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0 pointsbigtunacan10y ago0 comments

To valee's point though. I also believe collusion ratings could be found very high in cases where this is not a "voter ring" issue, but more an issue of who has a better network and/or is better at marketing.

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.

0 pointsbigtunacan10y ago0 comments

To the algorithm this might look like collusion/voting ring, but it is just some basic and completely ethical marketing.

0 comments

4 comments · 2 top-level

EGreg10y ago· 2 in thread

After several rounds of the same people always being in the first ten people to vote, how doesnt that fit the defition of a voting ring?

bigtunacanOP10y ago

I'm not saying the voting ring problem doesn't exist, but that the question of "is this ethical" is one that is more difficult to answer than this algorithm. I think the developers who ran this collusion algorithm must agree with this to some extent, otherwise there would be no reason to pseudo-anonymize the results.

To give an example. If I were to create fake accounts and then do some type of automated up-voting system for my own posts; in my mind that is clearly unethical behavior.

If I announce to my existing customers that I have posted something and they go of their free accord and up-vote this is clearly ethical behavior.

If I ask my existing customer/friends/family to go up-vote me I believe this falls into a grayer area, but I would personally say this too is unethical.

EGreg10y ago

Ok but why is ethics the most important consideration here? The consideration for the community is that the quality of the links is good and whether ethical or not, posting everything publicly and having THE SAME people be in the first 10 upvotes means there is a system that takes quality of the article into account less than the identity of the submitter, and it's been doing this over and over.

So ethics may be not the important question here, for the community.

1 more reply

doppenhe10y ago

agreed , this type analysis only open a direction to look further in and do not provide any absolutes (as most data analysis).

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