20 sats \ 21 replies \ @Undisciplined 12 Sep \ parent \ on: Stacker Saloon
That's old west slang. We need to zap new posts more quickly, if we want to take this guy down.
So, can zapping a post earlier may lead to top 5 on the leaderboard! That's weird!
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You get more rewards for zapping early. From an incentive standpoint, you need that to keep people from just waiting to see which posts are top posts before zapping them.
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Okay.
But this stacker seem to have got it very early with perfection. He's regularly trending.
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Every so often, we see someone really gaming the rewards algorithm masterfully.
It's self correcting.
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So, you're saying that rewards algorithm can be gamed?
Is the reward algorithm also visible to everyone?
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Stacker News is open source. The whole thing is visible to everyone. The rewards logic is also described in the FAQ.
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One gets the impression that he also doesn't zap things once they already have other zaps on them. It would be as if he thought those zaps were somehow tainted by the filthy zaps that came before them. If that's the case, it's a loophole in the system and could be addressed. He might be seeing valuable content and restraining because it has already been zapped and it would pull his ranking. Early zapping seems like a good incentive, but not at the cost of quality zapping.
Moreover, he may be a wizard. The profile picture looks like a wizard. If so, that would be something that the algorithm unfortunately wouldn't be able to address. This is because wizards use magic. They do so with spells and enchantments, which are not typically open source.
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I hadn't considered the purity angle. Whatever your reasons, they're serving you well.
No, wizards are bots and bots are wizards here. Not a believer in them. You seemed like a real guy, that's why you weren't being downzapped.
I was excited to know how this early zapping can favour anyone on the leaderboard. Anyways, keep doing what you're doing. As I know it's self correcting, so unless ypu provide value with your content, it won't be long when you see yourself very low on the table.
I think that's about it too. Not zapping 'contaminated' items makes sure we're at the base of the graph. I'm not a believer in wizards, but I guess there might be some out there!
If it's self correcting, it's fine. If not, SN would need to see it.
Also, it looks ugly when I see someone just sneak and eat up the rewards for so many regular Stackers.
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The rewards are non-linear with rank, so this strategy depends heavily on getting the top rank in the zapping categories. If it's working, that will draw in others to try and they just eat each other in the process.
If the sorcery continues we can all just downzap the so called wizard. Once his spent to stacked ratio goes negative he will likely move on. a few k sats in downzaps from some valued stackers should do the trick to knock him down a few pegs. He made an error not cloaking himself while conducting magic.