Presumably at least dang gets paid to comment here.
Ask HN: Are there paid commenters on HN?
31–40 of 60 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are there paid commenters on HN?
#32I see how manipulating opinion on social networks can yield a gain. But how would entity X profit from manipulating opinion on a small community of tech enthusiasts?
Or maybe the recent resurgence of Javascript frameworks in Web, desktop and mobiles is a plot of Russians to slow the computing and software engineering for the westerners by manipulating online tech communities?
Re: Ask HN: Are there paid commenters on HN?
#33Re: Ask HN: Are there paid commenters on HN?
#34Not sure if OP is looking for a job.
Re: Ask HN: Are there paid commenters on HN?
#35The answer is obviously "yes, there are paid commenters on HN".
The only real question is "how many", and "is that enough to render the discourse on HN worthless?".
It's hard to quantify, but in my many years on HN I have not noticed a very noticeable change in the quality of discussions on topics that I follow closely.
Re: Ask HN: Are there paid commenters on HN?
#36I see how manipulating opinion on social networks can yield a gain. But how would entity X profit from manipulating opinion on a small community of tech enthusiasts? Or maybe the recent resurgence of Javascript frameworks in Web, desktop and mobiles is a plot of Russians to slow the computing and software engineering for the westerners by manipulating online tech communities?
> I see how manipulating opinion on social networks can yield a gain. But how would entity X profit from manipulating opinion on a small community of tech enthusiasts?
Having your posts yelled at and downvoted can reduce your willingness to participate in discussion or debate. Especially when there's a stupid "karma" score that subconsciously gamifies our participation here.
I'd be willing to bet that having one's opinions silenced online trains one to stop talking about the same topics offline as well. Like a sort of conditioning.
And there are lots of powerful parties that want to silence certain opinions.
Why on HN? Because of the abundance of smart, wealthy, influential, and well-connected people here. Change these people, and your social engineering ripples throughout society.
Re: Ask HN: Are there paid commenters on HN?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the voting system not susceptible to meddling?
Susceptible in theory, infeasible in practice for forums of a large enough size, as there are enough organic votes to counteract shenanigans. In the case of more low-key manipulation, on Hacker News in particular there's flagging which shuts down shenanigans more effectively if needed.
I strongly suspect that flagging can also be gamed to selectively suppress topics.
I don’t know if it’s happening, and don’t know if I would be enable to tell - by definition…
Re: Ask HN: Are there paid commenters on HN?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know, Reddit has a lot of artrosurf. You can buy up votes and down votes very easily and you regularly see suspicious votes on some content.
The most obvious ones are where meme t-shirts are posted to medium-sized niche subreddits and get mysteriously upvoted into the low hundreds, and then a sockpuppet asks OP for a link to buy it. Goodness knows what the more subtle bot accounts are up to. Eggs, bacon, and spam.
That's not astroturfing/ideological manipulation, and it's not strictly evidence of voting manipulation either: people do legit like meme T-shirts and want to buy them (no, I am not in that category).
Regardless, voting is just one check on bad behavior. The other one is moderation, and at least on the subreddits I visit, moderators are strict on financial self promotion, but it can still vary.
Even on Hacker News comments there's people talking about "hey, I'm working on a startup." and someone asks "what startup?", and they reply "here it is." with a link. I've rarely seen those exchanges get downvoted.
Re: Ask HN: Are there paid commenters on HN?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Susceptible in theory, infeasible in practice for forums of a large enough size, as there are enough organic votes to counteract shenanigans. In the case of more low-key manipulation, on Hacker News in particular there's flagging which shuts down shenanigans more effectively if needed.
I strongly suspect that flagging can also be gamed to selectively suppress topics. I don’t know if it’s happening, and don’t know if I would be enable to tell - by definition…
Flagged posts can be seen with showdead enabled.
Additionally, posts that are incorrectly flagged can be vouched by another user (sometimes; the heuristics are unclear).
Re: Ask HN: Are there paid commenters on HN?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most obvious ones are where meme t-shirts are posted to medium-sized niche subreddits and get mysteriously upvoted into the low hundreds, and then a sockpuppet asks OP for a link to buy it. Goodness knows what the more subtle bot accounts are up to. Eggs, bacon, and spam.
That's not astroturfing/ideological manipulation, and it's not strictly evidence of voting manipulation either: people do legit like meme T-shirts and want to buy them (no, I am not in that category). Regardless, voting is just one check on bad behavior. The other one is moderation, and at least on the subreddits I visit, moderators are strict on financial self promotion, but it can still vary. Even on Hacker News co…
> it's not strictly evidence of voting manipulation
Oh, it's very, very obvious, and Actual Human commenters all ask "what is this doing here?" And that style of message board spamming is decades old, so it's about as obvious to me as a flashing gif banner ad.
> The other one is moderation
True, once the mods wake up, the posts are always removed. But arguably the damage was already done, and like I said, if this many obvious manipulated posts slip through the cracks, we can make some statistical assumptions about the presence of more evolved predators.