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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

You're right, except there are even more accounts. I killed them all. I don't know what made the guy go on a trolling rampage after all this time, but it's stopped now.

You should just send me an email when you suspect things like this; I can verify it a lot faster.

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I wasn't entirely sure what your email address was, to be honest. I guessed when I wrote that one.

I can assure you he went on a trolling rampage because arguing and karma is a game. And us geeks love to argue and play games.

I am certain there are more like him and there will be a lot more in the future.

The interesting question is can something like a Bayesian spam filter be applied to trolling?

Having an absolute karma score and leaderboard no doubt encourage the game aspect of the thing.

Yes, absolutely.

I feel a bit guilty, though, since my posting this seems to have put me on the leaderboard for the first time. Talk about karma. :-/

Wouldn't it be a good idea to silently hide the posts from everyone except the troll. Now he (or she) has been public outed he'll probably try again with a new set of accounts.

I like the idea, although if he/she has several accounts, it won't be long before he/she notices the trick.

The thing is, Hacker News has too small an audience to make gaming very worthwhile. I think that clamping down once is good enough to send the message across. I'd hope so, anyway, since it takes a lot of effort to get to the point where you can vote things up and down.

Do you have an automated system to verify an account is being used for this sort of astroturfing? If so I'm sure many of the folks here would be interested in it. I think a service that helped forums identify astroturfers could even be the basis for a YC company.

I would imagine simply grouping accounts by their ip address, creation time and set of articles they comment on should easily catch the unsophisticated guys.

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