Re:Ask HN: Why dont my upvotes work?
by lisper on Tuesday October 15, 2013 @12:50PM
(#6554484)
Unfortunately, voting rings work. They work because the number of people actually reading the new page is vastly smaller than the number of posts being submitted.
I actually did a semi-controlled experiment a while back and submitted a series of blog posts I was writing, all on the same topic. There were seven of them all together. On four of them, I asked a small number (a single digit) of people to upvote the story. For the other three, I didn't. All four of the gamed stories ended up near the top of the home page. The other three didn't get a single upvote. If you do the math you will find that this is a statistically significant result. (And I have since submitted many other stories. Not a single one has gotten more than one upvote.)
The trick is to get enough upvotes early enough to get onto the home page. It doesn't take much, it just has to be fast. Once you're on the home page, people actually pay attention and you get a lot of organic traffic. But your odds of getting off the new page at all unless you game the system are extremely small.
Some changes that would help the situation:
1. Provide some incentive for people to read the new page. I'm not sure what this incentive would be, but the fact that very few people read the new page is the nub of the problem.
2. Incorporate the submitter's karma into the ranking of the new page to allow stories submitted by high-karma users to stay there longer. Depending on the time of day, a story typically has between 30 minutes and an hour before it drops off the new page, after which it will surely never be noticed.
3. Don't start the timer on a story when it is submitted. Instead, start it only after some time has elapsed (at least a few hours) or it gets its first upvote.
4. Make it cost something (like a karma point) to submit a story. Throttle the cost so that submitting a large number of stories in a short period of time costs more.
I actually did a semi-controlled experiment a while back and submitted a series of blog posts I was writing, all on the same topic. There were seven of them all together. On four of them, I asked a small number (a single digit) of people to upvote the story. For the other three, I didn't. All four of the gamed stories ended up near the top of the home page. The other three didn't get a single upvote. If you do the math you will find that this is a statistically significant result. (And I have since submitted many other stories. Not a single one has gotten more than one upvote.)
The trick is to get enough upvotes early enough to get onto the home page. It doesn't take much, it just has to be fast. Once you're on the home page, people actually pay attention and you get a lot of organic traffic. But your odds of getting off the new page at all unless you game the system are extremely small.
Some changes that would help the situation:
1. Provide some incentive for people to read the new page. I'm not sure what this incentive would be, but the fact that very few people read the new page is the nub of the problem.
2. Incorporate the submitter's karma into the ranking of the new page to allow stories submitted by high-karma users to stay there longer. Depending on the time of day, a story typically has between 30 minutes and an hour before it drops off the new page, after which it will surely never be noticed.
3. Don't start the timer on a story when it is submitted. Instead, start it only after some time has elapsed (at least a few hours) or it gets its first upvote.
4. Make it cost something (like a karma point) to submit a story. Throttle the cost so that submitting a large number of stories in a short period of time costs more.