Hacker News Reader

Comment by kajaktum | Hacker News Reader

It's only a matter of time until companies start posting in Reddit to fake good user experience. For example, who the hell knows who mr fart32snap is on this reddit discussion thread talking about good cheap microphone? I don't doubt there's already some of these out there.

IMO, the only way this can ever be truly fixed is to have a 1 to 1 mapping between a person and their online personality. An account and their posts need to actually have a weight. It need to actually matter what an account's history is across the web.

I think this is what blockchain is supposed to solve. It is not fast and efficient enough for all the small monetary transactions. But surely is good enough for blogs or things like that?

View on HN

Corporations already do this. Same with NGOs and political organizations. They have done this for a long time.

I have a Reddit account that is old with a few thousand of the old "link karma," and received several 4-figure offers for the account for this purpose.

So we need an internet without corporations? Sounds obvious but how we are supposed to achieve this?

Easy self-hosted solutions, like IPFS or Gemini?

No, the pseudonymous nature of the platform, combined with the voting mechanism surfacing content (rather than a mechanism like "following" surfacing the relevant posts to you) makes the platform uniquely manipulable. That makes running these kinds of consensus-manufacturing campaigns easy.

If you get rid of either of those mechanisms, you make it a lot harder to astroturf.

HN would be the same way without dang.

Instead of making astroturfing harder you could also increase consequences for being caught and reward whistleblowers.

No company is going to risk posting without revealing that they are behind the post if doing so would result in - to make it extreme - jail time for the poster AND company leadership.

Ultimately, this is not really a technical problem but a social or legal one. As long as we let people get away with fraud - and let's be honest, astroturfing is fraud - then enterprising individuals will find ways around whatever technical means we put in place.

Buzz marketing, shilling, astroturfing... were already things at almost the very start of dotcoms, and before. (Microsoft actually pioneered some of it in online services before the Web, but I recall some early Web startups in this space.)

Maybe starting a decade ago, when I'd tell people about Reddit, I'd switched to telling them that the front page already appeared dominated by marketers and manipulators, but that most of the random subreddits were more genuine. Though even some subs at the time, such as for groups of interest, were run by marketers or in service of marketers. (Many subs seemed moderated by the eclectic mix of kinds of people you could find to do that thankless task for free. But some were obviously effectively working for brands, especially when groups of interest were built around buying stuff.)

I remember when the first piece of advice I was given was to unsub from the default reddit subs. Prior to that I never quite got it as a site, it seemed like a worse HN to me with less topic overlap with what I found interesting.

Astroturfing on reddit has been a thing for a long time. Try looking for a backpack, wallet, watch etc.. all top posts have a very "sponsored content" smell.

I've had friends at companies ask me to make positive posts to both reddit and news.ycombinator -- there are definately news.ycombinator upvote/post groups, who help push articles to the front page (I'm not sure how successful they are, but I know they exist).

I have seen some weird stuff astroturfed on HN. I think the strangest ones were lung pressure trainers and remineralizing toothpaste.

There are definitely Rust and SQLite astroturfing mafias on HN, and they are very powerful :)

> It's only a matter of time until companies start posting in Reddit to fake good user experience.

Uh, it has been like this for years. I personally know a friend who was hired to post fake comments on reddit 5 years ago. It could have been longer and I just don't know.

I guess the whole thing works very well because people still have "doubt" if it happened today.

This has been happening for over a decade. It's very effective and hard to spot if done well.

Another option is a trust network. We already have that within the social networks but not across them. I also don't mind trusting a bot that has a cohesive brand across the networks - there's no need for it to be human as long as I can untrust it.

So, your solution is omnipresent tracking and retribution?

The source of information is important which is just one of the many reasons why sites like reddit are poorly suited to be used as a reference.

Or you know instead of invading peoples privacy irreparably you can maybe just learn not to take opinions on face value.

LinkedIn does that. You don’t need blockchain to achieve it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com