I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
twitter.com
twitter.com
From there, they use dozens of fake Reddit and HN accounts to submit, comment on, and artificially boost their own posts. They also submit some unrelated cover posts. You can see some of these on HN here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
They have sockpuppet Reddit accounts doing the same thing across 10s of subreddits.
Here's the set of clients I know of (https://twitter.com/troyd/status/1316020415995674624):
AccessiBe
ClimaCell
Imperva
Loadmill
Rookout Labs
WhiteSource (AKA SecureCoding dot com)
Testcraft
I have no idea what they thought they were buying, but what they were receiving was black-hat content marketing at large scale. There may be other clients I don't know of.
Here's some Medium profiles of authors, where you'll see those companies get plugged over and over. I expect some of these will be removed by the authors soon:
https://medium.com/@AntonLawrence
https://medium.com/@Justin_Parsons
https://medium.com/@Dickson_Mwendia
https://medium.com/@oyetoketoby80
https://medium.com/@mrsaeeddev
https://medium.com/@ginomessmer
https://medium.com/@diptokmk47
https://medium.com/@sajjadheydari74
https://medium.com/@ngwaifoong92
https://medium.com/@henson.casper
https://hackernoon.com/u/ari-noman
https://hackernoon.com/u/diptokmk47
There's probably others I'm missing. If you run a blog and one of these companies is mentioned in a post that doesn't disclose an affiliation, it may well be fake. I contacted many of the publishers above. To quote Quincy of freeCodeCamp in https://twitter.com/ossia/status/1316216151802667008 after he researched this: "Stay vigilant, friends."
This particular industry isn't particularly secretive. I know of mature agencies in the UK and US doing this with real offices, full time staff, nice websites, senior staff with LinkedIn profiles, etc. And I'm sure there are others outside the anglophone world.
I believe you about Reddit, but it’s going to be quite hard to buy your way into HN, no matter how cleverly you do it.
I’m not saying it’s impossible. But it’s so easy to believe, and so hard to do, that it warrants skepticism.
Much the same as the best online payment processing anti-fraud services are an opaque black box that you feed some data into, and you get a result back. They don't tell you what's going on inside the black box.
I would not be surprised at all if the top vendors for online payment processing fraud detection also offer services for anti-sockpuppet/anti-inauthentic user detection. Some of the methods going on in the back end to analyze the validity of a transaction will also apply.
Considering the modern weaponization of social media to manipulate stocks, elections, protests and such, I would consider that sort of SaaS to be a growth market.
I was just a passive consumer before.
Why is this?
Kibitzing HN moderation itself is one of our oldest pastimes.
The correct security objection is to obfuscation being deployed in settings where there are decisively effective controls that could be deployed instead: where it doesn't make sense to raise attacker costs by degrees, because those costs can be raised to intractable levels instead. I'd cite an example, but it would spawn a 500 comment thread about how Linux sysadmins manage their networks.
I consider this a highly censored website with particular objectives, but a decent userbase.
That doesn't make actual astroturfing ok. We spend many hours combating it and banning accounts and sites that do it, including the ones that Troy's reporting on here. There's just a huge difference between it-really-happening and pointless-toxic-speculation. The difference is evidence, and that's what we require.
And how do you deal with the other side of "unfair" behaviour, e.g. excessive flagging or downvoting for legitimate posts or comments. As far as I'm aware there isn't any evidence required to downvote or flag.
Be kind.
Please don't sneer
Please don't post shallow dismissals
But downvotes are sometimes used unkindly, dismissively and as a way to supress a different view (which may or may not be justified). You nuke me and say why, I'm happy - we can talk! I can learn something new! Downvoting factual posts silently is... frustrating. And ill mannered.
I’m definitely happy that there’s minimum Karma for downvotes, but how does it prevent hive-mind downvoting?
If I was wrong, your response does not elucidate why, in fact let me quote bits back to you "soft conspiracy" ... "very little evidence"[0] ... "a vague sense of wrongness"
Well maybe but your post has less substance than mine.
[0] you didn't ask for any BTW
Imagine if a large corporation bought ~50 old accounts and spoofed different computers/browsers. Only 5 votes is needed to hide a post.
Controlling the narrative is almost trivial if you can spend mere thousands of dollars.
The main thing to understand is that we need something to look at other than just an opinion that one commenter was expressing which another commenter didn't like. That's evidence only of difference-of-opinion, not abuse.
Such data isn't always secret and isn't always just on HN. For example, if someone is asking for HN upvotes on Twitter, we sometimes get links from eagle-eyed HNers. Similarly when someone is sending out spam emails trying to organize a voting ring. And sometimes spammers copy comments from other forums and paste them into HN. Those are pretty basic examples but I hope you can see that in each case there is some objective data that supports a judgment of abuse.
Conversely, suppose you like $BigCo and someone else hates $BigCo, sees your comment praising them, and replies "how much are they paying you, shill?" That's the kind of thing we don't allow, because there's literally nothing supporting that judgment. The same type of commenter will see various comment arguing for $BigCo in HN threads and then post to other threads with high confidence that "HN is overrun with astroturfing". What they mean is that it's overrun with comments they don't like—and even then, "overrun" is an exaggeration.
What about the other side of it though? your reply didn't really address it.
What I feel is happening now is that in those situations (and others), people downvote and flag things that they don't agree with. They're not shouting "shills / astroturfing" yet the collective power makes it easy to silence opposing opinions, especially if those opinions are in a minority.
Completely anecdotal, but I reported to you two cases of flagged stories that in my opinion had value in them for the community (and in the discussions around them). Those stories were effectively silenced. I think it's a shame. There's no evidence require to flag or downvote, there's no requirement to even give an argument/reasoning for doing it.
Are there any plans to tackle this kind of behaviour in a similar way that empty/non-evidence-based claims of astroturfing and shilling is dealt with?
My first name @push.cx if you want to share notes on these or other abusive users.
There are numerous suspicious posts - which may just be my biases, or not - such as this thread with a guy posting a lot of facts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24746397
I applaud this because we need facts, but one guy there has an astonishing level of facts ready to go and a rather slick and way of putting things which I recognise. Why? because I used to work in publicity (though not of the spinning kind). I recognise the style. I want the guy here and posting because we need facts not shouting but if he has a financial interest, we need to know. It should not stop him being there if there is because in some respects his pro-niclear posts are pretty good but it needs to be open.
Other problems - there's a certain style of posting that proposes stuff with zero facts and magically gets voted to the top of the thread. No facts, slight whiff of fud, pushed to the top. That's not actually how the HN crowd tends to react to info-free posts (or myabe there's a subset who does, I may be mistaken). But how do I analyse the voting patterns when I don't have the voting data?
I'll not mention what happens when china becomes the subject.
Is it me? I don't know. But then I can't tell without evidence. There seem to be other problems. Is it me? I dunno. I'm posting less here because I feel good stuff is getting swamped (not just my stuff, a lot of other people's stuff. My posts aren't generally a pinnacle).
Edit: so how do I get the evidence you require?
So how do I supply the required?
The greater harm of these content marketing bullshit is it pollutes Google search results. If you search Google for some mainstream enough technical terms, all you get is shallow information, poorly written, posts on bullshit sites.
I'd like someone to make a search engine for authentic programming related websites and blogs, even if hand aggregated. Instead of surfing through 5 pages of ZDNet, geeksforgeeks, DZone, thenewstack, quora etc.. highly SEO'd sites.
I was once told that one of my rambly blog posts had appeared on there without me knowing; it wasn't the best, but still. My blog post was on our 'company' blog, turns out the marketing department of another segment of it just took it and reposted it on dzone.
What? You do realize anyone can create HN accounts to post any link and comment on any discussion, right?
Even if you argue that there are magical ex post facto measures to tackle obvious and rampant abuse, you do understand that the system is indeed vulnerable to astroturfers right in its very design, don't you?
Meanwhile, clickbaiting is much more effective than creating accounts.
That's not how it works. It might be a desirable goal, but that doesn't mean that the role of a content marketer is not to a) astroturf discusssions, b) generate content that's SEO-friendly even if they don't blow up.
Customers already get their money's worth if you get your minions sparking causal low-key discussions about their product/service/PR talking point on random places in order to raise awareness and focus on topics in ways that serves your best interests.
An interesting question to ask is if HN owes it to its users to be more transparent about responses like shadow banning and provide ways to appeal such responses. Most of would say no, the current approach is working for us and we should keep it going. But then I wonder why we’re ok with HN behaving like this but not large social media companies.
Shadowban is not perfect by all means, but it's still a good deterrent in my experience.
Also, with tethering it's really easy to circumvent, without needing a VPN.
[1]: IIRC, the whole Laos only has a /32 subnet… yes you read it right: a single IPV4 address for end entire country. And many country only have a few /16.
And regarding third world country, your idea doesn't prevent them to access the website, but they will access a site where the shadowbanning feature is pretty much disabled, which could lead to the proliferation of trolls or spam targeted at this specific country.
(Apologies if I'm getting that number wrong. I don't do much with subnetting.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_IPv4_addr...
And maybe the malicious/non-malicious ratio is low enough to make this method efficient.
It's useful with the more sophisticated class too, though. If they have to start fresh with new accounts, it slows them down and makes what they're doing more obvious to the community.
- no synchronization at all: conservatives (especially American ones) flagging socialist-sounding posts (often upvoted by Europeans when Americans are asleep), Gophers & C++ guys flagging Rust posts, etc.
- loosely synchronized: some content is getting popular on /r/rust, or /r/python, some people there will connect to HN to upvote it here.
- strongly synchronized: some influential Twitter handle posts a message about how “some shit went to the front page”, zealot followers come and flag the submission. Also works with specific subreddits (/r/programmingcirclejerk for instance, even though it's more aimed at comment posts than submission).
It happens a lot, often enough to be noticeable. Sometimes it sort of regulates itself (like in the left-right battle between Europe & US, or between the Rust Evangelist Strike Force & Rust haters), but not always.
Your 'no synchronization' case is tribalism. That's certainly happening here, as probably in every large-enough group. Yes, it's a significant problem. But it's not the astroturfing/manipulation problem being discussed in this thread. If your skepticism about "strong defenses" was meant to include this case, that's too general.
Your 'synchronized' cases would constitute abuse in HN's terms, and if you or anyone notice it happening in the future, we'd greatly appreciate being told about it at hn@ycombinator.com. Actually, if you can even point to cases where it happened in the past (e.g. "some content [was] getting popular on /r/rust, or /r/python, some people there [connected] to HN to upvote it here"), it would be interesting to look back and see whether we detected it and/or could do something differently.
The one thing I'd caution is that it's extremely easy to convince oneself that these things are happening when they're not. Nearly everyone with strong views about this phenomenon is massively deceiving themselves about it—if you're only guided by what feels like it must be happening, there's far too much opportunity to just project things into the situation. People do this all the time, and it's a big problem—as I've said elsewhere in this thread, it's actually a bigger problem than the abuse and manipulation being complained about. The solution is to guard against that by always looking for some extraneous indication (i.e. evidence)—for example a thread on Reddit saying "let's upvote this on HN"—and to be agnostic in the cases where one doesn't have that.
Right, talking about “right and left” was a mistake because the meaning of these words are pretty fuzzy and highly context-dependent. I'd give a more precise description then:
Comments containing criticism of mainstream economics, references to Keynes, arguing that “all capitalism is crony capitalism” or “capitalism didn't defeat communism, welfare state did”, being in favor of strong state intervention etc. are going to be much more upvoted when Americans are asleep. And conversely for comments referencing Milton Friedman, praising the power of the market, economic growth as the main goal for social wellware, etc.
I've seen more than once my comments on the aforementioned themes being upvoted multiple times, then grayed several hours later, to end-up with a positive score the next day. I didn't notice the temporal correlation until someone brought it in a thread, and many people shared the same experience.
If you want to have a look, the recent thread on the Nobel prize in Economics smells like a good candidate for investigation (even though I didn't participate in the thread, so I have no evidences there).
Anyone who have submitted anything on HN would know. Getting on the Front page isn't an easy task at all. And staying on front page is even harder.
And Cunningham's law doesn't always work on HN. Sometimes the community just decide to ignore it. Lol
Try searching for 'buy reddit upvotes' and you'll get ads for services that do exactly what you're talking about.
So I don't click on them now that I know this. Google of course seems not to care or is incapable of noticing.
[1] https://adrianroselli.com/2020/06/accessibe-will-get-you-sue...
Looking at comments and upvotes numbers, it's not like their HN efforts were any effective.
Edit: specifically, none of the interesting parts of this problem/idea are in the phrasing - the only thing to do is just go out and implement it, and that's very difficult because (1) you're essentially trying to solve the Turing Test ("is this a computer or a human?") (2) most of the techniques that you might use to heuristically make this determination can either (a) be defeated very easily or (b) be defeated by another AI made using similar resources+techniques to those used to make the first.
"Black Hat Firm" vs. Expensive Growth Marketing Firm:
– unestablished writer vs credentialed, domain experienced writer (with a salary?)
– spammy Medium.com presence vs Editor Connections at TechCrunch
– network of "dozens" of nearly ineffectual sockpuppets vs dozens of employees with "real" accounts ready to upvote and engage on Boss's call
If you're surprised by this, spend a day in the pits of a product launch in literally any industry. We welcome ingenuity when we talk about growth hacks but criminalize it when it's not classy. This is all a matter of access, Marketing and PR generally comes down to what resources people have and what they can get away with.
The fact that it's not a surprise (and implying that everyone does it) is not an excuse to keep manipulating people at a mass scale when they're browsing the internet in (primarily) good faith. I'd say that pointing that out and accepting it as a good justification is in and of itself unethical.
100% agreed, and I gather from other times/places where this was brought up that there's more of us than you might think.
I also believe that anybody who calls out this sick game at the level of society would be cruelly ostracised by those in power, either in media or politics or economy. Still, we should voice this more often. We should make people rethink our societies.
I could go essentially any situation with marketing and that's what the ethics boil down to for me. It's simply not good faith to rig voting on a social network. I hate it when my friends ask me to upvote their HN post just because they've asked and they know I've been around here a long time. But if they write a cool post and say "hey if you like this spread it around a bit" then that is fair and I'm happy to submit it to others here.
So to answer your original question: Yes, it really is less ethical and the continuum does not range from spammy to sophisticated. Spam can be quite sophisticated. They're correlated, but they're different measures and, really, a true master doesn't employ these techniques because they're playing a different, better game.
I haven't laughed so hard in months :)))
I've talked with over 150 founders (I'm running a website that deals with acquisition channels & user growth [1]) and this is like uncovering 0.01% of what's going on out there.
I became friends with some of these founders, and some of them admitted that a significant part of their growth was "paying for being featured in publication X"
Don't get me wrong, I'm against this "black hat content marketing" practice, but let's also consider the other perspective:
a) 80% of the content on publications like TechCrunch [2] is all about Google/Apple/Tesla/Virgin. I challenge, you go there RIGHT NOW. COUNT the % of stories about FAANG companies.
As the markets go into a "winner takes all" mode, these publications only cover the big winners. So people only hear about them, which amplifies the whole "winner takes all" thing, and the vicious circle continues.
Some of these big publications have made "attempts" to be "indie-friendly", but that's one big BS. I won't name the company I contacted (it's a biger publication). I basically told them: Hey guys, got an interesting article that was featured on HN front page 3 days ago, can I do a deeper piece for your publication?
Their answer: "Oh, that's great, go to our sister website X.com, we feature non-FAANG there". X.com was a website that wasn't even in the Alexa top 1M list.
I also have some doubts that the OP has removed some bigger publication names (maybe afraid of getting sued? No idea).
My point is: As publications get more "closed", the incentive for getting there via other means is going to get bigger.
[1] https://www.firstpayingusers.com [2] https://techcrunch.com
(Not so serious theory regarding overconfident influencers: Maybe they are just copying the style of the agencies, they get their pay checks from.)
Just for completeness: I have not. This is everything I have near-certainty of. I omitted 2 or 3 possible authors who I'm not sure of because I'm not willing to accuse someone with less than near-certainty (where certainty would be their admission). If I knew anything else, I'd have posted it.
Maybe more importantly, I don't have any reason to believe publishers knew this was happening, and have every reason to believe the opposite. Many of these blogs take transparency and disclosure really seriously.
Now he runs an SEO agency that focuses on backlink building.
Please don't be a jerk in HN comments. We're trying for a different quality of discussion here. The rest of your comment would be just fine without that swipe.
If your intention is different from that, this is good, but then the burden is on you to express your feelings in a way that disambiguates your comment from the default. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
For the lazy, I did just that, 19 stories under the "latest" Tag, 7 of which are about Google/Apple/Tesla/Virgin/Microsoft. So about 36%.
It all exists on a spectrum though, and we can disagree on where the line for black hat is drawn, with no one being wrong because it's a matter of opinion.
That's black-hat SEO -- where the behavior itself is probably illegal, even without the intent.
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/dis...
It probably is illegal if they aren't disclosing a paid relationship: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/dis...
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-re...
Specifically: "Unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, are hereby declared unlawful."[1]
This voluntary guide helps people understand how the FTC inteprates that law. Deciding not to comply because the guide is voluntary doesn't preclude prosecution.
You are right insofar as there is no law that specifically says "on the website reddit.com you must disclose if you are paid".
What is making you think this is true? It's not.
For example 3/4 of the example cases here are around undisclosed financial arrangements in influencer marketing, and in all cases the company admitted fault: https://mediakix.com/blog/ftc-influencer-marketing-violation...
I'm not sure what your definition of illegal is, but there is a law that the FTC is using to win legal cases on the issue.
This is one of the least appropriate uses of the word "specifically" I've ever seen.
That law just says "Don't do bad things. You know who you are."
Yeah creating fake grass roots support isn't particularly new, and I would venture that it's been around as long as there's been marketing.
And I totally understand. If you’re a small company you don’t have time to do further check-ins. They probably get you with a good pitch about influencer marketing for a niche area and that sounds nice enough to many to consider putting some money on it.
Astroturfing as been around for decades.
Companies reaching out to influencers to have them write something nice is also an open secret to the extent it is any secret.
But then again they could be a foot soldier for an appropriately compartmentalized consortium.
a) using a proxy from a residential ISP somewhere
b) never putting two or more sock puppets behind the same IP. Or assuming exclusive ipv4 use, not even any two clients from within the same /20 to /18 sized netblocks.
c) a reasonably varied selection of ISPs. Also variation in ISP netblock geolocation (maxmind geoIP database or similar) based on ARIN, RIPE, APNIC etc registration data. Obviously if you're promoting something that's very tech/startup industry oriented it would not be as suspicious if you had a bunch of posters "authentically discussing it" that geolocated to the SF bay area and Seattle.
d) a reasonably varied selection of common user agents. Also intentional variation on operating system and browser fingerprinting variables.
e) intentional training to avoid writing patterns and phrases that might seem similar, when one person is driving ten accounts
f) not doing dumb stuff that gives away your time zone, like if you have a bunch of people in a GMT+4 time zone that post things regularly on a 9-5 daytime work schedule, when they're supposed to be pretending to be ordinary internet users in a USA time zone.
From a black hat network engineering perspective there are a lot of ways that one human driving 30 sock puppets can appear from 30 distinct locations, as if there were 30 real humans with 30 different operating systems/computers/browser user agents and browser fingerprints.
As to what level of analysis tools are run on the server side to detect "low effort" sock puppets, that's another question.
From the point of view of a place where fake accounts/sock puppets post things, obviously an organization like twitter has a lot more staff resources to devote to writing custom analysis and correlation tools. Specifically for the purpose of identifying common patterns in inauthentic accounts.
I presume that dang and the people who run the ycombinator admin interface can see the IP address of every poster next to the post's timestamp, and might notice in a manual fashion if a lot of suspicious posts started showing up all from the same netblocks. But then again maybe not.
If you want to see the tip of an iceberg of one method for running sockpuppets, go google "residential proxies for sale" and start looking through the slickly presented marketing material.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=residenti...
If a user posts "I recommend product X", the overlay would say "Caution: This user also recommended the product Y,Z in the last 48 hours. 34/34 of the users post in the last month are product recommendations. Sentiment score for users posts: 100% positive. The following internet accounts are likely controlled by the same individual or organization: ..."
Is it feasible? Does it already exist?
See https://onesub.io/chrome for the extension (and https://onesub.io/mission for our wider mission)..
I for one find that most really high quality blog posts I read are not really on medium/dev.to/itnext, unless some large organization has committed to making every employee post there, but rather on small blogs run by people who pay the $5/month or year or whatever to run their own blog. Maybe I just haven't looked around enough.
It may not be a big deal to you, and that's fine, but it was a big deal to some of these publishers. Many of them take their neutrality seriously, to the point that they edited the articles to remove mentions and/or links when they learned about the undisclosed conflicts and the sockpuppet promotion.
Also, many (most?) of the publishers hadn't seen something like this: for-hire operation, well-known startups, and getting distribution in some of the largest technical blogs. While that certainly doesn't mean it isn't happening, it does mean that there's value to publicizing the details.
To my knowledge, employees absolutely do work on those; articles are edited and go through several rounds of review, but they aren't ghost written. Even the ones written by the management team seem entirely congruous with their level of product knowledge.
There are external people (usually former Herokai) who contribute to the Heroku blog; their names / positions are listed on the byline of the article.
I wouldn't see the point of having a non-employee writing the canonical description of a new feature; they wouldn't have the context necessary to do the best job.
seriously? I think I first saw it in 1996. Sock puppets are nothing new or innovative as a general concept.
1. If it praises a product, the article was paid for
2. If it has a link that looks even slightly out of place, that link was paid for
3. With few exceptions, most of the revenue for the publication comes from selling features and backlinks (much more than subscriptions and ads).
Sock puppets have existed for a long time, but turning it into a contract service for clients, selling it to well-known startups, and scaling it up this big is not something I've seen before.
(also, hi from NANOG and the SIX ages ago!)
On a large scale there is a big overlap between the general concept of operating a low-cost call center in a developing nation that speaks English (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh).
This has been taken to its most blackhat extent by the people who are running call centers for the fake "fix your PC it has viruses now, we are Microsoft support" scammers. Or even worse the fake Internal Revenue Service / Canada Revenue Agency type scam call centers.
The operating costs in monthly salary per human, and office rental, basic desktop PCs, electricity, telecom services are all very similar between the different grey/black hat business models. If you have humans talking to other humans by voice, you've got a bunch of $20 headsets with boom mics plugged directly into the desktop PCs, some SIP softphones, an asterisk setup, and a router/VPN connection back to a bunch of grey market SIP trunks. The voice part is obviously not necessary if it's just click workers.
Assume for a moment that your office and computer equipment is a sunk cost, and you've got a room full of dudes working a 6-day work week and paying them each $250 a month. They each need to bring in revenue of something like $10-11 per day to break even on the payroll. Obviously this "business model" is somewhat dependent upon finding a place that has a sufficiently large pool of low-wage, but moderately educated people who can drive desktop PCs, and a place to put your call center type environment in low cost commercial real estate. Thus my mention in another comment about Bangladesh.
Some organizations went into the gold farming market to hire people at the equivalent of $250 USD/month to repetitively perform tasks in MMORPG games and then sell the virtual currency/assets to people in the US/Canada/Europe with extra money to spend.
After that, they quickly discovered that it could be more lucrative to have one person run 30 reddit accounts (or twitter, whatever) and get paid to upvote stuff to the front page.
If one business model fails, you take the same office environment and temporarily convert the workers to doing another task. Or you have a mixture of tasks going on simultaneously for the click workers.
People with difficult accents or less than optimal phone skills, that cannot successfully scam a person and then transfer them to the higher-ranked "closer", are positioned for these click worker tasks.
My neighbor had a brother who was a "black hat" and when he explained to me how he ran his scams, I came to the same conclusion.
I had the same conclusion when someone told me about the dozens of cheap/used Android devices they and their roommates used to get paid to "watch" ads. Apparently there are apps that will pay you for ads you watch, and you can babysit them pretty easily to make like..... $200/mo.
You pulled that number out of thin air, didn't you?
I mean, some european countries like Bulgaria have a median household income of around 400€/month.
Do you honestly believe that Bulgaria is one of the world's poorest countries?
Getting back to reality, according to wikipedia, which cites OECD, India's median income in PPP is currently around 2500$/year.
India ranks 43rd in the world's median household income ranking.
I used a calculator. Annual figure is from there: https://news.gallup.com/poll/166211/worldwide-median-househo...
> some european countries like Bulgaria have a median household income of around 400€/month.
Irrelevant. Medians don’t aggregate the way you think they do. To compute global median, you need to know shapes of distributions in each country, and population of the countries.
Many blog maintainers/curators really are trying to be transparent, though, including most or all of the ones I mentioned. They either don't want content that was paid for or will only consider it when they know about it and it's disclosed to readers. For those blog maintainers/curators, here's a few thoughts:
* I think the generalization here are probably that if an author links words/phrases other than a company's name to a company Web site (like linking a type of product or the problem that the company solves), a curator should be more suspicious of the submission. It probably should be changed to link to an editor-chosen neutral discussion of that topic, like a Wikipedia page, trade group, or RFC.
About 2/3rds of the posts that I suspect had a conflict of interest would have stood out this way. For example, one post links "usability testing" to a company. That should stand out during review, regardless of the company or author.
I'd also be suspicious of posts that have more than 1 link to any company. Obviously it could be totally innocuous, but it's unusual and generally unnecessary.
* Don't blindly trust my assessment or the list of companies I provided. As with any random person on the Internet, I can't say authoritatively how any given post was motivated; I can only point to lots of people who are writing very similar things about the same few otherwise-unrelated companies. Each publisher will need to decide for themselves when a coincidence goes from unlikely to impossible.
The lesson here is probably to think about that for yourself: where do you draw the line? Would you prefer to err on the side of false negatives, false positives, or exercising editorial discretion (allowing the article but removing parts about specific companies)?
* I strongly recommend _against_ penalizing authors who are in developing countries.
I think the content marketing firm made victims out of the authors in developing countries. At best, they thought they were providing a real service to the public. At worst, they thought they were making good money doing something that might be a bit shady, but is common in their area. I have no reason to think they knew about the after-the-fact promotion.
(Authors in developed countries like the US - which includes all of the suspected made-up authors - obviously shouldn't be doing this and probably know it. Different rules apply.)
Moreover, someone in a developing country has limited opportunities for career growth and visibility (and some authors clearly have technical talent). I don't think this should justify taking those opportunities away. For example, I do not suggest refusing future articles from these people or otherwise limiting their distribution. Perhaps their future submissions need tighter review or can't be about specific companies/products, just technologies, but it's important that they still have this avenue.
Good luck.
Anything pro S&P500 should be suspect, especially when the comments are defending bad news.
Heck if Aldi astroturfs on reddit Frugal, you bet everyone else has a reputation management team outsourced for plausible deniability.
That's a pretty ridiculous assertion when you consider how many people benefit from these companies' products/services. (Look at how many people like Apple products.) Subsequently, they will defend the companies that they think are getting unfair treatment.
Maybe Apple is just really good at public relations and turns customers into zealots with their marketing techniques. They get plausible deniability when the fans show up and advocate for Apple and they get a lot of "boots on the ground" (fingers on the keyboard?) for free. Even better, plenty of their PR soldiers are paying them to be on the team.
All of this can change the narrative.
As more and more companies try to go the content marketing route, getting the all-too important backlinks become basically required. If you aren't getting them organically, then this is a great way to "kickstart" that process. Once you are in front of more eyeballs, then the organic growth can start (if your products are good/useful)
It's really the sockpuppet treatment that is "blackhat" which the authors might not even be aware of.
Flacks are inexorable from places of public attention.
People who are surprised about these things forget that in large part of the world doing this (black hat marketing) is not illegal at all.
I don't know if it wasn't doing its job, or if something like that just can't be maintained long term but it seemed to peter off relatively quickly.
One more thing -- this isn't an explicit endorsement. It's content marketing. I rather thought that made even the FTC rules hard to apply.
Also: "The Guides are not regulations, and so there are no civil penalties associated with them. But if advertisers don’t follow the guides, the FTC may decide to investigate whether the practices are unfair or deceptive under the FTC Act." https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/media-resources/truth-advert...
edit: more details
I 'd like to see sites like HN become vigilant against this kind of fluff marketing content (which has been making the rounds for a loooong time) from now on, as much as they are vigilant against political content.
Any new rules?
One of the reasons I continue to use HN is that there seems to be very little marketing content that bubbles to the top articles, compared to almost every other site. Something is working.
What Produchunt team did? Nothing)) Met some people in startup community who reported this fraud too, zero action taken.
Just go google "private blog networks" (pbn) or "link farm".
Good question. The thing that was news to me is that it's happening on very large blogs, not random sites and that it's being sold to and used by well-known startups. Like you, I expect sockpuppet accounts and random linkbuilding garbage, just not at this scale or with this much distribution.
I also note that as a not logged in user, the Twitter just shows me "related tweets" from people actually hiring or offering to sell social media content.
Also, if the threshold for posting something of potential interest to HN were "exclusive / breaking news" there'd be far too few posts and likely no community here at all for [redacted; aiming to practice civility and kindness] all of us to enjoy.
What makes you think upvotes imply people don’t know this sort of thing exists?
I think his comments here indicate that what he meant was he wasn't aware it exists "at scale" in this way, but taking the content of the linked post at face value, it's easy to come away thinking "How did he now know this existed?". It's precisely what I thought after reading his tweets, but before seeing his detailed comments here.
color me shocked.
And as others have said, even if the behavior weren't surprising, learning about a specific ring of it is.
> 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you mention this kind of thing at all, dang will pop in and warn you. You can post all kinds of other crazy stuff, but mention astroturfing or vote manipulation and you will almost always get a response. This is because these sites realize the exact opposite. That the percentage of this stuff is absolutely massive and they are terrified what will happen if the public finds out how common it is.
Its not that people do not realize it happens. It is that the average person is underestimating it by serveral orders of magnitude.
If you don't believe me, ask troydavis, who went to all the trouble of investigating the above case and writing the OP, whether we take evidence seriously and ban accounts and sites based on it. Or any of the countless other HN users who spot things and ask us to look into them. They're the ones who actually care enough about the community to help protect it.
The problem is that there's another side of the coin: most of the cheap insinuations of astroturfing, shilling, foreign-agenting, spying, botting, and all the rest of it—where by "most" I mean the vast majority—are pulled (begging your pardon) purely out of the insinuator's ass. Internet users just love to make this stuff up as a cheap way of throwing shade on whatever they dislike. That's the dross the guidelines ask HN users to keep out of the threads. This is important because gratuitously accusing others of dishonesty is a fast track to poisoning community, and it's 1000x easier to generate such accusations than it is to answer them.
> This is because these sites realize the exact opposite. That the percentage of this stuff is absolutely massive and they are terrified what will happen if the public finds out how common it is.
Here is something I can answer definitively—you're talking about what's going on in my mind and I think I can speak with some authority about that. No, that is not what's happening. What's happening is that I worry about the integrity of the community on two sides: protecting it from actual abuse and manipulation on the one hand, and protecting it from toxic fantasy bullshit on the other.
> No, that is not what's happening.
Not to try and get clever and twist your words, but these statements do not appear to line up particularly well with one another.
(1) that we "realize the exact opposite [of what we say]" — in reality, I tell the truth as far as I know it, because I respect this community (edit: plus, for the cynical, it would be a stupid and unnecessary risk not to);
(2) that we're "terrified what will happen if the public finds out how common it is" — in reality, I'm confident that the community would be bowled over by how diligently we work on this, and my only woe is that half the commenters don't want to hear it when I tell them how common it is (namely, that it's uncommon relative to the insinuations that they love to fill the threads with, and that such insinuations are the harder problem to solve and a heavier burden on moderators);
(3) that "the percentage of this stuff is absolutely massive" — in reality, unless I'm wildly ignorant of my job, it's tiny relative to the quantity of imaginary things people make up about it. The latter is the greater threat to HN. With real astroturfing and other forms of abuse, it's possible to find evidence and take action. But how do you persuade the internet not to hurl shit-soaked spaghetti everywhere? (Sorry for the unhinged metaphors, but it's demoralizing to argue about this in HN comments, because none of the users making grand insinuations want to hear about that side of the problem, and when I raise it they say things like "dang denies that astroturfing exists".)
We have a rule that you can't manipulate voting, commenting, or submissions on HN (because some people do that and shouldn't). We have another rule that you can't smear others with insinuations of abuse without evidence (because some people do that and shouldn't). There's no contradiction there. That doesn't seem hard to understand.
It is a safe bet you would not have written this the way you did if you knew this was a larger problem that you did not reveal or you were an amazing thespian.
Apologies on the insultation, which is obviously unfounded at this point.
Unfortunately this means that if you want to promote your side project, there's just no way, most topical subreddits will flag u as spam, and you are left with niches like r/sideproject. Or you do this kind of social media/content marketing
If they're still spamming for LoadMill eight months later, that strongly implies to me that the clients know what they're getting and are OK with the tactics.
Do the people paying for the content get any net benefit?
Attribution is a terribly hard problem, Google has the same issue with paid links, and handles with the Disavow Links tool, but that's a hack, not a solution, as it essentially means you have to buy services that get you and up to date list of links to your page so you can disavow them before Google hands out penalties.
In the more common case, though, it's clear enough who's doing it to take action. And you'd be surprised how often we get explicit confirmation of what happened. Sometimes a site owner will even passionately profess innocence and then sheepishly come back later with "I'm so sorry, you were right, it turns out my marketing-person/friend/teammate did it."
It would be funny (both -haha and -peculiar) if it turned out you do it all largely by instinct, like one of those fungus-cultivating ants.
Even there, though, one can make educated guesses, based for example on how many cases come up where people got away with it at the time, but then evidence comes to our attention later and we can figure it out in retrospect. Such cases are useful because then we can extend our software to catch them in the future.
I'd never claim that such manipulations never work; obviously we can't know that. It's possible that superclever manipulators are rolling HN in their hands like a piece of silly putty. All I'm saying is that if "most of the stuff on top of HN comes from [that]", then I don't know the first thing about my job.
Still many posts that make it to the top feel like commercial advertisement and I am pretty sure they use (their?) sock puppets to get the first upvotes to cheat the algorithm.
It's easy to create 20 accounts and just switch between them (and IP) when you do your normal HN procrastination to validate them and then get those initial 20 upvotes to go up to the top.
Imagine what it'd be like if AI wasn't all overhyped garage.
Downvoted I guess.
Oh, AI that can group think. That would be evil.
Question is why only one person has called it ( I can see )
It's not against written HN rules, bots are not allowed in unwritten rules, but is it a bot bot?
What more interesting is it's not a ring ( I assume it's upvoted by normal users)
They will be hard to detect. This bot could just calm down and fly under the radar and use upvoting and downvoting to control naratives. By the hundreds.
Need to get people to read comments, as compared to finding a word in them that confirms groupthink and upvoting.
I just ask you don't pass it on since I think what is more important is people on HN think more about comments. (Or call it themselves)
Its history and upward karma are interesting. I think it's clever in that it anthropomorphizes itself to reduce attack. Next step would be to hint at mental illness.
But it's about comment quality. Blackhat, pretend OpenAI intelligence don't matter. Comments need to speak for themselves.
There are no sockpuppet bloggers; those are called bloggers.
If you go down the fake road, you have to realize real news by real reporters is often wrong. I’ve had someone in law enforcement tell me the news accidentally labeled them the victim on televised news and didn’t correct it.
Classbooks written for US public school students- I understand that some content in them has been incorrect and intentionally biased.
There is truth, but it’s an ideal.
I’m glad that this is calling out those that are manipulating people, but on the other hand- what is the goal?
Will shaming bring fairness?
We could have communist dictatorial leaders enforcing their version of truth, if you’d rather have that sort of thing.
Our president should tell the truth, and it should be a scandal if not, to a point of course, because I’d bet most have lied at times.
But if it’s time to activate something like a libel superpower on the internet, how would that even work in a fair and practical way?
Freedom of speech cannot be freedom only to tell truth; truth can be aspired to, but not necessarily known by all, and what’s understood to be truth by some may change. So, really, what should be done?
Btw- I’ve done my best in past years to tell the truth as much as I can when I’m not kidding around, and it typically makes things difficult, but better. I’m not recommending anyone fake up things to boost rep. But, it’s happening, it’s not good, and I don’t see how AI or oversight or a control play would end well when it comes to enforcing truth. However, the notion of a “fake” account is what allows most of the users to post content on HN and Reddit more freely.
Yes, until we see a great advancement in AI, actual meat based mammals are driving these accounts.
> There are no sockpuppet
Sometimes it seems like half of Twitter is fake accounts. You've never seen photos or videos of a Bangladeshi click farm? 50 people sitting in small cubicles running proxy-connected virtual machines on desktop PCs, posting stuff, upvoting things on reddit, etc?
I assure you that such things exist. Some of the places that used to do MMORPG gold mining to trade virtual currency for real money have shifted into the market, because it's much more lucrative.
You've never seen the pictures from China of 1 person sitting in front of a board with 40 budget android phones mounted on it, upvoting and reviewing apps?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/dec/04/the-grim-tr...
Those aren’t “fake accounts”, though. They’re real accounts being abused. There’s a difference. If Amazon and Twitter allow it to happen, it will happen. But what does shaming accomplish here? It just means people waste time talking about it. It has little chance to change behavior. More likely the outcome could become Reddit and HN enforcing a real ID. That may hurt the community, because not all of us want our name on everything; it’s not because I don’t stand behind what I’m saying- I’m just not going to treat every post like I want to carry it around with me on a sign for the rest of my life, even though at some point, maybe I’ll have to!
That's how the world works, bud.
I haven't had a chance yet to look at Troy's latest report to see if there's more that needs cleaning up, but that's a question of inbox load, not smartness.
Edit: it would be interesting if anyone found recent submissions by these accounts that made HN's front page. If anyone does, please let me know at hn@ycombinator.com because I'd like to look at whether and why we missed something. HN has anti-abuse measures that do not show up publicly (because we don't want abusers to observe it) that ought to have prevented most if not all of that.
Predictability on the internet, which increases both with group size and with the divisiveness of a topic, is also a huge problem for HN [1]. But it's not the problem we've been discussing in this thread, and I think it's important to make clear distinctions between the issues. It's common for people to leap from some other issue to "astroturfing! shill! spy!" explanations, instead of facing the original issue.
[1] Here's why, if anyone wants an explanation. Predictability is the enemy of curiosity. Worse, when discussions are predictable, there isn't anything intellectually interesting in them, and the mind seems to resort to flamewars to amuse itself in the absence of anything better to do (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). So predictability destroys community as well.
Given that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a negative news story about Reddit on Reddit, I think I know their approach.