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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

> We should assume that all ads in general are scams. The noise to signal ratio is too large to care.

Completely agree.

> Word of mouth and maybe trusted communities like HN is the only way to reliably discover new things.

There is no evidence that HN is not being actively astroturfed though. Sadly community filtering cannot replace trust in individuals.

View on HN

Pre LLMs I would have said the all-text format of HN probably kept the astroturfing low, but these days I'm less sure. It's still a much less engaging format than almost any other place on the web, although again, with LLMs you can even cheaply target the lowest value returns.

You could read obvious shilling here pretending to like or pay and use the boringest B2B SaaS products way back too.

Trying to get a proper grasp of consensus on open forums is hopeless.

I wouldn't say it's entirely hopeless. Just gotta know who's behind the posts. Checking for conflicts of interest is essential. HN is valuable due the fact many notable hackers post here. Makes it easier to know who we are interacting with, what they stand for and who they work for. Invite only communities like lobsters are even better in that regard. Less random accounts adding noise. Some degree of elitism is a good thing.

What freaks me out is that in the long run everybody on the internet gets account problems at some point, and then when you're starting fresh, proof-of-humanity will be more difficult than it used to be.

Yeah I agree. The point I was trying to make is that you can't judge like the share of some actual collective agreeing to something from reading post on forums.

Reddit is an all text (or mostly all text) community, and it is heavily astroturfed in many subreddits. It doesn't stop the astroturfing.

There are very obvious flagging patterns around certain kinds of politics.

HN has been overwhelmingly astroturfed since at least 2010.

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