I've criticized PH for allowing voting rings and being a "black box" in general with respect to voting (see interview in Recode which had a comment from me: http://recode.net/2015/06/18/product-hunt-the-startup-kingma... ). The response to that interview is essentially "haters gonna hate," which means all attempts at offering suggestions to improve Product Hunt will be futile.
Yes, it still an echo chamber which I believe actually hurts the startup community because it incentives them to work on products which have zero value outside the echo chamber. It also incentives this bad behavior, and it has been spreading outside of Product Hunt which is why I'm upset by it.
If Product Hunt has enough community awareness such that they can tweet a GIF to every user who gets more than 100 points (seriously?!), then they have enough manpower to effectively punish and discourage vote manipulators.
This. I hate this. I love the idea behind Product Hunt and I was on there early on. I've discovered some great products from there but I find it increasingly becoming centered around Product Hunt itself and startups in general.
I suppose that's only natural as the community posts for the community, but I feel like there's so much more potential with a site like this.
I'm not in the valley. I'm in Chicago. And Product Hunt increasingly feels like some huddle of startup guys in the valley smiling at each other over the latest do-hickey they made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
(Cheers, from a fellow Chicagoan.)
While I have to take your word that you tell people not to ask for votes, that's not sufficient to creating a fair system without manipulation. The Product Hunt demographic is "growth hackers" and scrappy entrepreneurs who want to do anything to get their startup to succeed. These are the same people who want to "move fast and break things." The flip side of that is that they know that what they do is wrong, but they can get away with it without much consequence.
Case in point, there's a lot of meta discussion on "how to tell people to vote for your PH submission without getting flagged by the voting ring detector" (http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/36hsfc/product_hun... ) and "how to get upvotes on PH because you know an influential investor." (https://medium.com/ferris-life/zero-to-featured-how-ferris-c...).
Voting manipulation, not limited to but including voting rings, completely compromise Product Hunt mission to "find the best products." A one-liner in the FAQ will not resolve it, and I don't believe PH is doing enough to facilitate awareness and enforce that voting manipulation, in any form, is very bad.
I had done brief analysis that shows that the (YC X) submissions do receive more upvotes on average. Which is hard to attribute to a voting ring specifically.
It's my way of saying thanks, and I suspect other people's too.
There's some information here. PG was late to the conversation, but said there isn't anything, while others said the exact opposite before he posted.
Of course a lot could have happened in the 929 days since that was posted.
But I rarely comment as it just feels forced, like I'm standing next to a circle of people having a conversation at a networking event and I'm a few inches outside the circle, and it's clear I'm not a part of that circle.
But sometimes the votering detection would ring bells and when contacted these users had genuinely not considered what they were doing was creating a votering, yet were willing to understand the problem at hand and back off from each other a bit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1647826
Voting rings undermine the exposure of truly successful products, while giving preference to a possibly inferior friend's product.
Take Amy Hoy for instance (at least some people here on hacker news will know who she is). She has more than 16,000 followers on Twitter right now. I have 79 followers. She is good at marketing and it must have taken time for her to build up all of those followers. If she were to put several products on Product Hunt and I were to put up competitive products to each of those and we both tweeted about our Product Hunt posting naturally she will get more upvotes. Some of these upvotes will likely come from the same people, some of her most fanatical loyal customers.
To the algorithm this might look like collusion/voting ring, but it is just some basic and completely ethical marketing.
The implementation goes over every post and computes the ratio for voters within that post. It then removes one user from that group and recalculates the ratio. If the ratio drops, it brings that user back in. If it increases, it keeps them out.
You can check the implementation here (click on Edit Algorithm): https://algorithmia.com/algorithms/ANaimi/SimpleVoteRingDete...
Running SimpleVoteRingDetection on the complete Product Hunt dataset (16k+ posts, 52k+ users) takes a few seconds. If you have a dataset for any other website/application, you can easily feed it into the algorithm and experiment with that.
Is it helpful to first look at the names and sign-up times of a particular set of users, and then search for votes on common posts? This would result in a slightly different ratio:
SUM Votes(U1, P) / Votes(Un, P)
where U1 is a particular user, P is the post voted on by that user, and Un is the rest of the users up to n total users.
The reason this occurs to me is because you can still make this run more efficiently by limiting the number of users you examine (as opposed to running across only certain posts - should be the same number of queries for a particular number of either users or posts), and it would allow you to start the top of the detection funnel on heuristics around obviously fake IDs or correlated sign-up times.
This might help get around vote bots that set up fake accounts and all vote for the same posts, but also vote randomly for at a certain frequency for other posts (which would not be differentiated in the first algorithm from a true vote ring versus voters with similar trends in taste, such as the effect observed on pinterest).
Anyway, just thinking out loud. Or whatever the typing equivalent of that is.
Can't someone just go lookup the IDs to get real names?
I think what this fails to capture is that actually, it seems to me PH is a great proxy to the real world of startups. Yes it helps to be connected to influential people to be featured on PH. But the exact same thing is true for your startup in general. If you don’t know anybody, you’ll have a hard time getting noticed and finding investors. Your network and ability to connect to influential people can make or break your venture (I used to NOT think it was the case… I changed my mind based on my personal experience :-) ). I think that’s one of the very reasons Silicon Valley works much, much better than other places in the world: London, Paris, etc. They are a tightly connected community of makers, investors, journalists, influencers etc. It’s the whole echo-chamber thing and it’s absolutely fundamental.
Yet with such a low amount of posts meeting this tests standards, and the fact that Product Hunt was specifically designed to focus on influencers it doesn't seem unlikely that a small group of users would vote in similar patterns on either quality products, or ones shared by influencers they follow.
And, when you take into account that they share via email posts from influencers you follow it just adds to this behavior. The last few times I've been on Product Hunt was because I got an email that Hiten Shah and shared something. I follow him because we have similar interests. I opened the PH link, agreed it was a great find and upvoted it. It doesn't make me a vote-ring.
