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Comment by equivocates | Hacker News Reader

next week: hacker news is being manipulated by professional shills every day.

By definition, Hacker News is a professional shill. It's an arm of YC and has special interests as a community.

All communites have, but people from YC usually don't seem to hide their intention in communication (or they are good at it and I didn't notice).

The problem is when people are doing PR for an entity, while pretending they are sharing news, insights or data.

I agree that "shilling" really comes down to intent and transparency.

Are you presenting the information and disclosing (this can be implicit if connection is obvious) your interests? I don't think most have a problem with that, however the particular forum or board might not be suitable for it.

Indeed.

The line is not clear though. Some people present a new services with show HN and are acclaimed, others are rejected as advertisers. HN like underdogs, innovators and good-doers, but is less laxed with big companies, status quo and money lovers. So if the later can disguise as the formers, they can game the system.

Everyone here pretty much has a professional stake in the topics discussed, and most people don't disclose that stake. People may be honest about their thinking but their analysis is certainly biased.

it just so happens that those interests are around supporting founders so they can build huge companies and disrupt major industries. (No joke.)

Question: do threads that are critical of YC companies get buried just because they're YC companies? (For example if Uber had YC investment, which a cursory glance says it doesn't, would the criticism of it have been buried by mods here)?

(I say this because there were a lot of critical stories about Uber recently, and in the past, too.)

The answer to your question is "of course not". When stories are critical of YC or YC-funded companies, we moderate them less than we otherwise would. I've posted about this many times:

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&date....

This isn't because YC doesn't care about HN's business value. It's because YC knows what HN's value consists of: the community's curiosity and trust. That's the global optimum, so that's what's in YC's interests. It would be foolish to optimize for anything else.

Thanks, dang.

Though you've posted about it a lot I hadn't run across those comments yet - thanks for the links.

Isn't part of the definition of shilling that it's undisclosed? In that case, no: HN's business concessions to YC (job ads, and more recently Launch HNs) are public. Beyond those, we don't moderate HN specifically to promote YC's interests, and in fact err on the side of not doing so. You should see how sharply I scold YC startups who haven't yet had this drilled sufficiently into them.

The best way to make HN valuable for YC is to optimize its value for the community, which is gratifying intellectual curiosity—so that's what we spend our time thinking about. I wrote more about this here if anyone's interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13861971.

> Isn't it part of that definition that the shillage is undisclosed?

I will point out before as I did the other day that both you and PG (very ironically) didn't/don't identify who you are with respect to HN. I haven't checked the other partners I have noticed that some do identify as YC partners. Would also expect that any YC funded company might identify themselves as such so their comments or postings could be taken in context.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang

I personally think it's fine the way it operates but in all fairness the disclosure could be more than it is.

That's a different concern. HN's culture has always been informal and implicit. That has upsides and downsides, but it's the way HN is and I'm loth to mess with it.

People invoke 'disclosure', 'transparency', etc. as if these were unmitigated benefits, but when you delve into a complex system like HN they turn out to be tradeoffs. On HN the culture is not to spell everything out. That doesn't have to do with hiding anything; the information is all out there. It has to do with respecting users' intelligence, liking minimalism, liking users to have to work just a little, and so on.

The downside of this approach is not that it obscures business interests—just think how excited the community would be to hit on something like that were we ever so dumb as to hide it!—but that it makes things harder for newcomers.

> On HN the culture is not to spell everything out. That has nothing to do with hiding anything—the information is all out there and the community knows how to find it. It has to do with respecting users' intelligence, liking minimalism, and so on.

My theory on this (why) dates back to many years ago and in particular and oddly enough when I started (and ended) listening to Howard Stern in the 80's. (Haven't heard the show since then...)

I noticed that there were all sorts of people who appeared regularly. And you didn't know who they were or what role they actually played. And you didn't until you spent enough time listening to Stern that you were able to understand (or maybe triangulate or reverse engineer) who they were. There was no FAQ.

In a sense online communities are like that. If you are not willing to put in the time to make those connections the 'community' is just as glad to not have you there. Then it's their special thing.

The thing is I don't think that is the right way to be if what you want is knowledge and diverse viewpoints. There could easily be another 'grellas' (as only one example that comes to mind) that would add greatly to the content (comments or posted stories) and they very well might be turned off by not knowing the ropes and feeling it wasn't worth the effort to stick around long enough to find out.

What's interesting as a side note is how much money has been made in the computer business exploiting the secret handshake. Understanding of course that there are those that like the satisfaction that comes with figuring that out. (And I think that computer nerds like to have that secret handshake as it gives them power over non-nerds).

I agree. I even know another 'grellas', a good friend who is one of the best programmers and writers I've ever spent time with, and author of a well-known book on software design. He finds HN too cryptic and uninviting. He's squarely in the middle of HN's core demographic, so I can only imagine how bad it is for people a little further away. I'd like to do something about this someday, but a core principle here is to move slowly and not break things.

Well, sometime you see a personality or a topic getting traction out of the blue. Any critic get quickly downvoted. No debate seems to take place.

I noticed that with Bill Gates. Before 2015, nothing different. In 2017, business as usual. But in 2016, Reddit, HN, Imgur suddenly had a surge of Gate support : success stories, interviews, praising using comments...

It's just a supposition of course, I have nothing to back it up.

But it makes sense to me that the PR experts have learned now that it can be very efficient to target online communities instead of spamming mass media. If they can influence them, then the PR will develop itself in an organic way, feel more honest and natural, and the community will spread the message outside of itself, giving the impression it's genuine.

The best communication is the one that doesn't look like it.

Controlling the big medias has been the challenge of the last century, but the intellectuals grew defiant of them. They rely more and more on cross referencing various sources and debating with communities made of their peers or people experts in one niche.

This is the logical next move. Although it seems harder to pull out, in the long run the cost/benefit ration seems better because it relies on a intimate feeling of trust we develop with the communities.

I know I do: I always read the comments before the articles on HN, because I trust the community to give me a better insight on the matter than the article itself. It's often the case. People are brilliant here, having a lot of accumulated knowledge, offering pieces of analysis, missing information, stories and counter points or even just summary that are the real added value of the site.

So if the community now hosts subtle communication experts, they will (and probably already have) influence my point of view.

> I noticed that with Bill Gates

I suspect that one is probably just natural trend/popularity/fashion at work with the hive mind flocking in the same direction. Gates rebounded from the tech nadir to philanthropist, humanitarian and intelligent sayer of sensible things. A lot easier to like than when he had a foot on all our throats.

Similar effect with GWB. He is rebounding from pariah status and people can't help but warm to the guy's personality now that his crimes are being overshadowed by much larger bogeymen.

It's possible of course.

Still, he was a hated personality nobody in the IT community would come close to and then suddenly everybody is loving the guy.

Some stuff really don't feel right. My first "oh-oh" moment was when this arrived on the imgur front page (apparently 2015, not 2016 so my timing is off):

http://imgur.com/gallery/YDuoHdr

Everything, form the title to the content and the firsts comment is really weird. After this, I started seeing the Gate foundation work popping everywhere, and supports in comments of major social medias where only suspicion was before.

I did a mission for the Gate foundation 8 years ago in Africa, and at that time nobody speaker about this entity. I had to explain it every time I talked to someone new.

I have a hard time to believe the medias suddenly took a (very one-sided) interest for something that have been here for such a long time for no reason.

Yes, yes, I can be totally wrong. Still I can't help but wonder.

I've noticed some occurrences like this as well. For instance, the week before Bill Gates' recent AMA on Reddit, there were a a large number of frontpage posts about him from accounts with little to no karma.

It's probably not the primary factor in opinion on him being drastically reversed, and I doubt he has any personal involvement, but it's possibly one of the tools utilized by his PR team.

JWB as in John Wilkes Booth, the guy who assassinated Lincoln? I can't really imagine him having a resurgence in popularity, but I've never fully understood the American psyche, I will admit.

Ah, unfortunate typo corrected :) You've made me worried that might be true too.

GWB boycotted the Republican nominating convention.

Admins/mods on HN manipulate/modify a lot of the content created by users.

Would you elaborate on this? What are your examples? Mods are known to update submission titles (in accordance with the guidelines), but I'm unaware of any other content changes they make.

Some examples off the top of my head:

1. They detach comments from comment threads (to hide them?)

2. They boost some stories so that they remain on the home page for a longer time

3. They also remove some posts from the front page... (because they are duplicates, not "quality" content, etc...)

I could probably come up with more examples, but I'm sure that you get the idea...

Thanks for clarifying. I read your comment as to mean mods updated the content of comments. All of the items you mention are actions the mods engage in in their role as moderators, which they themselves have described elsewhere.

Sadly it's true. Some companies game the HN ranking algo, and employ shills to divert the discussion of their product. At least two companies (that are infamous for such shady tactics anyway) do it actively regularly on HN.

The first thing to prevent it, would be to change the HN ranking algo so that stories with more comments than votes are not automatically punished and forced many pages backwards from the frontpage. Add a report button to report users. Implement an admin interface to monitor certain users and ban them.

Please name these companies!

this--plus evidence too if you can find it please!

This probably refers to Uber and Peter Thiel and companies associated to him?

If they're manipulating HN they're not very good at it. Lately I'm seeing smear pieces against them appear on the front page on almost a daily basis and the tone in these threads is overwhelmingly toxic rather than positive.

I could be wrong but I felt this happened on the Spotify thread that is currently on the front page. All the inital reaction was negative, about how the piece was a 'submarine,' etc. Now the top 5 comments are about Spotify's new killer feature and how happy the customers are...

I took a look at the thread I think you're referring to, and both those comments and their upvotes are by established users with no signs of fakery that either we or our software could pick up on.

What you observed is probably a different phenomenon: early comments in a thread often start off negative, and only later do other users show up to post positively—their motivation being to balance things out. Often the positive comments to get the most upvotes in the end, but the whole process takes a while to play out. If you've ever run across a thread where the top comment says, "I can't believe how negative this thread is!" and proceeds to make a positive case with great fervor, this dynamic is probably why.

I dont think you could stop upvote fakery. Maybe like highway speeding just try to control it enough to keep things somewhat safe.

Old, established accts on all the sites can be, and are, sold to people for purposes of fake upvoting. Maybe limit the number of upvotes one can do in a day. Doesn't seem a major inconvienence and makes the upvotes more valuable.

You've made these accusations many times but never supply a drop of evidence. We've repeatedly responded [1,2,3] and asked you to stop, yet still you persist. I appreciate your concern for the quality of HN, but at some point this becomes abuse in its own right.

It's unfortunately common for users to feel absolutely certain that other commenters are astroturfing when they merely happen to disagree about company X or issue Y. The underlying assumption is: 'no one I disagree with could possibly be commenting in good faith—they must be disingenuous'. This is a cognitive bias. Nearly always, when we investigate these accusations we find nothing—nothing except that the accuser really dislikes $BIGCO.

Real astroturfing and shilling do exist, I've personally poured countless hours into combating them on HN, and I can tell you from long experience with the data that they don't look anything like what you're positing.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844253

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11988639

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12322393

First, I want to thank the guys behind HN and Dang for being very open about any HN vested interests. I have no doubt HN tries hard to be honest. No complaints here.

That being said, I am very suprised you mentioned "drop of evidence". It is very upsetting you said that. There is hard evidence.

The fact is: There are may dishonest people in this world. They may justify their honesty, but that's not the point. See the PLETHORA of dishonest reviews (with proof) on Amazon, Yelp, Ebay, etc. And HN is the perfect place to game comments/upvotes/topics, and you bet it is. Firstly, it's simple to game HN. Actually, too easy. And the returns are really good. The audience are high-income earners, and intelligent people. The topics can be very niche (which means highly targeted). In fact the mentality that "HN can't be gamed" is better for the gamers, since other HN users will really believe most comments are genuine.

HERE'S THE DEAL:

I will do a project "for free" for the public good. This will hopefully establish proof. If I am allowed by HN legally, I will show my study of how I can easily, massively game HN. And you will not but able to detect it. I will not make money of this, but I will provide detailed statistics about traffic and CTA clicks. I will provide a dollar value of the fruits of my gaming, if it was to be real. I would be just one person doing this in my spare time. When the fruits are so sweet, PR companies will employ full-time paid individuals and maybe even teams.

P.s. Dang, I know you try hard to remove "shill" comments /upvotes /topics. Yes, you catch the amateurs. But the whole point of shilling is to blend in be undetectable. You don't and simply cannot catch those. And on a seperate, there was a study that "doctors who believe they cannot be gamed/bribed, are actually the most gamed/bribed".

I said there was no evidence in a specific user's claims, not that there was no evidence anywhere. See my third paragraph.

There are two problems. One is that astroturfing and shilling exist. The other is that some users are too eager to see an astroturfer under every bed and a shill in every pot.

Both problems are destructive and we need to deal with both and not pretend that one subsumes the other. On HN the approach is simple: (1) if you think you see abuse, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate; and (2) don't accuse other users of astroturfing and shilling unless you have evidence, and keep reminding yourself that an opposing view (e.g. them liking/hating $BIGCO while you hate/like it) is not evidence.

Yes, accusing a specific company certainly requires proof. So I apologize if I was defending that.

You say "astroturfing and shilling exist". It is likely a "very high" percentage. "Very high" does not need to be 60%, but it is relative. Even 10%-20% is very high, which I think the ratio might actually be. It is just too attractive--the bang-for-buck ration is just too sweet.

Please note, I don't say this with pleasure. I'm an honest shop and it is painful seeing competitors astroturfing.

I sent details to HN per mail and other means. One of the companies is MSFT (others here named the other companies), they created manys accounts around BUILD confernce 2015. Before that event HN was a pro-Apple, pro-open source with little MSFT news - something you would expect from startup and SV investors. If you would have a proper interface, you could watch such activity in real time and act. Some third party interfaces like http://hckrnews.com/ show also stories that got hidden despite high commitment from the community. Almost every day I find insightful stories that vanished off radar. And it visible that not so nice stories about certain companies get immediate reaction by publishing a minor news story that very rapidly gets traction on HN frontpage and the not so nice stories is spammed with comments and flags to push it off the frontpage.

Disclaimer: I have nothing against a certain company per se, I just don't like how the do their PR in a very shaddy way, and how they destroy things (like their own products for very short term greed). And I would prefer if HN algo doesn't punish stories if there are more comments than votes - as this is the most common way for them to "hide" stories.

Edit: Now it makes sense, it explains why MSFT is so interested in HN (woos Y Combinator startups into their eco-system, present a polished new MSFT, PR is trying to hide ugly truth), it fits my observation of a massive user increase (green accounts) around BUILD 2015 event, etc "Today, Scott Guthrie and I joined Sam Altman, to announce a partnership with Y Combinator, one of the world’s leading startup accelerators.": https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/stevengu/2015/02/09/y-combi... and "Microsoft woos Y Combinator startups with $500K in Azure cloud credits" http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/09/microsoft-woos-y-combinato... , "Microsoft offers $500k in Azure credit to woo Y Combinator startups" http://www.geekwire.com/2015/microsoft-offers-500k-azure-cre... "$500k of Azure credit for YC startups" http://blog.ycombinator.com/500k-of-azure-credit-for-yc-star... "Microsoft Wants To Buy Love In Silicon Valley" https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/10/microsoft-wants-to-buy-lov... ... as Alex Wilhelm of TechCrunch wrote "It will be interesting to see what percentage of the current Y Combinator class chooses Azure over AWS". What's then answer? It certainly changed HN, that's my impression.

This is what I mean about there not being a drop of evidence in what you say. Alleging that Microsoft created accounts on HN is a serious charge. How do you know this? You don't. You know none of these things. You're merely narrating your own perspective and finding an assortment of "details", as you call them, to fit it (some silly corporate partnership, a few stories you saw do this or that on HN's front page—Now it all makes sense!). This is not evidence, this is how imagination works.

It's really time now for you to stop posting like this. It's past tedious, and destructive of the community.

Dang is right, accusations against a specific person/entity are serious and require solid proof. Could even be illegal.

It's really time now for you to stop posting like this. It's past tedious, and destructive of the community.

I'm not sure if you read it, but the recent "Who Buried Paul" is a wonderful exposition of how a plethora of weak evidence can lead to a false conclusion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13902012. What's wonderful about it is that it's written about a politically noncontroversial topic, and thus (hopefully) allows for more reasonable conversation. Might be a great candidate for recycling.

More controversially (and thus less appropriate for direct HN discussion) Scott Adams has a nice piece on confirmation bias, using Pizzagate as the example:

So let me tell you what a mountain of evidence is worth.

Mountain of Evidence Value = zero.

In the normal two-dimensional world in which we imagine we live, a mountain of evidence usually means something is true. So why am I looking at the same mountain of evidence as the believers in pizzagate and coming to an opposite conclusion?

The difference is that I understand what confirmation bias is and how powerful it can be. If you don’t have the same level of appreciation for the power of confirmation bias, a mountain of evidence looks like proof.

Here’s what I know that most of you do not: Confirmation bias looks EXACTLY LIKE a mountain of real evidence. And let me be super-clear here. When I say it looks exactly the same, I am not exaggerating. I mean there is no way to tell the difference.

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/153821538056/about-pizzagate.

> Add a report button to report users.

You can flag individual comments. And you can also email the mods with your suspicions.

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