Hacker News Reader

Comment by zergrush | Hacker News Reader

This is why Reddit is a low value high effort distribution channel. When your userbase is hostile and suspicious constantly to any commercial introductions, advertising there becomes just an exercise in futility. The demographic also is problematic on Bluesky. Same on hackernews. Astroturfing is certainly a response to this friction and in turn it only creates more of it.

Also specifically with Reddit they have allowed hiding comment history which makes it even harder, I imagine they did this for boosting ad business

There are much better platforms to spend your effort on like X. X requires many users to purchase a subscription account and thus acts as sort of a litmus test (people who can afford low amount of money per month).

View on HN

> Also specifically with Reddit they have allowed hiding comment history which makes it even harder

Such a terrible change, and it's apparently the default for new users. I have no way to check if the person I'm about to spend 3 minutes typing a reply to is just bleep-bloop.

On the other hand, as a Christian Conservative, I used to have people sniping my profile and replying nastily to me when I commented on completely unrelated topics, just because my ideals didn’t align with theirs. Or, auto banning me from subs based on which subs I commented to. In that way, hiding my profile has helped me, because Reddit as a whole is extremely left wing.

Unfortunately, what you state is also true and it is now harder to avoid replying to bots, obvious shills, or trolls.

yeah reddit but also its old as time I see people do it on HN as well

this type of behavior just comes from a deep place of misery and anger

the amount of time someone spends online is directly related to their socioeconomic status

someone with a rich vibrant and wholesome life with economic comforts to do travelling and hobbies dont have time to go through somebodys comment history and spend time judging and trying to instigate others

someone without those things are going to be online all day.

what? the richest person on earth was so addicted to twitter that he bought it

he bought it to control the most politically-influential (at the time) social platform.

Happens a lot less on HN. While HN isn’t perfect, people are usually respectful to each other.

Moderators are still able to see your post history without extra steps.

Everyone can also go to one of the "unreddit" sites to workaround this privacy feature.

Unless you delete before scrapers get it, it's stored on multiple databases.

I have stopped using Reddit for several months now and haven’t looked back. For a time I tried to engage but it was in a sea of far left ideology that was very resistant to any discourse. It happens on HN when the topic is political though some level of descent still flourishes here as opposed to getting downvoted, flagged, or banned like on Reddit.

Those redditors are here on HN and it has inherited a lot of the same far left ideology. You can see it common place now, stalking comment history, flagging so that they will get banned. It's not even necessarily political but having different opinions or not agreeing with narratives they subscribe to, exactly the same flaws that Reddit has.

I've stopped engaging on HN a lot because of the characteristic change I notice especially since 2020.

It also makes users feel more comfortable posting awful comments and comments that lack critical thinking skills.

No it doesn't. Accounts are value-less to the average user. You just make a new one. I've got probably two dozen accounts on Reddit, most of which I've forgotten over the years.

I think it's a bit harder these days. A lot of shadow banning of new accounts, subreddits with min karma/age requirements etc

The hidden history is particularly annoying when evaluating if someone is a troll operating in bad faith or not; in my experience, when someone makes a comment that is completely out of pocket, their profile is almost always hidden. That is selection bias, however.

IMO it is a net negative.

It's like the racist facebook users profile picture meme, but with "concerned" reddit users post history (always hidden).

10 years ago redditors took some pride in transparency, you were able to check who you were talking to based on their profile (unlike boards like 4chan). Now it's auto-generated user names with hidden everything. Might as well get rid of unique names and profiles at all and call everyone anon.

> The hidden history is particularly annoying when evaluating if someone is a troll operating in bad faith or not; in my experience, when someone makes a comment that is completely out of pocket, their profile is almost always hidden. That is selection bias, however.

Agreed. Hiding history has become a negative signal or, really since it's so common to hide, open history is a positive signal.

There used to be bots that summarized an account's posts. One, I think it was usersimulator, was particularly amusing as it ran a markov chain over the account and generated a fresh post in the style of that user. Quite telling.

I still use reddit but I tag accounts using RES and sometimes see the same bad apples turn up in other subreddits.

I got restricted on X for making fun of Matt Pocock ai methods like GRILL ME while having verified account and paying subscription. It's back to normal, but it was demotivating experience and I stopped caring about X

I have no idea why people listen to this guy. It was obvious he was a grifter and has never worked a professional dev job in their life. I guess there are enough new people to sustain the dev slopfluencer, but man at least read a book or something first.

> There are much better platforms to spend your effort on like X

That was a good punchline!

These days anytime I'm forced to find something only on X it requires wading through hundreds of posts from obvious crypto shilling bots with paid blue checks. They usually just do a weird uncanny valley LLM summary of what they're replying to and keep the explicit marketing on their own TL unless the tweet is market/crypto related (presumably to avoid spam filters).

> Astroturfing is certainly a response to this friction and in turn it only creates more of it.

It's a little unfortunate that when marketers see something that is resistant to commercialization they decide to become even bigger liars instead of letting someone tell them "no".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com