634 Diggs, 17 comments, and 100 comment upvotes for Viagra | Hacker News Reader

634 Diggs, 17 comments, and 100 comment upvotes for Viagra

i.imgur.com

37 pointstalbina30 comments

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That's an impressive number of fake accounts. Here's a permanent screenshot:

http://i.imgur.com/yHtLy.png

I wonder if they're using some kind of blackhat technique to trick regular users into upvoting it.

Very likely an example of the 'sockpuppet management' software discussed here last week IMO.

EDIT: you can still see the page in google's cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Perhaps this says something about the average Digg user that they would not want to publicly share :)

Sorry for the snarky comment, I just had to. As other commenters have pointed out, we are entering into the age of "online personna warfare" -- which in my mind could end up spawning true AI since the monetary stakes are so high, as annoying as it all is right now.

Brain-teaser question: if you had a hundred friends online, and they all knew you and joked with you and provided support when you were having a bad day, asked about your family, etc. -- as long as they blatantly did not try to sell you anything, perhaps just mentioning a product every few months as part of a normal conversation, would it really matter if they were robots?

Product placement is going to go from actors in movies to robots on internet sites. Right now it's just happening in a very klunky and annoying fashion, but it'll get smoother. Very strange times we live in.

Agree. A finer example of such techniques are prevalent here on HN. Recall VirginMobile Nexus and black Friday items with tons and tons of comments. Coincidence? Appropriate timing? VirginMobile ran out of that product by the way.

>would it really matter if they were robots?

Yes, because their only motive is profit. All their jokes, all their friendly advice was only ever given in order to extract some of my money and therefore my time. No matter how far they go to hide this fact, however genuinely useful or comforting their presence, they have only one reason for their existence and that fact would forever offend me and I'm sure others too.

Imagine if one of your human friends behaved in this way, persisted in a relationship with you solely because they were being paid to do so. You would feel violated, and in my mind if that friend were a robot, I would feel more violated. At least in the case of a human, I can reason that they needed the cash.

So you're not mad when a Pepsi can appears in your favorite movie but you would be mad if the robot that had been playing a killer game of chess with you for the last hour told a joke that mentioned a famous comedy album?

Both of these you get value from. Both of these are providing some kind of marketing "push" for some product.

How about your best friend who loves some certain kind of music and is always putting links to songs you don't care about in your Facebook feed?

Like I said, the purpose was just to mess with your head a bit. Apologies if I made it sound like some kind of evil overlord controlling armies of robots. That's not what I meant at all.

I am mad when a brand is obviously and garishly inserted into a movie in a way that breaks my suspension of disbelief. I am not mad when it adds to the suspension of disbelief by making the setting seem more real. Product placement is obviously banned on the BBC, and it seems totally ridiculous when characters in soaps/sitcoms only ever ask for 'beer' or 'wine' in the pub.

The second case is an artistic choice as well as a marketing choice, unlike the blatant mentioning of product names in dialogue that is so annoying. This corresponds to my point about social interaction solely for profit being the problem.

Similarly, my friend who likes certain music spams my feed with links because he likes me and because he wants me to share the enjoyment he derives from the music he's found. He may also want to increase the income of the band, but that isn't the only reason he puts the links there. I have other friends who are in bands or promote bands, and it does sometimes annoy me when they spam my feed.

I might be mad if a chess robot brought up a product, it would likely depend on how well it blended into the conversation in a similar way to how my attitude to movie product placements varies with how well they blend into the movie.

It would also depend on how good the robot was as a chess partner compared to other robots that namedrop products more/less. If it outshines every product on the market I might put up with a lot of marketing. By then we'll probably have adblock for our implant firmware anyway.

Yes, that's my point: as robots become more human, their activities will "blend in", as you say, with the things we normally do with folks. Right now it's much too jarring.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not rooting for the robots. Far from it. I don't want to live in a world where we are all networked together and have armies of little robot friends to help us with all of our needs. Yuck.

I was getting more to the true nature of the Turing Test. If you can't tell whether there's a person or robot talking on the other end, it really doesn't matter. In fact, you could argue that, for our own personal needs, internet bots could end up becoming much better "people" than real people. Which is very strange.

>internet bots could end up becoming much better "people" than real people. Which is very strange.

http://xkcd.com/810/

I have to say, as someone who has to deal with the same problem every day, I feel bad for the Digg folks. They are a good group of engineers, and spam is truly a hard problem -- much harder than most people realize.

Does Reddit have the same problem?

Also, would something like this make it to the front page? And if it didn't (because of editorial input), how come it hasn't been deleted?

Maybe it's just a new meme?

It has been deleted now.

Someone tried it on HN last week.

Who? The Facebook resume guy?

Someone selling pills, I think.

Someone tried astroturfing /r/gaming last week and were called out on it.

Truly blatent spam is extremely rare - it's the stuff that's mostly legitimate that has an ulterior motive that is hard to spot.

If it provides enough legitimate content to be useful to the users, it will get upvotes regardless of its ulterior motives. At a certain point an advertisement is entertaining enough to be viewed voluntarily. cf Old Spice guy.

For a while, there was a major problem with blogspam on the science subreddit. There was a user who would ripoff content from other sites, paste it into a blogspot site, and slap ads on it. It would regularly get upvoted to the top. He's probably still at, and cursing at people in Hungarian when he gets caught. Ask the folks at /r/ReportTheSpammers about "Ralph" sometime if you'd like to know what spam on reddit looks like.

Reddit has a lot more built-in spam protection than is apparent to the average user. Faking that a vote was actually counted for new or questionable users, getting your account flagged for mass-voting a certain way, etc.

yeah, you can get something like this to the front page of reddit easily, if you and a couple of guys use a tor browser, and create fake logins, and upboat the content.

Reddit doesn't have good defenses against tor browsing. Tor browsing/hack is the best way to beat reddit defences, since you can circumvent reddit's IP logging, and cookies.

And it was just deleted.

I've been thinking about this for the past few days. It would seem captchas are an effective tool for screening bots etc out. But what happens once they pass the security line? (the body scanner didn't catch them before boarding the plane...?)

how do you identify a bot post in the wild? It seems to me that there is an equal possibility that a post could be from a bot as it could be from a real person... is there a way to use distributions, and some kind of artificial intelligence to search for fingerprints? Another curious question, how do you test it? Is there any accounts that we for sure have spotted as "probably an intelligence bot"

EDIT: I just got another thought, maybe it would be possible to setup a honey pot?

I was thinking you could look for mouse movement to determine if it's a bot or a human. Bot writers don't have any need to code this feature in, if the site they're targeting isn't looking for it.

But when the site evolves, the spammer will evolve too.

That would be quite expensive both for the server and the client. Besides, I certainly wouldn't use a site that tracks my mouse movement to determine whether I'm a human or not.

>look for mouse movement to determine if it's a bot or a human

That trick didnt work in the days of AllAdvantage and its ilk and it wont work now :)

Ahh... memories...

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Alladvantage#...

> is there a way to use distributions, and some kind of artificial intelligence to search for fingerprints?

Yes. :) I wish I could say more, but I don't want to give away the secrets to reddit's spam detection.

Isn't reddit's code open source? https://github.com/reddit/reddit

Or are there parts (like the spam detection algorithm) that are kept secret?

We keep the spam detection parts secret. It is the only part of the code we hide. We wish we didn't have to, but sadly, spam is an arms race.

yeah,

but you can program your bots to train the spam filters. Nothi8ng annoys the user base more than false-positive spam filtering.

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