Hacker News Reader

Comment by catch23 | Hacker News Reader

TheAtlantic pays people to spam the reddit with content, and buys high karma accounts to vote up content. Essentially, the companies being banned are the ones with shady business practices.

View on HN

If this was happening on HN, the majority of domains would be banned.

When did this start being a "shady business practice"?

This is happening on HN - bostinno.com literally has dozens of accounts, macobserver.com, bgr.com, extremetech.com and a bunch of other sites all have a handful of accounts each. A lot seems to slip through the cracks.

I think you're missing paulhauggis's point - by "if this was happening", he means "if we banned domains that were being submitted by paid marketers". His point is that doing so shouldn't be considered a shady business practice.

It's wrong because employees are getting paid to submit as many links as possible to increase page views.

Here's another bostinno spammer: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dmcgregor

That really is just one of dozens... pg went through and hellbanned a bunch of them a while ago but they've started up again with a handful of accounts already.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3929297

I wonder what their investors think of this.

In which cases are people buying high karma HN accounts and buying upvotes?

I don't think they're buying them yet but it looks a lot like people expect that market to emerge - earlier tonight there was a bunch of mashable stories from accounts that were each 175 days old and each submitting just a generic cross-section of fluff from popular sites.

So...? I guess I naturally assume that most companies with a marketing department try to get their content popular on social media. Sure some site users may break the ToS by trying to game it...so ban the user. A halfway-decent anti-gaming layer should handle stuff like this without an issue. It seems petty on Reddit's side to me.

A halfway-decent anti-gaming layer just gives these people who have already demonstrably gone out of their way to exploit the system a benchmark they need to beat. And they'll pay to do it.

I hope HN does a similar thing to the domains being spammed here too.

I would assume their 'anti-gaming layer' is perfectly adequate. Admins and employees have stated multiple times that much time and effort goes into making sure that Reddit is run by actual users posting content they want to. This is affirmed by the fact that virtually none of the comments are of the style 'slj2wkvje Said: please review my site: w w w dot myxxxstuff dot c@m'

The automation becomes much less useful when real-live users are the issue. It's easy enough (and probably enjoyable) to spar with the onslaught of link-bots, but paid users (if such users really exist) create a problem which can't be solved programmatically.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com