That's...brilliant. Sort of reminds me of my concern about bots artificially inflating google rankings for competitors to get them banned. (Which apparently turned out to be unwarranted.)
EDIT: By "brilliant" I mean brilliant in that twisted security breaker kind of thinking that slightly creeps most people out.
EDIT2: As the post below points out, in retrospect it's pretty weak. But then, most things of this nature seem pretty weak in retrospect. In my opinion the fact that it's so weak is the whole beauty of it. It's a simple oversight that wasn't obvious until pointed out.
That concern is probably warranted, someone can get banned for a unnatural backlink profile. To be reconsidered they have to go through all their bad backlinks and either have them removed or tell google why they can't have them removed. A few blog networks and someone could potentially knock out a competitor for some time.
Meh, it's weak at best. Because HN follows zipf's law, you can fix 85% of problem just by making it more difficult to flag submissions by the top 250 or so users.
Plus it's just annoying. The yc partners are supposed to be reading applications this week, and now they have to deal with this crap.
Interesting. There was a post about different data analyzed towards Benford's law which caught my attention - about a year ago I think. Would you mind elaborating what you mean by 85% of the problem can be fixed in relations to zipf's law (I thought I was aware of the law, but perhabs I'm missing some intuition since I don't quite get your point?).
The #1 HN user has 10x as much karma as the #10 user. The #10 user has 10x more karma than the 100th user. The #100 user has 10x more than the 1000th, etc. Essentially the vast majority of highly upvoted submissions come from a tiny group of already trusted people, so by fixing the problem for just 1% of users you are actually fixing the problem for ~85% of content. It's almost impossible for a bot to make it into this group, and if they do then it's trivially easy to ban them.
Your fix is self perpetuating in a bad way. If only the top 100 users can get on the front page, only the top 100 users are going to get upvotes. It's impossible for real people to make it into this group.
Hacker news could easily be made more self sustaining for pg an co. Plenty of people would probably volunteer to be a maintainer. If not, one unobtrusive ad would probably be enough to hire one.
EDIT: By "brilliant" I mean brilliant in that twisted security breaker kind of thinking that slightly creeps most people out.
EDIT2: As the post below points out, in retrospect it's pretty weak. But then, most things of this nature seem pretty weak in retrospect. In my opinion the fact that it's so weak is the whole beauty of it. It's a simple oversight that wasn't obvious until pointed out.
Regardless the perpetrator is an asshat.