being followed that the only way onto the first page is by being one of them. That kindof sounds like a problem too.
My (similarly limited) understanding of the HN ranking system is that it's more a factor of time and votes - ie, the question of who contributed is not relevant to the ranking system, only to all of us users who decide which articles to read and vote on, which brings us back to the original question.
I don't think the original question was identifying a problem and trying to solve it, but the points made here all seek to improve what's working already today.
If PG knows before hand what name his content is going to show up under there is a high likelihood of a bias on his part which he would be _unable_ to ignore even if he consciously tried. This is standard psych experiment stuff.
This is really an extremely easy test to get right if we think for a minute.
If user1 sees 'pg' as the submitter and user2 sees 'blah' user1 might comment something which gives away that it is actually pg to user2. Now user2 might realize this and act on their pg bias.
Can you think of a way to prevent this?
If there actually is favoritism this might solve that issue somewhat and yet give people credit where it's due.
I can only reducing this making the overall quality here improve.
For example, I will be more likely to read a comment if it was written by any user that I recognize. If I'm more likely to read a comment I'm more likely to upvote it as well.
It's like movie stars getting elected to political office just because they are more recognizable...
Most are clarifications as Hacker News Maintainer and Furry Investor. (or Furry Capitalist?)
Knee jerk vote-ups I am guilty of are for: edw519, mixmax, rms, pg and nostrademons. But I'm very sure I'd have voted those comments up even if I didn't know the commenter's id. ID gives more context... it is like I hear it in a particular voice.
No, actually it's the phrase "it's like I hear it in a particular voice". Precisely correct. Sites like this one aren't collections of anonymous robots talking to other anonymous robots.
Example implementation:
unames=['bob1','bob2','pg']
lu=len(unames)
secret_seed=309580435
from binascii import crc32
def hash_eq(number):
return crc32(str(number),secret_seed)
def get_uname(page_id):
return unames[hash_eq(page_id)%lu]
I agree that it would be an interesting social experiment, though I'm not concerned if people are pandering to pg, nickb, or anyone else.
If the pandering is a problem, you'll still get some of the same sites being voted up (paulgraham.com, techcrunch etc), but some other more interesting ones might break through.
Still, I would hope most of us look past those things anyway.
I really don't have a problem with it... that's what this community is all about. Hacker News is PGs world, and if you don't like it, then go somewhere else.
I don't think this is true. I certainly don't want it to be true.
I have also noticed that pg's comments have unusually high ratings, whether or not the actual content was unusually good.
Unfortunately I suspect more than a few will recognise his fist. Just like old school morse signallers can recognise individuals by listening. I'm pretty sure individual writing styles are recognisable.
My idea would be to make user names invisible on submissions to individuals, until after you vote. Only then revealing who they are to the person who votes.
I don't particularly care if PG gets tons of karma. I love the submissions, comments and community here.
I think it's best to just let it be exactly the way it is, even if there's some pandering.
I don't recall the name of the principle, but doing some googling around about Robert Cialdini's work should get you all the information you need.
I think when it comes to social interaction, the ability to build relationships of trust is a feature, not a bug.