Hacker News Reader

Comment by wfjackson | Hacker News Reader

According to this post, they do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8620539

It would be nice to have that in a disclaimer in the posts discussing Google or in the HN profile page though.

wfjackson and ckelvin are fakes, replying to and upvoting each other in order to astroturf this thread. This is the latest incarnation of a pro-Microsoft astroturfing campaign that has plagued this site for years, using these two accounts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=recoiledsnake

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=cooldeal

... and many dozens of others.

This person (or persons) is an accomplished if not professional pro-Microsoft astroturfer whose "contributions" to Hacker News consist of shilling for Microsoft, slagging Microsoft competitors, and covering their tracks. At one point they even created fake female identities to make it look like when we banned them, we were banning women (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7079380).

We ban any account that evidence suggests is part of this campaign or anything similar. It is a bad-faith abuse of this site that has cost us many hours of work that would otherwise have been poured into improving HN, so they steal from this community in addition to violating it.

It's especially galling to see them personally attack sincere users who don't hide their affiliations and don't snake around replying to themselves.

I wrote something longer and more boring, but managed through several rounds of edits to condense it:

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Sounds awesome. Let's do that for everyone. We can put my NSA affiliation in there too.

In the history of this site nobody has ever made themselves look smarter or been more persuasive by accusing another HN commenter of being a shill.

Conflict of interest is very real and full disclosure should be a norm in the community powered media with so much influence on tech industry.

What?

Everyone on HN works for someone. I am not my company. Google has plenty of views i don't agree with, and I have plenty of views they don't agree with.

If you believe comments on HN (or almost anywhere else) should have conflict of interest disclosures, you may as well shut it all down.

Everything here is opinions of people, presented as opinions of people.

Indeed! Who cares about conflict of interest in a discussion thread? Your point is either valid or not, intelligent or not, it will persuade me or not. I don't need to know your entire background to see value, insights or lies in your remarks.

It's really not that hard to understand that someone making comments about a company they are paid by should call that out.

It is extremely hard to take this moralizing seriously when the only reason he's taking this flak is that he's actually signed his name to his comments and been forthcoming on the site about where he works. That's not something you can say about every opinionated HN commenter.

I agree. And intolerable to take when the provocation comes from an accomplished if not professional astroturfer who has plagued this site for years using dozens of accounts.

I would certainly be not against some external entity or random event shutting HN down. That would lead to genesis of new communities and contribute to spreading the influence to several or dozens of separate entities.

Ironically, voice of the hackers, the independents, the non-affiliated is weak here. The voice of the tech establishment, the VCs, the startups, the megacorps is heard loud and clear.

Do you not see how HN is crucial for YC continued success as the VC company? YC doesn't have to censor anything, the increased presence of YC alumni defines the narrative.

I do not believe that it is healthy for most important tech community on the open internet to be so strongly influenced by one VC company.

Disclosures would help a little bit.

edit I don't mind the downvotes :)

Charming. The "external entity or random event" part of that comment is what really sold it. You're all class.

Yeah, because surely YC would give up one of their most important generators of competitive advantage willingly.

Also, ofc, with you being one of the top HN members would not support that. I don't have any personal benefit from any outcome, but you do. Who is all class now?

edit: I am curious, in what way, shape or form "external entity or random event" part of my comment is related to either presence or lack of my class? Care to elaborate?

It'll be amusing to watch you try to build an intellectually coherent narrative out of (a) insulting strangers for supposed conflicts of interest, as if it was possible to do that without directly questioning their integrity, and (b) openly suggesting that coercive force be used to shut down a forum that happens to host arguments you don't agree with.

You are being disingenuous.

(a) "A conflict of interest is a set of circumstances that creates a risk that professional judgement or actions regarding a primary interest will be unduly influenced by a secondary interest." "The conflict in a conflict of interest exists whether or not a particular individual is actually influenced by the secondary interest. It exists if the circumstances are reasonably believed (on the basis of past experience and objective evidence) to create a risk that decisions may be unduly influenced by secondary interests."

It is reasonable to believe that a person discussing his employer on public forum creates a RISK that his posting decisions MAY be unduly influenced.

Stating that a conflict of interest exists doesn't question the integrity of the person per se. I am not sure why would you choose a COI definition that is easily disproven by Wikipedia.

(b) Simple. That is not what I said. "suggesting that coercive force to be used to shut down" != "[to] be not against some external entity or random event shutting down".

And finally, (c). You were the one going full ad hominem without addressing anything in my original argument.

I don't get your motivation, though. It is obvious that HN is skewed in UX/UI and in the discussion contents in the favor of YC and YC alumni. That's the point. What is your reason to be aggressive about that?

I stand by what I said and don't see any need for us to continue talking.

YC censors plenty on HN, especially negative stuff linked to YC alumni or startups.

I posted something the other day about the myo and i got a error page everytime I submitted it. tried submitting something else and bang it goes straight through.

I dont care that they censor stuff but that they are underhand and sneaky about it gives me pause for thought when I see content on here from YC startups, was it pushed to the front page artificially? Probably. Best to err on the side of caution and assume that it is just YC trying to sell me on their latest startup.

> YC censors plenty on HN, especially negative stuff linked to YC alumni or startups.

No, we don't do that. We actually take care to penalize stories less when they are negative about YC or YC-funded startups, and none of the HN software takes YC-related material into account. I mention the latter because what you're describing sounds like it was done by the software.

There must have been some other problem with your post. If you provide a link we'll be happy to look into it for you.

http://hackaday.com/2014/11/18/thalmic-labs-shuts-down-free-...

This was the link that I tried to post, I submitted it 9 days ago when I subsequently posted another Myo link to the offical website which was allowed to stay up. I tried to post 3 times each time it just disappeared and threw me back to the submission page. I then tried to make another submission, one about a drone being used by an estate agent, which went through fine, then I submitted a direct link to the Myo site which also went through fine. So I tried my original link again and got the same 'error'.

Interestingly enough if you look at the original article I tried to submit there is a line that says:

"Quick aside, but if you want to see how nearly every form of media is crooked, try submitting this to Hacker News and look at the Thalmic investors. Edit: don’t bother, we’re blacklisted or something."

So evidently others had a similar experience to me whislt trying to submit the story.

Ok, I found that in the logs. What you experienced was caused by the duplicate detector. That story had already been submitted by a different account, but was dead. (It was dead because the submitter had lost submission privileges because of prior off-topic posts.) The system redirected you to the existing post, which is how it tells you that you submitted a duplicate—but since you don't have "showdead" turned on in your profile, you didn't see it. This is a bug. We're working on a better duplicate detector, which should eliminate this problem.

Re the quote from that article, it's common for article writers to spice their posts with claims of being blacklisted. In HN's case, at least, you should take such claims with a lot of salt—they're usually groundless, and the ones that aren't are typically distorted. I tried to point that out in this case at the time (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8625890).

This is an entirely factual post with details requested by a mod however because it portrays HN negatively it gets downvoted.

Whether this is by fanboys or by YC it doesn't really matter, it is still a form of censorship.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com