Ask HN: Are there paid commenters on HN?
How susceptible is HN to ideological meddling, eg by governments or “Big xyz”? If susceptible, what would be the signs, how could it be managed, would the HN API aid such meddling, and does it even matter?
Is someone paying to get upvoted? Almost certainly, but I doubt it's worth a lot here where the sorting algorithm is much more opaque than Reddit. On Reddit getting to the top is just a numbers game.
Also, even though there's far too much political posts on HN, they're the minority and I can't see a reason for some secret government agency to pay staff to change our views about the political world. Reddit is much more politicised, and it'd be naive not to assume every major government has a propaganda team of Reddit posters.
(I'm using Reddit as another example of popularity-contest forum like HN is)
I haven't said they're bad. I just personally don't enjoy politics with my hacker news.
Agreed on the downvotes, I could do without them.
The only real question is "how many", and "is that enough to render the discourse on HN worthless?".
It's hard to quantify, but in my many years on HN I have not noticed a very noticeable change in the quality of discussions on topics that I follow closely.
Whatever happens speak your mind, you've earned it by existing. Don't get discouraged by downvotes. The future depends on it.
For gov examples, try starting a discussion about America's torture program, war crimes, or independent anti-war media. Your post will be flagged, and it won't get back up because such discussion 'goes against the guidelines which are actually rules'. The moderation will be praised by high karma accounts, who are quite happy with the status quo thank you very much.
Check out any thread ever concerning Assange. Those comment sections are masterclasses in the derailment of productive conversation. Since pointing out obvious shills is against site rules, you're more like to be banned for pointing out meddling than for spreading outrageous smears.
For "Big xyz", try writing a comment about GMOs, or agricultural pollution, monopolies, enviromental destruction, the not too distant horrors perpetrated by pharma co's, or any of a number of other third rail topics like unions or healthcare costs. 'Totally normal accounts' will slither out of the bushes and sealion your thread to death.
Yes, it matters - a lot. "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." - Noam C
Or maybe the recent resurgence of Javascript frameworks in Web, desktop and mobiles is a plot of Russians to slow the computing and software engineering for the westerners by manipulating online tech communities?
Having your posts yelled at and downvoted can reduce your willingness to participate in discussion or debate. Especially when there's a stupid "karma" score that subconsciously gamifies our participation here.
I'd be willing to bet that having one's opinions silenced online trains one to stop talking about the same topics offline as well. Like a sort of conditioning.
And there are lots of powerful parties that want to silence certain opinions.
Why on HN? Because of the abundance of smart, wealthy, influential, and well-connected people here. Change these people, and your social engineering ripples throughout society.
You can care about it and avoid posting things that irks the herd or you can not care about it and voice it anyway.
You can either derive reward by being socially accepted or by promoting your own views and opinions.
I often check an account and notice it was not active for a substantial period of time before a sudden change in tone is noticed.
Seeing the same anti-vax talking points (for instance) spread from Reddit to here has been upsetting. The main difference I have noticed is the responses here are more sound technically, typically, call out the flaws more quickly, and are obviously not being influenced by the astro turfing. It's still tiresome, but here we are.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anti-vax-movement-russian-troll... (May 2019)
Actually comment trolls cost near nothing when hired in India or russia. And they scale by infecting some other people with the same thought, who themselfes comment then in similar ways.
Often "they" buy some celebrities that run out of money. In Germany for example this is near ridiculous. Just look at Michael Wendler.
That's not, of course, to say that abuse doesn't happen. It's simply to say that when considering abuse, we need to look for actual evidence. It's impossible to evaluate vague general claims. We need to see specific links. For example:
> I often check an account and notice it was not active for a substantial period of time before a sudden change in tone is noticed.
As the site guidelines ask, you should send us specific links so we can look into them. Such perceptions usually turn out toe be rife with assumptions and projections, but occasionally we find evidence of abuse, and when we do, we crack down hard on it. The vast majority of it that we've seen is small-scale commercial abuse, though—voting rings, commenting rings, and various types of spam.
When it comes to disagreement on hot political/social topics, we all need to get used to the fact that society at large (indeed the world at large, since HN is a highly international site) is a lot more divided than we would like, and stop resorting to cartoonish Boris-and-Natasha explanations to explain away the unwanted facts that (a) a lot of people sincerely and strongly disagree, and (b) everyone has good reasons for their views, even when they're wrong or we feel they are.
I wrote a long post about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398725. Note that all these arguments are limited to HN. Larger sites have different problems to deal with.
Even if you assume that there are Sufficiently Smart Manipulators [1] planting carefully crafted comments in undetectable ways, the conclusion that leads to is pretty much the same as what the site guidelines call for anyway: we should respond to bad arguments and false claims by patiently and respectfully providing better arguments and true information. If a community can do that, then hostile pathogens aren't going to kill it—and if it can't do that, then it's going to self-destruct anyhow. In either case, hostile pathogens aren't a fundamental cause, and the solution is to focus on and strengthen our own responses. The only viable long-run answer to the Sufficiently Smart Manipulator is the Healthy-Enough Community.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
A while ago the comments were the gold, now I can't really get them. In my subjective experience, contradictory comments (to the post) became the most popular. That doesn't make sense. You can't contradict always to anything.
So HN became like any other new site: I'm skimming through the headlines in a minute, and done.
If into this sort of analytics, we are always looking for data engineers and data scientists for Project Domino - see our DefCon AIV keynote for more info.
Most HN responses are thoughtful and reflect some background. Timezones vary, but are self-consistent. Similarly, different people gravitate to different topics. But when a reply is on a talking point associated with state misinfo and written in a misinfo/troll style (short, lies, unfalsifiable, red herring, pushes asymetric work to the other person, ...), I check to see if from an account mostly only making non-technical comments, time zone range, and other surprises. Unfortunately, no public way to do IP/browser-level correlation for account reuse and other common forensics.
While such an account is unlikely to be a programmed bot, human troll farm employees are paid to do exactly this sort of campaign. NLP is great for catching funny behaviors and talking points, but without the forensic info, generally too hard to increase confidence. NLP on a message is like an alert, and NLP on the message history can tell you if someone acts like a troll, but metadata forensics are still typically needed to get proof points for saying it's a troll-farm-style troll. (Then again, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's enough of a duck for many community leaders to treat it like a duck.)
If HN's trust and safety team prioritized this stuff, they should have the needed metadata already, and the forensic analytics patterns are pretty established nowadays - you don't need to pay FB's $1B/yr on it. I'm sure they do some of it already in addition to the human moderation. Project Domino is all about building open AI so others can do the same without the high budget.
EDIT: In the case where someone says something against common perception, downvotes in particular deemphasize it (turning the comment gray on HN, collapsing it on Reddit) as this comment unintentionally demonstrates, thus why astroturfing in such forums successfully can be hard to do nowadays. The real astroturfers do Facebook/Twitter instead where content can't be downvoted.
In the case of more low-key manipulation, on Hacker News in particular there's flagging which shuts down shenanigans more effectively if needed.
I don’t know if it’s happening, and don’t know if I would be enable to tell - by definition…
Additionally, posts that are incorrectly flagged can be vouched by another user (sometimes; the heuristics are unclear).
Which content did you have in mind?
Also some early vote manipulation on the new submission can have a lot of impact using very few accounts.
Regardless, voting is just one check on bad behavior. The other one is moderation, and at least on the subreddits I visit, moderators are strict on financial self promotion, but it can still vary.
Even on Hacker News comments there's people talking about "hey, I'm working on a startup." and someone asks "what startup?", and they reply "here it is." with a link. I've rarely seen those exchanges get downvoted.
Oh, it's very, very obvious, and Actual Human commenters all ask "what is this doing here?" And that style of message board spamming is decades old, so it's about as obvious to me as a flashing gif banner ad.
> The other one is moderation
True, once the mods wake up, the posts are always removed. But arguably the damage was already done, and like I said, if this many obvious manipulated posts slip through the cracks, we can make some statistical assumptions about the presence of more evolved predators.
Anyone that starts pointing this out gets shadowbanned or downvoted by the herd.