Reddit bans The Atlantic, Businessweek, others in major anti-spam move
dailydot.com
dailydot.com
Disclaimer: I have no idea how effective the user banning methods are, but I assume they can be outsmarted more than domain ban.
Not that it banning domains is ideal, but effective implementation is often more important.
The rest, I agree! Pando and TechCrunch in particular.
Don't hold your breath, though. Banning those sites would do a disservice to YC's portfolio; one of the tangible benefits of being in YC is easier access to the trade press. I really don't expect to see 'pg do anything to alienate anybody who could potentially write a useful story about a YC company.
(I'm fine with that as a cost of "not having to run a site like HN myself".)
They really clog up the science subreddits with wildly hyperbolic titles that get debunked in the first comment.
But banning what one could call mainstream media from HN wouldn't do it favour. My impression is that I'm no the only non-hacker around here, so not strictly tech issues have their justification as far as I'm concerened. And if some content shows up that just doesn't fit, well simply don't vote for it or simply flag it. I for my part don't care who submitted a certain article or from which source as long as it's a good read or a good discussions. Perfect if it's both. Just my 5 cents.
Disclaimer: Not working for any of the above mentioned news outlets, and I don't even have a wired subscription. :-)
Isn't the whole point that people can submit what they find of interest and what they believe will interest others? All it takes to "ban" them is to not vote them up.
This type of action would merit some type of direct contact with the individuals or company who run the domain.
http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v03qc/physor...
When you are hellbanned on HN, here is what happens: nothing. And for sure you are not informed about this in any sort of way: no popup, no messages, nothing. You think everything is normal and you still can write comments, but they appear only to you, which is confusing because you assume others can see them too. You can upvote (and as usual arrow disappears) but your vote does not count. Another thing is that you are being thrown at some sort of non-cached, low-priority server that is as slow as hell. It then takes about 10-15 seconds to open any comments' page (this is confirmed by me, because once I got my account resurrected, everything start working as fast as my internet goes, same moment with no changes on my end). Another thing noticed: after your account is resurrected, your score can go up/down like before, but average score does not change (mine stays .65 for a while now). During dead period I wrote some long and, in my opinion, interesting comments, that were not displayed (especially spent some time on this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4068798 ). A nice fellow from England noticed how silly I am for keep participating in HN community but really being a ghost. I emailed info@ couple times and told them I barely get massive downvotes and my karma stay positive for a long period of time. I don't spam or troll. Nothing happened. After couple days I start emailing PG and about 12 hours later got email from someone else apologizing about being killed and my account got resurrected.
I hope that PG/HN/team will add some features so that someone killed can know about it.
edit: sorry didnt answer: as of HN, no, the system is not that hellish. Score does not go up just for you (so you would assume everything is fine).
Every once in a while, right click the link to one of your comments and "open link in incognito window".
Adding features that tell you you're hellbanned defeats the purpose of hellbanning people.
If I would get some sort of warning of what I am doing wrong, I may be given a chance to learn. Isn't that the purpose behind coming to HN? To learn?
Hellbans are only intended for spam accounts and trolls, neither of which is going to change their behavior. Sometimes people that aren't spammers or trolls get hellbanned, but that's an unfortunate side-effect of imperfect algorithms and moderators, not intentional.
Reddit uses an "upvote fuzzing" algorithm. All up votes you see anywhere on reddit are approximations influenced by the shadowban system. Only after a story has become old and locked, do the upvote totals truly stabalize to their actual levels.
The stories position on the site is based on the actual numbers. The numbers next to the story are just approximate though, to help fool banned accounts.
This is why things like Reddit Enhancement Suite that show upvote/downvote totals for comments are largely incorrect, and nothing more than a novelty.
Reddit's response seems to be to take away the cheese in order to make the site less appealing to the rats. Its one strategy.
So far I've found that making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has changed is most effective at keeping them from getting worse. The first time we tried returning a straight error code for a robot search we got to see how fast a robot could send requests (pretty damn fast!) but we can send them the same 10 bogus serps again and again and again and they will chew their robot cud all day.
Right. The quality of feedback information is one of the biggest factors in development cost. The bugs you can't reliably recreate are the biggest problems, sometimes by one or two orders of magnitude.
This should be used as a weapon in the security battle. Seems like not enough people use it.
In all likelihood, the scam initiator is not the same person as the scam implementor, so "making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has changed" is likely to inflate their costs tenfold. This also works when the scam is entirely the work of one person, but it's especially effective when multiple parties are involved.
Do you guys know of any other techniques that waste the malicious actor's time making it think everything is a-okay?
This usually fails because someone isn't strong enough to not respond. Or someone engages because it's a fun conversation for them. Examples of this on HN are some of the political discussions (eg Palestine) where people really should just flag and ignore but often people engage.
Seems like not enough people use it.
Relevant Coding Horror http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h...
I hope it's the case.
Now we do sell API access to our index, but not for stuff like this.
Reddit does do this, through shadowbans. Apparently, they felt that they weren't effective enough in discouraging antisocial behaviour.
Does anyone know if reddit has tried extending silent bans to domains?
I then talked to the moderators about it and they said that my link submission history contained multiple items from my blog, so the automatic spam filtering kicked-in, with my domain being blacklisted. Because the submission was good and ontopic, one moderator proceeded to whitelist my domain again.
I don't know if the key for this silent ban was just the domain name or the combination of (username, domain name), but it was a silent ban.
When I was at Google there is a new hire class that talks a bit about security and 'bad' queries. There is an admonishment in the class notes to 'not' experiment with those queries unless you were a member of SecOps. They claimed they would notice, and they would track you down.
So to answer the meta question, all search engines have this problem. I know this is true because of the new hire class at Google (largest search engine) and because we (Blekko) offer our index through API access to a number of smaller brands you may have tried and by doing that we see what they see in terms of search queries.
Generally there is someone in an operations role at those partners with whom I can share notes and pass along the latest fashion in terms of scams.
Criminals attempt to exploit that, using search engine results to figure out likely targets.
There are also people who try to exploit keyword searches and the advertisers who buy advertisements on them but that is less obviously criminal.
I know that big telcos have internal security goups and British Telecoms had/has a ferocious rep.
BT got even stricter after some one got a temp job and looked up the x diretory numbers for one of the Queens residences.
After that they started doing posative vetting for team leads on major projects - that is the equivelent of TS clearance in the USA
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4074345
-- and --
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4074230
These point, respectively, to the following url's. Notice the slight url difference in what is actually the same article.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/what-cou...
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/what-cou...
www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/this-part-actually-does-not-matter/258139/
Feel free to change the next-to-last part to whatever you like.
I can understand spammers, kind of and even trolls in their own logic. But karma whores, in my understanding WANT to belong. So such a move would be quite, well, stupid.
Even if you remember to implement a canonical tag pointing to the "real" page, you risk people linking to these dummy pages (producing a minor loss of link value according to Cutts) or weird mangled versions coming into existence (think escaped referrer logs that make their way public and crawlers find, etc), and then bots have to take the time to request incorrect URL's and find out they're junk. Better to return a 404 or 301 to the correct page (if you know what it should be).
See, this is actually the kind of sh*t that SEO is about: usability for bots.
If you're going to have slug-type Urls, they should at least be unique, and if they do change, the old version should at least show a canonical link and/or 301 to the new one.
Usually this means keeping a record of every variation the Url has ever been for a piece of unique content.
The Atlantic is in the content business, and in case you hadn't heard, that space is having its lunch eaten. It's part of the job to produce content and figure out how to have it read. That involves playing around with things.
I don't really find it reprehensible that people write and then promote their own content, whether that's music, movies or the written word. What else should be done? Establish centralized "distribution" centres? Wait a minute...
Submitting your own articles once to a place like HN or reddit is pretty shady in the first place; since that's not the intent of these sites. The intent of these sites is sharing stuff you found, not stuff you created.
Submitting your own article twice is just a dick move.
I just disagree. These sites operate pretty well as martkets. If your stuff sucks, I likely won't stumble on it.
>"since that's not the intent of these sites"
Ironic, since we have a "Show HN" topic here, the sole purpose of which is to do what you're saying shouldn't be done.
>"The intent of these sites is sharing stuff you found, not stuff you created."
I want to read good content; I don't care who submits it. I'd rather risk people submitting their own crap sometimes than never getting a chance to read something good that nobody "found".
Spamming is one thing, and obnoxious. But I find it a tad hypocritical to accept A/B testing colours on a button to squeeze another buck from someone, but reject someone A/B testing content to find out what combination of words in the title creates the most page views. It's the same business.
Oh come on. It's clearly not the changing of the URL in and of itself that I was objecting to. It's the doing it for the express purpose of submitting it twice to a site which has a filter set up in order to prevent that behavior.
I can't believe you didn't understand that from the get go, so I can only conclude that you are being deliberately obtuse which is annoying.
http://www.amazon.com/Cryptonomicon-ebook/dp/B000FC11A6/
http://www.amazon.com/Snow-Crash/dp/B000FC11A6/
I think I'd be a bit more worried if someone posted a variety of link-baity slugs to the same story.
One of the worst examples of that is the so-called Global Fund to fight AIDS etc - actually burring any critics on a scandal where billions of your tax payers' money earmarked for development aid disappeared with some of the worst criminals on this planet - and dozens of millions continue to die from that.
There is no perfect world with social networks - you have to take everything happening there with a "grain of salt"
https://gist.github.com/461a1a7ab5cc82df02d5
I don't personally think it's a bad thing to submit one's own stuff (who doesn't like DanielBMarkham's agile posts or Jeff Barr's AWS stuff?); I just like to keep lists.
What if I want to submit one of my own links one day--will I wind up on your list? And if someone out the loop happens to stumble upon your list, will they think that I am a self-promoting spammer due to my inclusion?
You should probably change this list a little. Adding a comment or two about its purpose would be welcome, and including statistics such as submission ratios by each username would be nice and help to avoid such confusion I have mentioned.
Finally, how does someone get 'off' your list?
How do you define "regular" and "sometimes"? At what point do you decide someone is "participating"?
If someone submits, say, 10 links to other (presumably interesting) sites for every 1 link to his own site, is that kosher? What if it's 4:1? 1:1?
How interesting do the other sites need to be? At one extreme is neat stuff that everyone likes and makes it to the home page (which benefits the "my own stuff" not at all, but certainly helps with karma). At the other is junk thrown in as filler to make that 10:1 ratio.
These are not idle questions. Especially when I think everyone in the HN community is aware of journalists' and bloggers' need to attract attention to their articles (which they, at least, believe are relevant). The question is how one can be an accepted member of the community _and_ also let people know what he created.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but I think innovation on this front could help to preserve and enhance HN's vibrancy.
The subreddit idea is fantastic but I don't understand why they aren't making this their focus. A netflix style recommendation system for subreddits would improve the quality of reddit 10 fold and give it a chance of lasting the next few years. I'm a fairly typical and regular reddit user and the sort of spam they're banning rarely (if ever) affects me, I've never seen a link on the front page and thought "what is this doing here?", focusing on this seems misguided.
Search only helps you find what you're looking for, it doesn't help you find things you might be interested in.
re recommendation system: it might work, but OTOH it might be too intrusive and/or too compute-intensive... a risk worth taking IMHO.
That's exactly my point: I did not know that r/games existed until I saw a post in r/gaming recommending it, at which point I subscribed and my reddit gaming experience improved greatly and I have since submitted highly upvoted articles to that subreddit, thus improving the experience of other r/games subscribers (they got the sort of content they wanted to see).
If each individual reddit user is subscribed to 20 subreddits they care about vs. 10 default ones that are just content dumps with no real target audience then the individual redditors would have a much better experience which will in turn improve the experience of others.
as such it's a problem reddit has to deal with?
moderation. this is something pg understands well and is
also the foundation of hacker news.
I am not sure what you mean by "officially sanctioned", but moderation on HN is among the most heavy-handed of any site with comments and upvotes and downvotes comments that I know of. And I tend to believe that that has a lot to do with its continued high quality.
(Google bot not telling me either)
Mods have the ability to 'hellban' people, make it so all their submissions and posts are not seen by anyone except themselves, unless you turn on the "showdead" option in your profile. Users can become automatically hell banned if their comment karma is too negative.
Mods also have the ability to delete stories from the front page, (occasionally you will see popular, heavily commented stories about factually incorrect information, or just over hyped trolling disappear) or seemingly optionally send a story to the "depths" of the site via some kind of super down vote mechanism. This can also occur if a story is heavily flagged.
These actions are not transparent, or obvious, so it is easy to miss them occurring, perhaps lending to your perception there is no moderation.
Just interested, mostly I suspect because stack overflow elections are on us and they are ultra upfront about it.
Whatever, it seems to be working.
Someone implied that all founders accepted into YC are offered mod privileges although of course many will be too busy to do any moderation.
Also, I sort of got the impression that only founders of YC-backed companies and YC employees are mods.
ADDED. When reading with SHOWDEAD set, in order to get an accurate impression of moderation frequency, please keep in mind that if someone posts the same text twice as a comment, one of the comments is automatically killed (and in fact that is what happened to a dupe of the comment I am replying to). The autokilled dupe shows up as a dead comment.
Still I would love to see some sort of discovery mechanism for sub-reddits. The tools reddit provides for casual discovery and management are just laughably poor, but I suppose it's down to priorities a staff availability.
Honesty, I feel exactly the same way you do about the issue you raise. But it's not germane here.
Yeah, mainstream reddit sucks, but there's always smaller subreddits.
Of course this means I may be missing out, but that doesn't bother me too much.
I found a couple of wonderful subreddits by just typing the most obvious subreddit address btw (r/piano ...). And once you have found one subreddit on a topic, most of them are kind enough to put links to related subreddits in their sidebar.
(only example I can think of now is r/drunk and r/cripplingalcoholics, though that's maybe not the ideal choice :-))
I work for ForeignPolicy.com, which could loosely be described as a competitor to the Atlantic. To avoid being spammy/bad community members, we specifically don't submit all of our pieces to reddit/HN, or even all the ones we think are relevant (Virtually our whole site would fit, say, /r/worldnews. HN less so, but occasionally FP stories do rise to the top here). Most major things get submitted anyway, and often drive a fair bit of traffic.
That said, the tradeoff here is that we lose control of the headlines that we get submitted under, and the submission timing, and have to work quite a bit harder to make sure that we see submissions to get involved in comment threads when possible.
It would be nice if we could get some sort of account that would let us submit our relevant content, but without any special privileges a la' the publisher feeds that helped ruin digg.
We _could_ just get people with well-built-out legit personal accounts to trade off in submitting our stuff, but that still strikes me as too spammy.
I know in the comments thread on reddit Alienth said that this action will only be taken in cases where they can prove that the sites knowingly offended [1], but it really worries me that the lines aren't set in stone, and a competitor could potentially make a very compelling attempt at spamming all of our links and get us banned.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v03qc/physor...
I think that the first two are ultimately good things. The headline and the timing can be more useful as feedback than as part of the message you control.
As for the third, the key is figuring out how to get notified when something is submitted. If it's important enough, then the "work quite a bit harder" is worth the investment.
Nevertheless, I already have a feedreader, and I don't need to see HN, or reddit turned into another RSS feed or twitter.
If your stuff is good it will rise to the top.
In the meantime, especially at HN, it crowds out less well known sources and authors and bloggers.
More abstractly, are there to be no places where people, real humans, can talk with each other without the advertising machines wedging their obnoxious way between us uninvited? Surely you can see there is some value in having such places. If the populous of reddit wants it to be such a place, then spammers are like someone at a party trying to sell watches to everyone rather than conversing. The hosts have asked them to cool it or leave. These particular louts didn't cool it, so the hosts pushed them out the door.
The basic problem is that people's stories are competing for eyeballs - a personal conflict - and that people are not satisfied with a fair resolution with that conflict (letting the general public decide). They are seeking an unfair level of exposure.
You can't solve the basic problem of conflict technically; the best you can do is to provide fair tools. Trying to provide tools for content access, though, is unrelated (orthogonal, really) to the issue of fairness.
Changing how the content is delivered won't really change things. Either it will be fair (everyone can submit to the API) or it won't be. If it is fair, then every smart publisher will publish to the API (heck, who wouldn't want to autopublish their blog to reddit?) and the result will be a pretty useless firehose :-D
If it's not fair, then you're undercutting democratic filtration...
That said, as a bigger content provider, I think the system of "Someone almost certainly will submit your content anyway, but with a title and timing that that they choose, and you don't get a fair shot at preempting them" is a bit frustrating.
That's of course the nature of the internet, and I don't want an HN/Reddit where publishers have _exclusive_ control or spamability.
That's never the case on any of these sites.
That does not mean it's "bad" or unimportant (quite the contrary, it's probably more important than 'hacker news') or anything like that.
Like I said we make it a point not to post our own articles to social media sites ourselves, but we do make the HN front page one a month or so, and it would be nice to have the option to control over the titles and submission timing when the content is relevant (assuming, of course, that we submitted the link first =P).
Once the conversation starts, it's no longer yours to control. People will say what they will about your articles, and trying to find ways of controlling that rather than adjusting the articles themselves would be quite annoying.
Then because they are first, they get to choose the title.
That's all they wish for, not control of the conversation itself.
For example, one problem with the current system is that they "have to work quite a bit harder to make sure that [they] see submissions to get involved in comment threads when possible." This isn't controlling the conversation, this is improving their engagement with it. (Though it could also be used for evil; consider someone who wants to trash-talk on any posting to fsf.org.)
Think of the "would be nice" as being wistful, rather than a request. After all, they know how to have more control over the timing and headline now, by using "people with well-built-out legit personal accounts to trade off in submitting [their] stuff."
I'm not exactly raging against how it is now, since anything on our domain gets a big (hard earned!) credibility bump from many readers, so we do have an advantage.
My only complaint is that if I have a smaller personal site, I can write an article, then submit it somewhere relevant and with a title that fits, at a time of my choosing. On the other hand, if FP writes some great article about Australia, I can't post it to /r/australianPoliticsSubreddit with an Aussie slang title at 8am AUS time.
Oftentimes I see users submit our articles with these really spammy linkbait titles (presumably for karma?) and then they die an instant death in the new queue, even if the content would've probably been fine at 9am on a Monday with a reasonable title. Now if we'd have had a fair shot and they'd have beaten us to the punch, that's a different story =)
In the scheme of things it's not a huge deal, and even I can't think of a system that would allow this without it being abused, but it is a bit of a frustrating double standard.
Setting up automated alerts for when HN starts showing up in the referer log for an article seems like a fairly easy way to handle this.
It seems there is a simple solution to this...
Why? Well, moderator abuse. Moderators can mark stories and comments as spam to get rid of them. But there is always moderator abuse. So the spam filter has got trained on tons of comments and links that aren't spam.
How would they fix it? Give moderators a means to get rid of bad posts other than marking them as spam.
Rather than throw out OC, why not throw out the actual rule breakers? Those who manipulate Reddit by illicitly acquiring votes should be the target of anti-spam measures, not simply those who submit their own content.
That's exactly what was done. These publications have employees manipulating social media sites. They're not just submitting stories, they're actively spamming for traffic.
I think self promotion shouldn't be frowned upon on Reddit, only when someone manipulates the aggregator.
The worst part of this is how this countermeasure reeks of the fallacy of ad hominem: who cares who the submitter is and how he/she personally benefits...as long as the content is good?
Well, the easiest answer to that is that one of the best ways to separate the good content from the bad algorithmically is to look at the submitter behavior. Saying "as long as the content is good" glosses over the practicalities of actually measuring that.
Seems like Jared Keller was doing exactly his job description and got the whole domain banned.
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nbj914 posts links to "outsideonline.com"
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jnickhughes posts links (almost) only to soentrepreneurial.com.
I've seen others, but these were the easiest to find.
However banning competitors outright vs banning competitors that spam are two different things.
Here's the top comment from reddit...
Not sure how to feel about this, on the one hand if they were cheating then blocking them makes sense, on the other hand, I don't see a public list, and this could be abused by admins to block unfavorable sources (maybe not the current admins, but who knows what batch of admins we'll get in the future?)
What probably is happening is that theatlantic / businessweek had a group of up voters that they paid (staff) that would constantly manipulate the voting.
But, generally with reddit since quite some time the frequency of which the content is repeating is shortening substantially: Try for yourself - have a look at imgur and point out the images that you have not seen during the last 24/36 months repeating over and over ( not counting the variations of cat pics, funny heads etc)
So that is their mainstream - but there are many other still functional areas underneath.
Now if we are talking mainstream that's where this ban of BusinessWeek.com, Phys.org, ScienceDaily.com, TheAtlantic.com, and GlobalPost comes into play.
When an organisation like reddit that is facing a more and more immanent lack of content bans content - well looking at that as a desperate move might be kind.
In other words - they have lost the understanding of their own business model or more precisely the underlying principle of their overall existence - sharing content.
So if those sites are the ones who share the most content - fine - IMHO at least most of them are known to have created value content for many years (some for decades and beyond).
The whole thing that a shop like reddit might achieve with that is pushing more and more of their long time supporters to the sites where the most of its content originates from.
Or in other words - sure wag the dog - or even better - post the whole thing on AOL, digg.com, myspace or name your own previous network(s)...
Besides, how hard is it to point to a proxy that forwards to the spam site?
We're banning QUALITY content?
BusinessWeek and The Atlantic are some of the BEST and most RELIABLE source of info around.
http://www.reddit.com/r/junk001/
Has recent links to all 4 announced bans.
It wouldn't completely rid the site of the bigger voting rings, but it would cut back on many individuals who spam posts looking for a quick turnaround.
I know exactly what sort of work he does, and frankly, I'm not sure what he did wrong.
Just for fun: http://www.duckandcover.cx/content.php?id=111