Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

The rule is against insinuating astroturfing without evidence. The alternative is threads full of pointless insinuation about astroturfing—the favorite junk pastime of internet forums. HN doesn't have "particular objectives", it has one objective: to gratify intellectual curiosity, and that guideline is obviously integral to this.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

View on HN

Just curious, but what constitutes evidence in this context?

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.

By evidence I mean something in some data somewhere that's more than just the opinion being posted, which we can look at and evaluate objectively. I know that's a bit of a lame answer, but I can't give you specific examples without giving the same examples to others who would want to circumvent leaving evidence in that way.

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.

Thank you so much, dang. I'm completely with you 110% that just throwing accusations this way is bad, and that it's also most likely a "I couldn't disagree more" leading people to a wrong conclusion about shilling and such.

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?

Here's some logs + a writeup of when they spammed Lobsters on behalf of LoadMill: https://lobste.rs/s/utbyws/mitigating_content_marketing

My first name @push.cx if you want to share notes on these or other abusive users.

'Fairness' has no relevance when it comes to a site's participants deciding among themselves what is and is not worth discussing. Perhaps those posts and commands that were flagged or downvoted were considered less legitimate than you might have suspected by the rest of the userbase. <insert xkcd 1357 here>

IDK. Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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.

In aggregate downvoted posts are practically always low-effort (or sometimes just really unhinged or otherwise patently wrong), so I'm not convinced that downvotes being used unkindly is a big problem.

Downvoting is also restricted to accounts who exceed a point threshold. I think that particular feature (ensuring people who can downvote at least have some level of trust within the site) has been critical to prevent hive mind-style downvoting. I rarely see downvoted comments where I don't understand why they were downvoted.

perhaps ironic, but can you help me understand why the GP comment was downvoted on this thread? I’m genuinely wondering. (the one from throwaway_pdp09)

I’m definitely happy that there’s minimum Karma for downvotes, but how does it prevent hive-mind downvoting?

At a guess, it's a post that implies a sort of soft conspiracy with very little evidence. It just doesn't contribute a whole lot of value to the subject at hand, except for attempting to foment a vague sense of wrongness.

I'm the poster of that. Regarding evidence, I copied bits from the HN guidelines, said that downvotes are OK if I know why cos they bring benefit, then got silently downvoted. Is that not evidence enough? BTW I can't downvote myself. It was an honestly made critique and suffered from exactly what I protested against.

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

That is not a good indicator. Your mind can always rationalize something.

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.

But as I've pointed out before, how do I as a user of this site, get access to the very evidence I need?

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?

New submissions appear here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest. Eventually, consider enabling "showdead" on the settings/profile page.

It has already been pointed out that discussing anti-astroturfing measures in detail is not done, for reasons that have been explained. It doesn't seem reasonable to keep demanding explanations given what has been said before.

"The difference is evidence, and that's what we require."

So how do I supply the required?

You can always contact the moderators in private if you're unsure, or do lots of research, like Troy did here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com