Comment by cperciva
10 years ago
As opposed to a $20k contest to see who could solicit the most votes via word-of-mouth in the Bay Area? Because that would have been totally fine, of course.
Of course not. But I haven't seen any evidence that anyone was doing that.
honest HN community members who voted for him in good faith?
How many such people exist? I don't think anyone knows. Unfortunately the vote spam which he solicited via twitter overwhelmed any other signal.
Even if this was supposed to be entirely decided on the basis of votes -- which is explicitly not what was planned from the start -- when people cheat they normally get disqualified. You don't say "this Olympic athlete took steroids, but maybe he should keep his medal... after all, he might have won even without the drugs".
> > honest HN community members who voted for him in good faith?
> How many such people exist?
raises hand
Hi, my account is 3000 days old today, only a little less old than your own. I went back and checked and it turns out that I didn't vote for Pinboard, but that's largely because I hadn't been active on HN in quite a while and I didn't think it was necessary. I did voice support for Maciej in the comments there.
I genuinely wanted to see him go through the program ("like a bowling ball through a python"), and not just for entertainment purposes. I think it would have been a valuable cross-pollination for everyone involved.
I've generally felt that HN -- and to a greater degree, YC -- aren't particularly welcoming towards people like me. I got fed up enough that I wrote a news reader to mine HN for articles just so that I wouldn't be tempted to visit HN as often, and when that broke a while back, I never bothered to fix it. Literally the only reason I'm here now is because Maciej mentioned it on his Twitter account. I've always been an outsider here. Seeing YC accept another, more successful outsider would have been nice.
This fiasco has all the scent of cliqueish hostility towards Maciej, you have been non-stop and relentlessly accusing him of being a troll (and you're smart enough to know better than to claim to know someone's psychology better than they do over the internet), and the results stink like a US election.
raises hand
To be clear, I'm not saying that such people do not exist. I'm saying that there's no effective way to estimate their number.
Sure there is. The way has been outlined by `beeboop' and `killwhitey' in this thread, and subsequently by myself. The question have not been answered: if the concern is vote-brigading then the correct result can be determined by looking at accounts that are more than 30 days old.
If the outcome is the same then the twitter-promoting explanation is simply a smokescreen.
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What about by the quality of the discussion in the Apply HN submission? This was (as I understood the original experiment) to be the primary mechanism for selecting finalists.
Pinboard's application had the best discussion.
Dude, the guy got 300+ votes from HN regulars in the first round, before he'd even hit twitter. That's not steroids. It's like "this Olympic athlete won fair and square once, then we decided to change the competition to make it fairer to others, and he won even more, lapping everyone else, but the judge doesn't really like him so he won't get a medal."