Comment by polote
4 years ago
Ring detection works for people who don't know it exists. And thus works well a lot of times. But is very easy to bypass, and I won't tell you how.
And if I recall well, dang has already said several times that he will not disclose the algorithm https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
> But is very easy to bypass, and I won't tell you how.
That really depends on how it works, and whether you know how it works. Simple signals such as IP location and temporal distribution of votes are easy to use for detection, but also easy to manipulate. On the other hand, if you employ a graph of user associations based on votes and comments in the past, you can detect clusters among them, voting collaboratively. This is way harder to circumvent in the long run, but also extremely difficult to implement accurately.
It's pretty easy to generate new accounts here