Honey pots to keep comment quality high

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

Interesting:

There has been a lot of recent debate regarding how to improve quality control on HackerNews (HN), and to his credit, Paul Graham (pg) has tried a lot of tactics. There is a very clear set of HN guidelines, which very few members these days probably read. For a while, pg tried playing around with the karma formula and, even if I disagree about the way karma should be measured, at least he gave it an effort. He also hid comment karma from everyone but the author, to help slow the demonstrable deterioration of the discussion section; apparently this has been successful in pg’s observations. Nevertheless, I do believe that we are seeing a continuing trend downward in overall article quality on the front page1.

In this post, I present a honeypot approach to combating group-think and quality deterioration in article selection on social news sites.

Article Honeypots
A honeypot is an article that is link-bait or otherwise in direct violation of the site’s guidelines, but is intentionally submitted by an admin as a test to see if users inappropriately upvote it2. For each user, three scores are tracked: the number of honeypots seen, the number of honeypots upvoted, and the number of honeypots flagged. A user’s seen count increments when they load a page with a honeypot article displayed3. If a user upvotes one of the honeypots, their upvoted score is incremented; if the user flags the honeypot, their flagged score is increment.