The Black Market for Social Media Manipulation | Hacker News Reader

The Black Market for Social Media Manipulation

stratcomcoe.org

73 pointsmanigandham12 comments

This is a very basic article, but presents a decent outline of this niche. As they say, all of this is very open and available on the clearnet anyway.

One technique used by those "high end" account creators: they all network with each other irl, add their (1000s) of fakes as friends with each other, and hire staff to send random chat messages to all friends every day. Do this over time and you extend the hidden limits set by FB on adding friends and sending messages.

This isn't anything new. A buddy of mine ran a "company" that sold backlinks (mostly low quality garbage) about a decade ago -- the company was making 7 figures yearly. At around the same time, I figured out how to game the StumbleUpon algorithm and was selling front page spots (for like $1k a spot) with my sister.

It doesn't surprise me that this is still happening. There's money to be made, but there's a lot of risk involved with greyhat/blackhat business models. Being young and dumb helps.

hahah, my brother and I also sold gamed StumbleUpon front page, and digg, and early reddit, and delicious back in the day and sold it as a service. It was insane how easy it used to be...

I think it is pretty obvious that these companies have built pretty sophisticated scrappers for social media sites as well to bypass any API or ToS restrictions. Twitter bots for politics aren't even hidden. Reddit has a huge problem with social media manipulation as well.

The best part of this basic article is that probably cost 250k to EUR taxpayers and provided 0 insight, keeping the wheel of fraud spinning.

This should start to be tracked.

I caught Aldi advertising with Reddits frugal board.

Young accounts, lots of Aldi Love.

That marketing company has gotten better.

I find it awful HN mods won't let this be discussed. Is HN manipulated? Why wouldn't it be?

We spend a lot of time addressing readers' concerns about the integrity of HN. I did so just this morning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20508960.

The main constraint is that answering these questions thoroughly is time- and energy-intensive. Since our resources are limited, this quickly eats into the other things we need to do to keep HN up and make it better. So we have to be careful how we engage. That mostly means answering users who have substantive questions and good-faith concerns, and avoiding getting lost in the forests that the wilder kinds of insinuations lead to. The internet is a gigantic Rohrschach test that is all too ready to supply whatever people want to see.

Would it be possible to add the invited page (https://news.ycombinator.com/invited) to the lists page? https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

It would be super helpful to also provide a 'lobbed' page. I didn't know about this practice, and I'm sure many other users don't know about this either. It's important in my opinion for the sake of transparency.

We'll add the lobbed page once it exists. The invited page probably doesn't belong there since the distinction between invited and reupped is just an accident of timing.

Perhaps, as with other potentially open-ended discussions, schedule and time-box this?

A quarterly/half-year transparency report or audit post, say, discussed at the time of posting, perhaps.

It makes me tired and depressed just to read that. Nor would it help; it would generate an order of magnitude more questions and objections and meta.

What works is personal interaction with particular users.

Hence the time-boxing.

Open outcry isn't the best Q&A / conversational model. It's HN's default.

The Scholastic Instruction model has merits: lectio, meditatio, quaestio, disputationes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism#Scholastic_instr...

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