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Comment by consumer451 | Hacker News Reader

My own anecdotal experience on reddit and HN is that much of the heavy lifting can be done by just a few people "guarding new." This is a good thing sometimes, efficiency is nice, but it can also be manipulated.

There seem to be some keywords that trigger a pre-organized group to descend upon a post in New and downvote/report/flag it into oblivion.

There was a piece documenting how easily, and cheaply, it is to manipulate reddit a few years ago. I can't seem to find it now.

I would like to add that sometimes my posts get flagged, such as a recent one complaining of poor writing, and that's fair enough.

meta: hilariously, this piece was flagged while I was writing this comment, so I vouched for it.

If someone could give some reasons why TFA is not interesting and deserves flagging, I would love to hear them.

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It seems like people aren’t consciously aware of both how easy it is to game online platforms and how distorted our perception of numbers are online.

You can make the tiniest issue seem like a massive global concern without much effort, better yet enlist your friends and you can get the issue trending on other sites too because now lazy orgs have no problem using Reddit as a source. It’s of course not just Reddit, every platform has deep problems with people gaming their prevention systems, bot farms, trading accounts, and so on. That’s before you get into groups/corporations actively trying to push a very specific narrative in an organized effort.

It plays into the second thing I mentioned which was the distortion of numbers. The way we perceive stats online is very interesting, in that 2000 followers is a tiny insignificant thing, but 2000 upvotes is a major thread. This general distortion makes it very difficult imo for people to really grasp when something online is “real”.

So I get why some just opt out and view online life as just a funny thing irrelevant to reality. It’s kind of easier that way.

A good reminder that "Twitter isn't real life" as the saying goes

As a counterpoint to my own point - if you live in just the right bubble in BK/SF/DC, Twitter and real life might feel similar enough.

If you find this to be true, please talk to some normal people & touch grass.

I've seen it happen.

IME the bubbles are common across large cities -- and because they're bubbles, "normal people" are all inside the bubble while outside the bubble is only Bad People™.

Without getting into politically sensitive specifics, I have a friend (offline and on) who for years believed that the attitudes offline were radically different from what they were, based on their experiences online. Then they'd run into the offline reality and become genuinely upset, thinking that they were just surrounded by awful people. In the end they moved to a place they believed would be more accepting, only to find pretty much identical attitudes.

All because they slowly, over years, curated their online experience to the point that they truly believed it reflected some real offline. I'm not a HUGE fan of stand up comedy, but the line, "Twitter isn't a real place" is something people need to fully internalize.

Interesting to consider, as I do think that is accurate. But I also think people are more accepting in person than they are anywhere else. There is an odd barrier that the "other" group is always disconnected. If you are there talking to them, you must not be truly the other group.

An important thing that I don't think many people realize:

On big popular sites like reddit, especially on main sub posts, you can find any opinion you want in the comments. What this means is that if you are pushing an agenda, you don't need to be the originator of the comments/posts. You can use unknowing bystanders to carry your banner for you, giving the content much more legitimacy.

I don't think people understand how pervasive this is. Being able to control upvotes is far more powerful than being able to generate authentic looking accounts with strongly persuasive comments.

I took a look at my profile the other day and realized that I'd somehow inadvertently flagged a bunch of posts and comments. Guessing it was a UI thing, trying to hit 'context' instead of flag.

Yeah, I have found the same in my profile. This has been discussed recently in various posts. That's why the flagged link is in the profile now.

There is a major temporal component to posts, comments, and flagging. I am not sure what good comes from unflagging my mistakenly flagged items when they are usually at least days old by the time I notice.

Considering the gravity of that particular mechanic, I would argue that something along the lines of the "are you sure?" prompt used in the delete action would be really helpful.

I just learned about this from this thread. Checked and I also had some accidental flags. Oops.

Looks like I've got a bunch too, including several posts that I'd actually upvoted.

Related issue: it's too easy to accidentally mix up the upvote and downvote actions, because the buttons are close together and the visual feedback after the fact is pretty subtle. This is particularly bad on mobile.

That should rarely matter, because multiple users have to flag a submission or comment for it to become actually flagged.

> That should rarely matter, because multiple users have to flag a submission or comment for it to become actually flagged.

That's what I thought. If you don't mind taking a moment, is there any rational reason by your reading why the linked article would deserve multiple flags on HN?

This may be conspiratorial thinking on my part, but if I was part of an influence voting ring, I would want to make this type of article disappear. If that's the case then the voting (flagging) ring might have just outed themselves to the admins, no?

I don't have access to HN's or Reddit's data, but I suspect that it only takes a few dozen people to accomplish the "heavy lifting" you had mentioned. This is particularly noticeable on city/state subreddits, where you quickly notice who 'the usual suspects' are because they comment so consistently and show their ideological bias so readily. These folks may or may not be coordinating on a discord, but I ultimately think they have an activist mindset and are driven to try and control the discourse on the community they see as "theirs".

I've seen people in smaller city subreddits try and stand up to these folks, but they end up getting about a dozen downvotes on all their posts. They probably don't have the energy to keep putting up with all the contentiousness and they almost always give up trying to argue and the echo chamber is restored.

there's definitely an inertia to the voting system, once someone gets up or down voted they're likely to keep going on the same direction. definitely seems like a major flaw in the voting system.

There is a talk about social bots from the ccc in German. At the end social bots didn’t have any influence. The most influence came from one 60 year old guy who didn’t stop posting right wing propaganda. So yea one person is sufficient.

There's a UK-based subreddit that's flipped so hard from left-wing to right-wing lately that I'm convinced it's orchestrated. But not just in the "spam and move on" way we're familiar with from a decade back; there's real effort being put into the comments. The posts and comments are hitting all the current government's talking points in a way I find incredibly suspicious. (And when I say that, I sound like a conspiracy theorist. You can't win).

It might have been an accident. Super easy to flag on mobile. When I look at flagged submissions in my profile it's a bunch of stuff I didn't intend to flag. UI needs a confirm popup for flagging IMO.

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