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Comment by interfixus | Hacker News Reader

This and many other of OP's submissions are definitely interesting. But I notice all 179 of them - with possibly an exception or two - are BBC travel stories, that OP has never submitted a single comment, and that someone with the same name as OP is a deputy travel editor with the BBC.

This may all be quite in order, I just find it at a slightly odd angle to the general way of things on HN.

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Good catch, but there doesn't appear to be any attempt at deception and it doesn't really break any rules as far as I can tell. I suppose it could be considered mildly spammy, but then again the articles submitted seem generally to be high quality so as far as I'm concerned it's fine.

Imho posting almost every day for 10 months is more than mildly spammy, I agree that the articles are generally high quality but that's true of many other publications. I have no idea if there's other people doing the same nor if it's ok for HN's admins, but as a reader and user of the site I'm not really ok with it, I think we should hold users to a higher standard.

If she wants to post every article from the BBC on HN she should at contribute in other ways, commenting or posting other high quality sites. And again, this is directed to any other users behaving in the same way.

It appears that only a handful of the submissions go anywhere, the rest sit at 1-3 points. If the voting is organic, and her submissions are by hand, it seems fine right? I just wish the website wasn't such a laggy ad-ridden dumpster, and I would visit it more. This is coming from someone with uBlock Origin installed, yet it still manages to lag my PC to hell. Great job BBC.

Try and disable JS specifically on BBC? The site renders fine without it and I have no issues even with a relatively old PC.

HN is a link aggregator, of course there's going to be agents or bots that automatically post links to HN and all the other link aggregators. I don't mind, given how the point of link aggregators is to get all the links and have the heroes that visit /newest find the best ones.

We need to make sure the signal-to-noise ratio of /newest doesn't dip too much though otherwise it'll be difficult to find the diamonds in the rough. It's already pretty fast moving as it is.

if the BBC are pushing content through your site, you must be doing something right!

i don't think BBC need to push anything, they are financed from gov budget, more likely their author of those stories or editor of that department wanting more page views

I never thought I’d ever love to see both a contradiction and a confirmation embodied in a single statement. Thank you!

BBC ≠ editor/writer, not sure what's contradicting about it

and how exactly would you know

People are responding that its 'okay'.

But the issue isnt that they posted the link, its that they likely are using bots to upvote as well.

I have a hard time understanding if people hate google or if Firefox is advertising here. Similar with Apple.

EDIT: Basically cant trust HN either. What is the solution to astroturfing?

> its that they likely are using bots to upvote as well.

Doesn't seem the case to me. The majority of BBC submissions, even by the OP, sit only at a few points.

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