so the theory is that now there will be a lot of bots taking over HN and posting stuff that they want to rank up, destroying the value of the site? What's the defense there?
(hi to those from GitLab watching #hn-mentions on Slack)
That's really interesting that they'd disclose their strategy so publicly. On the one hand, I can't see it doing much harm. On the other hand, wouldn't it be somewhat self-defeating or even embarrassing to confess that you're doing that? One could probably reasonably assume that many companies have a social media strategy like that, but to have people know that's the strategy would probably drain away at least some of the goodwill provided by the posts.
bad way - posting stuff to make your company profile go up all the time, if you think you have something that might be of interest to HN sure but not everything you do should get posted. when negative stuff comes up swoop in to defend company and to drag down those saying negative things about company, especially without disclosure but even with disclosure.
Good - something technical about company comes up, developers who worked on technical thing come in and clarify technical aspects for people. Somebody has problem with your product and you come in and ask for clarification and help solve problem.
God I love hacker news… their insanely outdated moderation tools are a shame, but I can’t lie, holding a big stick makes for a peaceful forum.
Someone should build an AI agent that keeps a list.
I have to admit I agree. I really like the benevolent dictatorship which does not allow that kind of BS, even from me. (The time dang gently reprimanded me for some kind of sarcastic attack, upon reflection, I decided that I liked this high standard, and resolved to do better.) I’d hate for it to change too.
If you don’t want something to be in Google on a policy level, you now have to add the noindex meta tag on every page.
I really like what lobsters did with invitation tree https://lobste.rs/about#invitations
A site is spam-proof if it makes it hard enough to get an invitation. The relatively few spammers who slip through can be warned and/or banned.
Unfortunately, we may not be invited.
Being open is hard, very hard, but it's the only long term strategy in my eyes. The rest is an illusion.
Yeah, but then it's also invisible to search engine users, in which case no one will want to spam the site for SEO anyway.
As evidence against: Lobsters, which uses an invite tree, has virtually no spam to speak of.
That being said, if there are lots of dormant accounts on lobsters, they are likely spam bots just waiting to be activated once the rules are deeply understood and there is something to gain, or be waiting until there are more than the mods could actively fight against because they lack the tools to do so (see: false sense of security).
It's pretty clear that invite trees provide actual value and the opposite of a "false sense of security".
I'm simply telling you how spammers work on OTHER platforms, quite successfully. Whether lobsters is immune to that or not, I don't know, nor do I care to know. If you think they are immune, then great (see: false sense of security).
Users who actually believe in the site and understand how the mechanism works and appreciate the high snr that they've enjoyed, will be understanding for the most part even if they end up on the wrong side of one of these bans, and have to go through an appeal system to rejoin the site on some other trust tree which is much more closely monitored by its members than the one they were on before. Ensuring that future bans will be highly unlikely.
Depends on whether you can trust them. If someone at the top of the invite tree gets hacked or starts shitposting, it doesn't really imply anything about the people they invited, they're all probably innocent users. If they turn out to be a spammer though? Then you can't trust anyone they invited. Any false positive should be handled on a case-by-case basis or reinvited by someone else who is trusted and is willing to vouch for them.
Thanks for answering my questions though. It was insightful.
If the problematic account is too high up in the tree, then they probably have way too many descendants which increases the false positive rate which means you can't conclude that they're bad based on the fact they're invitees of a bad account. Essentially, the spammers diluted themselves inside a huge number of maybe good users so that you can't blanket ban them without collateral damage. In that case you're better off banning the bad account individually and looking for new bad roots further down the tree.
Let's look at the definition:
> the practice among those with power or influence of favouring relatives or friends, especially by giving them jobs
Basically, if you are friends with the "right people" (aka, people closer to the root), no matter what they do, you are fine. You aren't getting banned for one of their actions. That is people in power (closer to the root) favoring friends (the people they invited), where "power" is the ability to behave with near impunity without severe repercussions.
The other commenters remark that you ban the entire space below the spammer, is a subjective judgment call they would make if they're the one paying the operate the servers and not wishing to use their time and energy to subsidize someone's desire to abuse the internet. Acting like this is some sort of petty fascist power move is not arguing in good faith, it is actually an attempt to escape an argument that you are failing to understand, by changing the subject from how to deal with a certain kind of common social network pathology, to a completely different name calling argument about someone's imaginary nepotistic motivations. It's probably best that you do excuse yourself from such discussions, even if you feel you need to disguise your exit with a juvenile parting shot.
Anyway you already advocated for, as you say, a "nepotic" system, by presuming to kick out people - spammers- whose behavior you feel disrupts the environment you're trying to curate for the benefit of people who are there to support it. There's absolutely no pretending you're above the enforcement of value system boundaries, it's only a question of how focused you want them to be, what stable values you want to optimize for in order to create a consistently attractive experience for your users.
I use this site far more than reddit, in large part due to the fact that it does encourage its users to identify and punish behavior (through flagging, disliking) that is out of step with the objectives of the site, as outlined in the usage guidelines which everyone implicitly agrees to (try to) follow when posting here. And yet in the public scope reddit is the clear 'winner' if raw traffic metrics are the score.
After being on the internet for 20 something years and Usenet for 10 before that, I've had quite enough experience with free for all dumpster fire communities to know that they are not the bastions of high-minded openness that people naively or foolishly believe them to be.
How are people lying on the internet and me having a discussion about it somehow me acting in bad faith? I've made it pretty clear in this thread that I don't care for lobsters, but I haven't made any arguments, at all, in bad faith. If anything, I'm trying to help the commenters by informing them of how spam networks work. So far, I've only been told that I'm wrong. So, whatever.
And yes, treating the nodes closer to the root with "favoritism" by not banning all their children and then banning "further away" nodes by banning their children (and parent?!) is almost a textbook definition of nepotism if nepotism extended to trees.
Being suspicious of dormant accounts, is not nepotism.
You haven't informed much to be honest. Whenever you're pressed for real bits of information, you just say you can't reveal the facts because they're secret and revealing them would help the spammers. So you're not doing much to reduce the uncertainty surrounding this topic which is critical to quality information. You're just generally claiming that the methods we're describing won't work while providing nothing but appeals to authority.
The information you've provided is the fact spammers try to obtain invitations and create aged accounts in order to look legitimate. This is already known and is the reason why you turn accounts and invitations into scarce resources to begin with. Spammers should not be able to just randomly create accounts, they should need to be invited. Whoever invites someone is vouching for them and responsible for their behavior. People should be inviting good people who they trust, not random spammers on the internet. You enforce this by also punishing the guys who invited bad people into the community.
I'm not claiming you're wrong either. I'm defending the rationale for the methods I've seen actual administrators employ to manage real communities. Those guys weren't up against spammers either, they faced far more serious adversaries.
So sure, this thread isn’t very informative, but that’s not entirely my fault. I’ve said as much as I’m free to say, the rest relies on other creative people who can read between the lines and ask the right questions.
At the end of the day, I’m sure some of the people that have joined the lobsters fraternity, er, site, have at some point worked at trust+safety in big corps and can actually help if asked. So I suspect they would actually be fine. I was just hoping to have an interesting discussion about it here and help people understand that a magic tree won’t help you in the long term.
Make accounts and invitations a limited resource. People will think twice before inviting someone who can get them banned. This reduces the problem to one of trust which is the foundation of real security.