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Comment by kevinmchugh | Hacker News Reader

My uninformed impression is that Tumblr users were relatively unique in how freely they mixed pornography consumption and non porno. There are some Twitter users who do this, but Twitter is public enough that most people are wary of doing that or get caught by follows, likes being public. My anecdotal experience is that I don't see porno comments or submissions from most reddit users either, but that's obviously skewed by the reddits I'm in.

I also know that Tumblr has norms against "horny on main", so maybe Tumblr users were very diligent about using alts and the other sites make that too frictional

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People on Reddit will often have an alt account for porn. I have seen people say things like "oops, posted from my nsfw account" plenty of times before. I assume Twitter is the same. Both platforms freely give out plenty of accounts.

You sure? Twitter is notoriously known for asking for users phone number in every account, its practically impossible to have an active account without adding your phone number.

I don't know about you, but I personally have 5 Twitter accounts and 20+ Reddit accounts (sometimes you want to have different perspectives on an issue, have different front pages, or maybe manufacture a consensus). Only the main Twitter account has been asked for a phone number - I think they actually know about alt accounts and don't mind you having them as long as you don't do anything crazy with them. Don't worry dang, this is my only HN account.

I had a dozen Twitter accounts, but they were made in a different era, nowadays they make it harder to sign up without a phone number tho you can still add bot secondary accounts to the main one.

"Manufacture a consensus"?

A SFW way to say "manipulate opinion", I guess.

I think it's a adaptation of "Manufacturing Consent", to sound less rapey. But yes, it's a euphemism for manipulating other people's opinions.

It's pretty common to use alt accounts to upvote and comment on your own posts - I used to do this when I cared. Some people take it really far and have their alts also repost their content to get multiple shots to "go viral." Some people also make down vote networks to silence comments they don't like.

Recently, I have used these accounts to get answers to questions: post the question with one account and ~3 bad but assertive answers with other accounts, and that's usually enough to get at least one response from someone who knows the right answer and wants to prove they are smart. All of this can now be done very easily by ChatGPT, too - it used to take effort.

This is the "dark" part of social media marketing that nobody talks about but a lot of people engage in.

Why do you do it?

It's common among trolls, not among the vast majority of users.

Not just trolls, there is a giant incentive for marketers (or even just TikTok-ers) looking to make something visible.

Tons of accounts reposting content from ~2 months ago to create a long, legitimate-looking post history and high karma score. They then use those accounts to complain about Product X or love Product Y -- and they don't look like a shillbot. Ditto for political actors, propagandists, et al.

Trolls, professional marketers, reputation management firms, social media "influencers," and even just social media "power users" who don't rise to the level of "influencer" are all known do this. This is a vast minority of users thanks to the Pareto principle and power laws. However, I suspect that the majority of posts you see on the front page of pretty much every social media app have had some degree of "help" from things like this.

One Reddit user, Unidan, was famously banned for doing this with 12 accounts, and in retrospect, this sort of scheme may have "made" his success - his replies showed up as the top comment a lot (even when they were not insightful) and it got him significant name recognition.

A lot of morally dubious people, maybe.

OP is probably confusing it with "Manufacturing consent", a book by Noam Chomsky.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

Adapting it. "Manufacturing consent" is a good book on the phenomenon, but sounds kind of odd (given how we use the word "consent" today).

The word consent can be used in many contexts, not only sexual. I see nothing odd about it.

Consensus is a different meaning. Going by how odd "a consensus" sounds I would simply assume the writer mixed both or misremembered, and I do not read further intent. Just my opinion.

Oh, I was the OP you are responding to. I don't like the words "manufacturing consent" to refer to astroturfing, mostly because of the link to sexual consent, but also because they lack precision (Chomsky's book talks a lot more about propaganda as a tool of "top-down" media rather than "bottom-up" media). A lot of other people who talk about the phenomenon also use "consensus" instead of "consent" when referring to specifically using social media this way.

Oh. In that case I must admit you know better what you intended to say :P

> maybe manufacture a consensus

You're running a one-person troll farm? Please reconsider your choices in life.

Not that I'm defending the practice (and certainly don't have enough skin in the social media game to do it myself), but it is extremely common to have alts upvote/repost each other on social networks, or downvote brigade someone when you're losing an internet argument.

I doubt that even 1% of people using Reddit are using alts to upvote themselves or downvote brigade others. If you have any data to the contrary I'd be happy to hear it.

It's still a solid sign of a sad life.

Or a small business, but I wonder how much money there is in that.

> Or a small business, but I wonder how much money there is in that.

They call it "hustling" and "growth hacking", and I suppose there might be good ROI on this when you're just starting up and trying to do some "organic advertising" in a niche community/subreddit. Those couple extra upvotes may be the difference between drowning unnoticed vs. staying on the front page long enough to gather initial interest, and spark a discussion that keeps it up for a day or more.

I still believe it's unethical behavior, though.

For some values of "extremely common", because I'm pretty sure most people don't have the patience and energy to do bullshit like that. But a small fraction of people do it a lot.

Or manufacture controversy for engagement? For example, I posted the 4 comments above all from accounts I own (/s)

This is actually more useful to me today. If you want a good, well-researched answer to a question from an expert, you are much more likely to get it on reddit if there are a few "idiots" with wrong answers available for that person to dunk on.

>You're running a one-person troll farm? Please reconsider your choices in life.

how else do journalists write this articles on internet hate mobs?

Infamously u/Unidan, a very popular figure on r/askscience posting high-quality answers to biology questions, was banned from Reddit when it was revealed that he used alt accounts to upvote himself/downvote those he was arguing against. Such a shame that he felt the need to resort to something so stupid.

It wasn't stupid. It's quite likely that he would have been stuck down in the noise like so many other high quality Reddit posters except that he realized early on that just a handful of early upvotes makes all of the difference to Reddit's algorithm. The Reddit algorithm is seemingly designed to snowball content, so if you want to rake in the worthless karma reliably you need alts.

I’m not so sure. Many other "household names" on askscience seem to be highly upvoted, apparently without shenanigans (but who knows?!) Even I have several 1000+ karma answers there, and many more 100+ ones and I’m a nobody. There’s also simply not that much competition on askscience! If you’re consistently able to write good, a-few-paragraph answers to questions in a particular field, and are also available for discussion and followup questions, it’s not that difficult to become commonly recognized and reap a lot of karma there without having to compete against others.

I think you may be underestimating the effect of this. With time, you can get several 1000-karma posts, but I bet you also have a bunch of 1-10 point things. Literally every comment and post that u/Unidan made had 100+ upvotes. He could comment about birds on a quantum physics page and get 100's of upvotes. As a result, everywhere he posted, people would see all of his comments "organically," and that kept all of his posts outside of the 1-karma hell that consumes a lot of amazing insight. That's the effect of bot usage.

With twitter I've found emailing support to verify you're a human has a decent success rate (and without sharing any PII)

Twitter literally lets you log in to multiple accounts from the same session. You can reuse the same emails & phone numbers too.

So contrary to what you say, the practice of having "alts" is pretty much encouraged.

Their help page technically says you can use the same phone number on up to 10 accounts, but that hasn't been the case in 4–5 years or more. It's more like 2–4 accounts per number allowed in my experience, and there is a few week cooldown on reusing a number even if you've already removed it from all accounts.

I don't think you can use the same email on multiple accounts at the same time, but using address extensions or creating new emails is easy.

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