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Comment by buboard | Hacker News Reader

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buboard

There are trustless systems though, like bitcoin

Oh btw you can buy hn upvotes too : https://upvotes.club/buy/hacker-news-upvote/

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> Oh btw you can buy hn upvotes too

HN credibility just dropped 80% to me for the moment ;-)

No but seriously, this is pretty bad. Many people are kind of addicted to HN and to many this is a stream of inspiration. I've seen people often share posts in internal Workplace chats where most people are not frequent HN readers.

Also having learned today that one can buy Reddit upvotes, I think this whole count thing is now officially useless.

i assume it s been happening for quite a while now, at least for some products featured sometimes, but it doesnt seem it's very prevalent

Edit: I've been asked to make this more explicit. How about: If you do this you will get banned.

Don't assume that those upvotes are counted. It's a cat and mouse game. We eat a lot of mice.

If you or anyone suspects that a post has made HN's front page because of vote manipulation, you should let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. We have years of experience with this data.

I'd never say it never works, because we don't know what we don't know. But I can tell you that many people who've used that spam service have gotten their posts buried, their accounts banned, and their sites blacklisted.

In the case of click farms driving virtual browsers with selenium or puppeteer, there aren't even any actual mice involved in those clicks!

> https://upvotes.club/buy/hacker-news-upvote/

I checked out that page, and at least with this one, it imo doesn't devalue HN credibility for me. The max number of upvotes you can buy for HN on this website is 10 per post, which hardly makes or breaks an HN post.

Those 10 upvotes would only be useful for an initial kick off for a post, but if the post itself is trash and legitimate users don't upvote it enough, it will all go in vain. So it would be kinda impossible to use this service to boost absolutely trash articles that people don't care about it.

"We upvote with very strong accounts; if you don’t make it on the main page after 10 upvotes, more won’t help"

Oh god. Imagine the thousands of bland consensus talking points they had to regurgitate to build those accounts. Never trust somebody with no gray comments.

Don't help them :) They can just throw in a few posts disparaging Rust to look credible.

I guess that means I can trust you.

They also need a few warnings from dang for absolute trust.

> On Hacker News, when the post is new, it doesn’t matter how much you upvote it after a certain point. After fewer than 10 early upvotes with great accounts, you’ll usually make it to the front page. From there, HN moderators select manually what they want to keep there. A good strategy is to buy only a few upvotes first in order to make your post visible; then, after it remains approved for 10 minutes or more, buy a lot more upvotes in order to rank it better, or help maintain its good position.

Is this actually true? I don't think so.

It also seems funny they offer to sell a factor of ten more upvotes to articles already on the front page. Maybe they'll just sit back and watch it happen regardless?

Well here is a thing. Do these guys expect any repeat sales? I mean, they could try their technique and if it works then great but if either way they still have the money. Is there a rating system where reviews are posted and would it matter if there was? (see https://www.xkcd.com/325/)

edit: Anyway, the mods have access to the database to see who has been upvoting articles onto the front page. If a group of ('high value') accounts upvote in a similar way on a regular basis then they could be detected..

I feel like mods could easily just pay the $2 and create a post for them to upvote. Then detect those accounts and IPs and block them. However, it's likely just a whack-a-mole situation. Perhaps they could shadow ban them instead?

They probably have accounts that match the topics and regularly upvote. So they have some accounts that upvote those entry level ML medium articles, another that upvotes lifestyle Saases, another that upvotes pet language posts, etc.

Is it better for the community to ban the fake clickers with disposable accounts, or to ban the actual people who pay fake clickers to promote their spammy posts, instead? Once you know who the fake clicker accounts are, leave them alone and let them continue to help you identify and ban dishonest self promoters who are trying to game the system to their advantage.

Hell, maybe dang runs upvotes.club himself, so he can take their customer's money then ban them immediately: that would be most efficient and least error prone. As far as I know, buboard might be one of his sock puppets, posting the URL as a honey pot to catch dishonest HN users. ;)

Only problem is that if I don't like you, I signe up and have them upvote the next DonHopkins post.

I think one method is to watch for upvotes that come when someone goes to a link directly instead of organically finding it through /new

I'm starting to understand how all the mediocre metaphysics articles from Quanta and Medium keep ending up on this website. They're the textual equivalent of graham crackers. Just bland enough to not be thought-provoking, but just interesting enough to keep people reading. And with so little to say on the subjects in question, they provoke huge off-topic discussions.

Bland Graham Crackers for Paul Graham's Hackers?

Looking to Quell Sexual Urges? Consider the Graham Cracker. One of America's first diet hawks, Sylvester Graham was certain that sexual desire was ruining society. His solution: whole wheat. How a zealot's legacy lives in our foods today.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/looking-t...

Bitcoin is not trust less, the more compute power you have the more « votes » you have.

then Monero. the point is there is a system that minimizes trust , certainly more than the corporate system

Whenever somebody starts spouting off about Bitcoin or Monero, I minimize the trust I have in them.

trust comes and goes - we ll see that when the current negative-rate world goes belly up. even as last resort measures, cryptos have their uses

When that happens, I'd surmise that the following is not going to be a good hedge: a completely ephemeral "asset" that is not backed by any conventional power structure or society, while at the same time being fully dependent on a highly sophisticated infrastructure made possible by said power structures and societies.

Cryptocurrencies depend on a redundant and highly interconnected network of many diverse actors to be able to maintain their trust guarantees. How that network is going to stay around in a doomsday scenario is very much up in the air.

The main point, the crucial point of a doomsday hedge is that it should depend as little as possible on the intricacies of the old world.

the same goes for cash & credit card, and in any case an apocalyptic war resets all prices to 0. Or you could extoil the virtues of gold but good luck carrying your gold in an EU country from Jan 1st, let alone the Moon and Mars

Of course traditional assets are highly uncertain if the world goes tits up, but you were the one hinting that cryptocurrencies would be a good hedge in a doomsday scenario.

The truth is that it is extremely difficult to predict what asset to hold in such a case. Physical assets can be confiscated by force, ephemeral assets are likely to just cease to exist.

Perhaps the best hedge is nothing as material as gold, or guns, or money, but having a large and robust network of friends and acquaintances. Ultimately, being connected (not just in a technical sense) is the best enabler of success in or out of a doomsday event I think.

The Europol investigation and presentation says Monero works as advertised, I trust that, especially since chain analysis companies aren't on the other side advertising their capabilities to undermine Monero

It doesn't matter if the technology or the mathematical theory behind it is trustworthy or not, the problem is that get-rich-quick money-for-free pyramid schemes attract untrustworthy people, so even if they technically work on the chalkboard in the lab, those people ruin them in the real world.

Social engineering and deceptive marketing trump Razzle-Dazzle Globetrotter Calculus every day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P1bu4HUAMs

I just find it incredibly easy to understand private digital assets without being led on to the guru's other untrustworthy product

What you are basically saying is that because people lack critical thinking skills, you distrust the other people that happen/claim to actually know about the topic, that seems awfully reductive.

No, that's not what I'm saying at all.

"Incredibly easy", huh?

Incredibly: adverb. used to introduce a statement that is hard to believe; strangely. "incredibly, he was still alive"

Even after your edit, I don't know what you are saying and how it relates to trusting people less for a relevant short comment mentioning Monero. Care to articulate that specific sentiment or how its doing more than painting with a large ignorant brush?

In the case of buboard's post, first he posted something wrong about Bitcoin (and plugged upvotes.club), then when corrected, backtracked to "then Monero". In the case of your post, first you posted something promoting Monero, then you claimed you found it "incredibly easy to understand private digital assets", but then criticized other people who "lack critical thinking skills".

What do you find so "incredibly easy to understand" about private digital assets that people who "lack critical thinking skills" don't get, and why are you more trustworthy than they are? "Incredible" literally means "not credible". Bragging about how "incredibly" clever you are and how dumb other people are doesn't make you sound trustworthy.

> "Incredible" literally means "not credible"

Like many words, incredible has multiple definitions usable in context, such as nothing to do with credibility, and typically what English users do is pick the most likely applicable context to the circumstance, such as the definition which completely undermines your entire argument and is more congruent with everything I have said.

With that in mind, how would you rewrite your entire post?

Since you asked: With the fact in mind that you're deliberately trying to misunderstand what I'm saying, I'd repeat my question that you didn't answer:

What do you find so "incredibly easy to understand" about private digital assets that people who "lack critical thinking skills" don't get, and why are you more trustworthy than they are?

Isn't it a bit ironic that you want us to trust your claim that we should trust Europol about a "trustless" system?

"There are trustless systems though, like bitcoin" -buboard; "there is a system [Bitcoin -- bzzt -- oops! -- Monero then] that minimizes trust" -buboard; "I trust that [the Europol investigation and presentation about Monero]" -rolltiide.

So why should we trust you and buboard, then? Care to link to your resume or PhD dissertation or any code or research papers you've written on the topic, since it's so "incredibly easy" for you to understand? Or should we just trust you without any evidence to tell us who to trust about a trustless?

So on the topic of Monero there are two parties that I mentioned: Europol and chainanalysis companies. Europol, a government agency, can be incentivized to lie about their investigative capabilities to help with their investigations. They detailed how they cannot track Monero, but lets assume they are lying.

Chain analysis companies advertise their investigative abilities in order to attract business. By theory alone they cannot track Monero transactions, and in practice, they are not advertising that they can while they do advertise how they can follow transactions on surveillance networks like Bitcoin. This is a second confirmation that Monero works as private digital money.

This part is a cat and mouse game, all while Monero continues receiving software updates to improve its use, via open source pull requests, which bolsters confidence I have in the system as it doesn't exist in a static state. A lot of people analyze the digital asset ecosystem in a current or prior state and dismiss them based on that.

I think that is enough ammunition for you to investigate further to come to similar conclusions without you needing to trust me or buboard.

But if you would like to dive deeper on why these parties are not able to follow Monero transactions in both theory and practice, there are some books on the subject and then code you can compile yourself to test it out. That's typically what we are referring to when we say trustless, the independent verifiability.

Wow, does that even work - I just assumed that HN was too small a community for misbehaviour to be lost in the noise.

Would love to hear moderators opinions on this?

Recently HN seems to have become more heavily targeted. I think bad actors have realized the value of the community here. I am increasingly wary of opening links to unfamiliar domains except in a sandbox environment.

This has been going on for quite some time. But the mod(s) do a more than credible job at keeping up with the trash and identifying such behavior.

The bigger problem - in my opinion - is people submitting (unwittingly) content cloned from elsewhere.

There is quite a bit of blogspam that makes it to the front page. Usually even that is taken care of sooner rather than later but for every time it works there is proof that it can work which will drive more people to try to get away with it. We can all help with this issue: ensure that we submit content from original sources and in case content from a cloned source is submitted flag the article and point to the original.

> in case content from a cloned source is submitted flag the article and point to the original

It sure would be nice if there was a way to add a comment to explain why one has flagged an article, so the moderators don't have to guess why it was flagged! As it is, I occasionally add an explanation in a comment or direct email, but it always feels awkward.

i presume if someone would use this, they d use an "OK" domain like medium

HN is not small by any measure. It is often featured on the first Google page. The HN hug of death is just as real as the Slashdot effect.

It is quite obvious when companies who think these sites are relevant for their social media is featured. Suddenly a whole lot of upvotes comes along. Make of that what you will. Personally I think it is naive to believe that any open community is free from bought votes.

Does anyone have any actual measures of this? I guess there are some API services re I could investigate but ... I'm lazy and it's xmas. It still just runs on one large server IIRR

Here's a post from 2013, "What happens when you're #1 on Hacker News for a day"

tl;dr numbers: 15,000+ unique visitors, 25,000+ page views

https://levels.io/hacker-news-number-one/

And here's a thread from 2016 where users chime in with their results.

tl;dr numbers: A #2 or #3 ranking was about 50k-75k pageviews.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12008384

it's not small. even if a show HN doesnt even reach the frontpage it s decent traffic, and , depending on the product, can be pretty relevant too.

one could do the math to figure out how they came up with this $2 / upvote price - i presume it's the equivalent of paying google for the same amount of traffic.

Using that spam service will get your account and website banned here, as plenty have discovered to their chagrin.

Heeiille

can I buy being upvoted outta the shadow ban?

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