Hacker News Reader

Comment by barbegal | Hacker News Reader

In 2017 they were claiming to be founded in 2015 [1] and didn't disclose that they were affiliated with financial companies. A few days ago [2] they were claiming to be founded in 2016 and disclosed that they were affiliated with financial companies.

The fake expert is not that concerning but providing affiliate links with no disclosure is a real concern and is rife across the internet and growing [3]. Obviously this company came clean once the journalists got onto them.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170610022155/https://studentlo...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20180420191847/https://studentlo...

[3] https://blog.marketing.rakuten.com/hubfs/Networks_Help_Drive...

View on HN

do you find affiliate links more evil than a company being able to significantly manipulate how the media reports on the industry they profit from?

Isn't that just shoddy journalism on the part of media that reported and quoted them? We shouldn't shift the blame from the media companies that reported fake information as fact. We are never going to get rid of fake information. We can only push for journalistic standards to ensure we aren't bringing credibility and legitimacy to a company pumping out this crap.

We can push for higher journalistic standards and also push to punish crooks who intentionally deceive the public in order to line their pockets, especially when it's at the expense of struggling populations like heavily indebted students.

Identity checks are incredibly time consuming and expensive. Many authors deliberately use pseudonyms.

The only practical way to avoid what you’re calling “shoddy journalism” would be to have a single international register of vetted and accredited blog authors.

Is that really an outcome you want?

Or perhaps journalists could actually do some investigative reporting rather than treating blog posts as even a potential source of truth.

Are people willing to pay them commensurate to the extra work they will have to put in to do this?

Sure... As soon as every project on github audits every line of code in all of their dependencies.

I'm not sure your analogy sticks. News organisations are purporting to be sources of truth. I don't think that many Github projects are purporting to be sources of audited dependencies.

Trust matters. It's a tremendous efficiency engine.

One verifies as feasible, but one also punishes intentional violations of trust severely.

There are multiple people who did things wrong here. Sure, you can call out the media companies, but there is no reason to not also criticize fraudsters. There is enough blame to spread around.

> this company came clean once the journalists got onto them.

They changed their story, but we don't know that what they say now is true and they have a track record of intentional, per-meditated deceit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com