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Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's fair, but there's a difference between 1) accusing the specific person you're responding to of being a shill or that everyone advocating a given position is a shill and 2) suggesting that HN as a forum in general is likely the target of influence campaigns that impact the quality of discussion

dang, I think perhaps a rule should be added for users to not engage in "guilt by association", e.g. tptacek elsewhere made a comment that they flag posts simply because they're afraid there will be low quality comments in them, rather than discerning. Good idea, bad idea, maybe idea?

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Can you state your point along with sharing that link please? I can't read minds - and I lean away from making assumptions.

It answers your question, which has come up many times before, directly. If you feel otherwise, email hn@ycombinator.com --- "@dang" (or equivalents) isn't a thing here, even in replies.

dang has that username because it's a rarely used word.

And no, it doesn't answer my question - you seem to make assumptions a lot that people should be able to interpret things exactly how you expect them to; and you have the polar opposite behaviour as well of assuming what others mean when you're potentially wrongly interpreting. It's quite fascinating - and you'll assume I'm just wrong without caring to put effort into seeing if I have a valid point or not that could lead to growth.

It's not an insinuation it's an obvious fact of the world we live in. It's obvious to anyone who has used this site, or any other site, for any period of time.

Of course I'm worried about abuse, as this site clearly has the ability to influence people, not just politically, but technically and socially as well.

As I stated, just emailing you and hoping for the best is an entirely broken model which leaves users with no ability to detect this and quantify it for themselves or to share that information with the public who uses this site. HN itself offers no reports, no data, and no summaries about these actions or their outcomes.

I'm genuinely surprised you thought this was a worthwhile response to the broader problem of user trust on public forums, or would waste a minute pretending that HN uniquely doesn't share in them.

>It's not an insinuation it's an obvious fact of the world we live in. It's obvious to anyone who has used this site, or any other site, for any period of time.

I think it's very easy to feel it as an obvious fact, it's not that easy to really know that it's going down.

Allow me to externalize the subject to avoid involving HN on the matter: Reddit. Reddit has had astroturfing campaigns, of this I'm completely sure because I've seen it go down and get caught and everything. Here is an example about a year ago on r/programming: https://web.archive.org/web/20230611210834/https://old.reddi...

My problem is: say I have opinion A that is opposite to opinion B. When seeing a lot of this second (totally terrible, incomprehensible) opinion, how do I properly infer what is actually happening rather than just accusing that side of being bots? It really doesn't seem like a simple thing.

Shhhhhhh -- the first rule of the censorship-suppression-narrative control apparatus is you don't talk about the censorship-suppression-narrative control apparatus! The second rule is..

Emailing me? I'm just some guy.

Would making that change in wording alter the point in any material way?

I'm just saying, nobody should be emailing me about shills on HN, because I can't do anything about it.

Does that mean you don't think shills are a significant-serious problem, or because you don't believe you can do anything about it then it's not important to you?

E.g. If you consider it to be a problem, and there were possible solutions to shills on HN (and elsewhere), would you be interested in seeing those solutions implemented and/or tested?

I think you're downplaying-minimizing your importance as an individual, and I'm not sure why you'd do that. Does downplaying it enable or justify it to yourself for what could be considered abdicating responsibility, so you can quell stress that otherwise would be felt if you took it seriously as a problem you would take on to help solving?

Because it is a very difficult problem to solve for, and to some degree you're right, you as an individual - "just a guy on HN" - can't do much about it; and such conversations are essentially ban-heavily frowned upon on HN, e.g. not talking about downvotes, etc; because that discussion rarely happens in any deep and serious way on - like perhaps an annual topic posted and pinned by dang to get a deep dive to offer a chance to present their deep dive essays and concerns and perhaps proposed solutions, to perhaps help others understand the severity and seriousness of shills gaming our communication systems-channels and their effects on the development of society? And where such a planned annual event may create a beautiful frenzy to help tech people and others refine their understanding and proposed solutions?

I'm not interested in discussing this here, sorry.

You'll have the conversation somewhere else then? Otherwise I'm confused why you'd qualify it with adding "here."

And not sure why you're saying "sorry" either?

You can make that claim about Reddit or other social networks but.. just read through this thread? It's pretty clear that this is just random people's uninformed opinions, fears and speculations. I don't see a single good argument besides the very easy to make and modest opinion that we're not sure what's going to happen exactly now, but it sure is interesting.

That's… A good reminder, actually. At best it's just some random guy. At worst it's a three letter agency's botnet. Maybe influence ops would be less realistic of a concern if we all put somewhat less stock in social media.

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