Ask HN: Nafarious "influencers" and bad actors on HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Nafarious "influencers" and bad actors on HN?

We all like to believe HN is a special place. Nonetheless, things might not always be what they seem. To that point, to what extent are there entities that manipulate the arc of the HN narrative(s) via down vote, purposeful distracting comments, and so on? How often does this happen? If not at all, how can that be?

All, speak freely, please. And for once, try not to down vote, as the irony here wouldn't be funny. All ideas however unique are welcome.

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> purposeful distracting comments,

The voting system invites this by its very nature. People will try and post early attention grabbing comments that are vaguely related to the story in order to get lots of upvotes.

Plenty of good potential conversations are derailed by, not flame bait (obvious flame bait gets deleted), but, "very engaging" conversations that start off on some tangent that is only the slightly bit related to the story.

Yes I have noted that phenomenon, to the point I would be happy to have a HN client that would ignore the first comment its children.

> > People will try and post early attention grabbing comments that are vaguely related to the story in order to get lots of upvotes

You sure? Speaking for myself of course but to me the upvotes do nothing , it's about being the author of a comment that sparks a debate between factions and hopefully my faction gets to clear the table on intellectual merit on each and every comment and that has more to do with how elaborate the comment is vs. how many upvotes it receives.

Numbers going up make a certain % of the population behave in strange ways. Some people will go to any lengths to make their imaginary number go up, from asking friends to upvote things (potentially worth $$ if a post for a product hits the HN home page) to writing bot rings to upvote their own posts.

Another POV is that the entire point of a karma system is to encourage posters to follow the cultural norms on a site. When I first joined HN, posts that weren't at least a few long paragraphs got almost instantly downvoted. I actually appreciated this as it made for a really nice S/N ratio. It also meant that I didn't post any comments unless I had something substantive to say.

So basically the karma system encouraged people to change their behavior in such a way as to contribute to conversations in a non-trivial fashion.

Now days I feel that downvotes are used to just penalize super toxic comments. Exceptions do exist, but since the maximum down vote is -4, it is pretty easy for the community to restore the score of a comment that got downvoted to grey because it irritated a few people.

The people who focus on the negative aspects of social media will be less satisfied than the people who focus on the value granted. Especially considering your relative lack of power to change how others engage on this platform, you’ll find a lot more value here in ignoring the voices you don’t like than you will fruitlessly trying to silence them.

Also reconsider the belief that HN is “special”. It likely isn’t.

> > to what extent are there entities that manipulate the arc of the HN narrative(s) via down vote, purposeful distracting comments, and so on? How often does this happen? If not at all, how can that be?

If that happens and it's ideological then how is that not fair and square? It's just a bunch of people who are particularly ideological about something, it happens.

The worry becomes if they are paid to comment and upvote/downvote, that's a whole different matter, but it's hard to prove, but I also suspect it's very hard to conduct such campaign especially on an obscure site like HN.

> "to what extent are there entities that manipulate the arc of the HN narrative(s)"

I may have encountered that a few years ago, someone had submitted a link about progress in medical ultrasounds.

Another person claimed in many long posts that "never, never there will be portable ultrasounds".

Clearly now they are wrong, but even at the time there were PoC of ultraportable ultrasounds.

The guy knew its stuff, so I suppose he/she was working in the industry, and he/she saw the thread as a menace for their business.

> Another person claimed in many long posts that "never, never there will be portable ultrasounds".

I am reasonably sure I read about home made (by an engineer in a developing nation IIRC) portable ultrasound devices on Slashdot almost 2 decades ago.

Today, right now, you can go on Amazon buy an ultrasound wand that pairs to your Phone. :-D

> The guy knew its stuff, so I suppose he/she was working in the industry, and he/she saw the thread as a menace for their business.

I've worked in industries where I've said some well informed stuff that later turned out to be completely wrong, because it turns out some people working in the same industry at another company where just better, or because technology moved on.

This is why I now try to avoid speaking about fields I haven't actively been working in after 2 or 3 years.

On the HN thread yesterday or the day before about space exploration and CPUs, there was an expert in the field, in 2010, and they were arguing with someone who worked in the field right now, and eventually the two realized that both sides were speaking the truth, it was just 2010 state of the art vs now. IIRC it was about what CPUs and technology stacks were being used in the field, someone was saying the KERMIT protocol is outdated and not used and another person was saying it is in use, and it turns out they were both correct.

Thanks for the comment.

I just want to tease you:

> "by an engineer in a developing nation"

If it's the engineer I am thinking about, I may be wrong but I think he is French:

https://github.com/kelu124

This was circa 2004 or 2005, something around then.

20 year old memory, so about the only thing I am sure of is that it was an indie engineer hacking away at it. :-D

I've asked dang et al to release data on astroturfed threads and haven't heard any response whatsoever. They have the data but aren't willing to share it seems. Why is a different question. As persona management (sockpuppetry) tech gets better it becomes much more difficult even with the data to prove.

Who created your frame-of-reference?

Imagine there was a person of relevant credentials who said the climate or covid wasn't all that bad -- he wouldn't be censored by the mods; the article would be flag-killed by those who find it beyond the realm of possibility and/or acceptable discourse.

hn even has its tech blind spots: crypto and LLMs among others, route around them as institutional reform is not possible.

Some sites are banned here, but you can visit them in another tab.

I think that's why everything is on tiktok or discord now, gen-Z aren't trying to reform facebook, they are just routing around established tech, from what I understand tech discord groups routinely mock hn, but I'm not invited to those spaces so this is secondhand.

Because you're asking: we cannot downvote submissions but if I could I would downvote this one. Not because I'm "manipulating the arch of narrative" but because it is a low effort post, pretty much designed to attract conspiratorial comments and commentators who feel silenced/persecuted by downvotes or moderation. That's unlikely to result in a constructive, interesting discussion.

Downvoting gets unlocked at 501 Karma. Short of that, you have the ability to flag submissions where it makes sense to do so.

For submissions? I have way more than 501 karma and cannot downvote submissions.

Downvoting comments and replies gets unlocked at karma 501

Submissions can never be downvoted.

Both submissions and comments/replies can be flagged, though I'm not sure if there's a karma limit on that facility.

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