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Comment by fermienrico | Hacker News Reader

Deleting this comment - I will email dang.

Send Dang an email

"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."

Thanks, I didn't notice this guideline and I apologize for taking over this thread. Apparently, my post is upvoted heavily 20+ votes and it's clouding the actual discussion.

I've also noticed a large influx of new accounts posting low quality, politically charged comments in the past few months. You can find plenty of those in this thread.

I think its pretty likely that we're headed for an extinction type event for upvote based "anonymous" message boards like HN, reddit ... or at least a significant decline in their usefulness

What's a good alternative architecture that promotes quality content/comments and prevents regression short of manual compilation, moderation and curation?

Edit: Jotting down some ideas:

1) Occlude/Delude/Fog-up the votes for newly created accounts. Mature accounts get to see gray posts.

2) Consesus amongst mature accounts has higher weight over newly created accounts.

3) Penalty for being flagged is higher for mature accounts as with power comes responsibility of good behavior.

4) Karma should have more meaning that just a tally of points. Upvoting costs Karma (-1 from balance). So, people are more careful and have to strongly agree to upvote. Probably some caveats and downsides here.

5) Buffer out the oscillations of upvotes/downvotes. Sort of like a mass-spring-damper system.

6) Hire moderators that are vetted and publicly funded by HN members.

7) Verified accounts with work email or some other means. These accounts would have the highest weight in anything they do.

I think you essentially need something pseudonymous and reputation based. Something where getting banned has a reasonably high cost in terms of re-acquiring reputation required to post.

Slashdot only gave out a small number of moderator points per day (5 IIRC). Also you could not moderate and post on the same topic, which means you cannot downvote opposing views so easily.

"I've also noticed a large influx of new accounts posting low quality, politically charged comments in the past few months."

This is why you should flag every political submission to HN.

I just reloaded the page and, let me see the top comments:

1. Note that US citizens have long been warned about stuff like this ...

2. I just noticed - all anti China comments were heavily upvoted but just in last 30 mins ... (this comment thread)

3. Not just arrested but tortured ...

4. This is bad for Canadians recently, with many arrests and accusations of spying ...

5. I've visited China nearly every year for the past 6 years and never had any sort of issues ...

6. I get the impression that we're now in an undeclared Cold War with China.

7. Use this to negotiate hazard pay with your company when traveling to China.

The rest are greyed out:

8. ... If this is the direction China wants to continue to go in, I no longer want anything to do with it ...

9. ... Of course anything and everything is a sign of a "New Cold War" so I'm not surprised this is as upvoted as it is.

10. The current administration has been bullying China incessantly ...

So, 1/3/8 are clearly anti-China, 4/6/7 can be read either way, 5 is questioning the premise (so we could consider it mildly pro-China, if you will), and 9/10 are the only explicitly pro-China comments. They are also at the bottom.

So I'm not really sure what you're saying.

I am seeing the same that you're seeing now. Those grayed comments are back to black.

Why do we even have such a huge oscillation? I am extremely suspicious but cautious with allegation without data.

What I am sure of is the following:

Comments start out positive, then comes the hammer and they go extremely gray (the lightest color and bottom out at -4?) and then we have them back to normal levels. This is a really concerning behavior. If we had a plot of vote vs. time, we'd see this hammer come down. I strongly suspect.

Well I'm no HN admin, but from my own experience, a comment can switch between grey/black with only a few votes. You are basically saying that a controversial comment gets upvotes, downvotes, and then upvotes. A pro-China commenter would see the exact same data as you see, and claim this is an evidence of anti-Chinese brigading ("hammer").

* While I was writing this my original comment score went from 1 to 2 to 0, which kinda proves my point...

I see, if there is benevolent behavior, I think that's fine.

What I am concerned about is a coordinated astroturfing that is perhaps state sponsored to change the western narrative. That's pretty fricking scary and should be investigated if that's the case.

>"It is not too difficult for a foreign power to get 300 accounts on HN with 300 IPs, and have a farm of employees manipulating votes on HN"

It does not have to be "foreign power". To me it looks like HN has groups of "concerned participants" on either side of a fence.

There is no data to prove my assertion and your rebuttal.

This is my own impression. This is what "to me it looks" stands for in my original reply. I do not have to prove it to others.

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