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12 Comments

How invite codes help to fight the spam on IH.

As we all know since 1st August invite codes 🎟 have been introduced to help to fight spam. That's great motivation and I totally get it.

However... 🧐

I was just curious to see how it works in practice. Was the spam rate actually that high to justify the introduction of codes?

Spoiler alert: In short yes!

The graph 📈 shows the number of daily posts by users who have been banned. It just so happens that at one point (~Jun 2021) the number of daily posts started to climb significantly. Up to a certain point - marked on a graph on the day of introducing invite codes.

The graph is a piece of clear evidence that amount of banned posts decrease significantly. And the overall quality of discussion on IH has improved 💫

There is more

If you are curious about other stats or facts regarding the IH let me know down in the comments! 👇

  1. 6

    out of curiosity, how did you get this data?

    1. 2

      Well, I would say that it was basically scrapping but in fact, it was more than that.
      👉 Actually, I asked @csallen and @channingallen if I can disclose my method :)

  2. 6

    Another strategy could be to give certain actions based on Karma points like stackoverflow or hn.

    So unless you've proved yourself by doing certain tasks (like ac age, num thanks, etc) you can't do something else (like post, downvote, etc). This has a benefit of making the site open to everyone while still help fight the spam problem.

    1. 2

      The downside is that the only way to earn karma points is to do things that are highly visible to others, e.g. make posts or leave comments.

      For example, if I made it so you need points to make posts, but you can make comments without any points, then spammers would simply make a ton of spam comments, which would be just as awful as tons of spam posts.

      Ultimately, you need to either restrict access, or put a lot of effort/tech/money into policing spam.

  3. 3

    Succinct analysis and helpful for other folks trying to build online communities. Thank you!

    1. 1

      Thank you, and yet more to come!

  4. 2

    Cool stuff! However, I don't know what is exactly what on the chart.

    • what is the red line?
    • what are the gray dots?
    • what are the tiny gray vertical lines?
  5. 2

    Very cool data, thank you for sharing

    1. 1

      Thanks! 🙌
      Stay tuned for more! 💪

  6. 1

    I'd be curious to know if the total posts/comments also went down in the period.

    I can definately see spam going down once it became invite only but curious on people being forced to post/comment to get invite codes drove up IH's totals for posts/comments.

  7. 1

    I'm curious to see how the decline progresses. Will invites bring it back to original levels? We'll have to wait and see.

  8. 1

    Very interesting! The engineer in me always loves to see a good graph. Thanks for sharing!

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