FWIW, I was one of the people running a bot to auto-submit. I've always been a big-iron algorithms programmer, and I've never done much web programming, and certainly never programmed an auto-submitter before. Since I figured most of Jacques' idle thoughts were worth more than half the things making it to the Front Page, I figured it was an ideal time to learn a little about the back-n-forth of a form submission system with cookies, and to see (a) what I could learn, (b) how quickly I could learn it, and (c) how little code it took.
So it was an interesting experiment, I'm glad I did it, I'm pleased I learned something from it, and I'm sorry it seems to have caused Jacques some grief.
For that I apologise unreservedly. We have had a chat off-line and I believe there's no on-going problem. I have, of course, disabled the bot.
But the questions raised are interesting. I suggest that the "first submitter gets all the karma" situation means that people submit without thinking, worried that unless they do so they will miss out on that one item that earns gobs of karma, that they saw first, but didn't submit quickly enough.
Just sharing the karma between submitters won't work, because then if someone sees something gaining traction they just submit it themselves and share in the imaginary profits. Simple, clean, clear solution that's wrong.
Agreed. The only downside was that I wasn't in on the joke and that quite a bit of the backlash was directed at me, not at the people running the bots.
I also think that it would be prudent for anybody that intends to run any kind of bot on HN to ask PG for permission.
Perhaps splitting karma between submitters until the item reaches the first page, then. I know I've never managed to be the first submitter of an interesting link; there's always somebody that saw it before me. So normally I don't even think of posting a link.
(Of course, lately, I get the vast majority of my interesting reading from here anyway, but still...)
I don't blame you for bot-submitting Jacques' stuff. His posts are always good and - after all - always hit first page at a dead run. People here do actually find them interesting.
So it was an interesting experiment, I'm glad I did it, I'm pleased I learned something from it, and I'm sorry it seems to have caused Jacques some grief.
For that I apologise unreservedly. We have had a chat off-line and I believe there's no on-going problem. I have, of course, disabled the bot.
But the questions raised are interesting. I suggest that the "first submitter gets all the karma" situation means that people submit without thinking, worried that unless they do so they will miss out on that one item that earns gobs of karma, that they saw first, but didn't submit quickly enough.
Just sharing the karma between submitters won't work, because then if someone sees something gaining traction they just submit it themselves and share in the imaginary profits. Simple, clean, clear solution that's wrong.
No solutions, just problems.