The solution is not regulate it. The solution is to stop pretending like social media have anything to do with reality.
Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
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Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#32The solution is not regulate it. The solution is to stop pretending like social media have anything to do with reality.
The solution to the exploitation of human weaknesses is for humans to toughen up and stop being so human. /s
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#33I can't wait until we can just automate this garbage generation and put them out of business.
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying any of these except the first has happened - Tory Bruno (CEO of ULA) promoting ULA on reddit under his own name providing useful information: Definitely ok (thanks Tory! https://old.reddit.com/user/torybruno ) - Tory Bruno promoting ULA on reddit under a pseudonym: Almost acceptable, not the best since he has money involved and isn't disclosing it, but he probably honestly thinks most of wh…
Seems like the key (obvious?) difference between "acceptable" and "unacceptable" is the speaker's transparency about the source of the message. Disclosing who you are and your relationship to the topic: Acceptable. Hiding or obfuscating who you are or pretending to be someone else: Unacceptable.
I think there are multiple differences, some more subtle than others. Transparency about the source is an obvious one, but also:
- Authenticity of the message (does the person believe what they are saying)
- Transparency about the number of people saying it (even if you aren't transparent about the source, it's better to pretend to be 1 pseudonymous person than 10)
- Information content of the message. All else being equal Tory Bruno giving out spreadsheets making the business case for Vulkan is better than Tory Bruno repeatedly saying "Vulkan is a good idea". As a less extreme PR people giving out information about timelines is better than PR people saying "watch out for our upcoming product".
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#35What this article fails to mention: there was recently a case discovered where one of the clients of these troll farms was... Ministry of Justice. They used to slander judges who were not in the political line of thought of the previous / current leading party. The knowledge of this was as high up as Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the man who appears to be driving the whole country from the back seat. One of many, many articles…
I can't say it surprises me. But I think by now every government is using such farms. I find it difficult to believe otherwise based on recent FCC issues ( https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jsvine/net-neutrality-f... ). Yes, sadly, I am invoking everyone is doin' it.
Based on these two examples, I wouldn’t say “everyone”. Every corrupt populist administration maybe?
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#36Reminds me 18th century Paris where professional applauders and influencers were paid to influence the crowd. Or the retro seo trick where you ask a question on yahoo questions so you can answer it with another account to backlink "relevant" website. Literally nothing new, internet has of course changed the scale and took away the monopoly from newspapers and tv.
Pre-YouTube, fashion companies would employ companies to identify the cool kids in a group and give them free stuff to wear, in order to promote the brand.
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying any of these except the first has happened - Tory Bruno (CEO of ULA) promoting ULA on reddit under his own name providing useful information: Definitely ok (thanks Tory! https://old.reddit.com/user/torybruno ) - Tory Bruno promoting ULA on reddit under a pseudonym: Almost acceptable, not the best since he has money involved and isn't disclosing it, but he probably honestly thinks most of wh…
I find it pretty interesting that this comment is on HN. A few years ago, I think it was pretty widely accepted in SV that the last method you mention was just part of the grind. Maybe not the most straight-shooting approach, but still accepted. We even had a title for it: growth hacking. People hired growth hackers! I'm going to refrain from asserting a value judgement; I just thought it was interesting
We ban accounts that do that. It has never been acceptable on HN, not since the beginning, and not by a long shot. People have wildly varying ideas about what is "widely accepted in SV", largely imaginary I think, but in any case not in the section of the Venn diagram that HN overlaps with. (Btw, only about 10% of HN's community is in SV.)
One case where we might not instantly ban someone is if they had a long history of using HN as intended. Then we might left them off with a strict warning not to do it again. But that's rare. Real community members tend not to do this kind of thing, and that makes it easier for the community to spot: since such comments are made by people without much experience here, they tend to stand out like a sore thumb—usually a bunch of green thumbs that turn red when whacked by a ban hammer.
Many has been the email thread in which a sheepish startup founder or manager wrote to apologize for what their "growth hacker" did and asking to be unbanned. We usually let them off if they promise not to do it again and to tell all their friends that what "growth hacking" got them on HN was a swift ban.
Another case where we incline to mercy is when the underlying article is good work and something the community would normally find interesting, and it's clear that the "growth hacking" was happening out of naivete. Usually this is because someone had the mistaken idea from afar that it was "widely accepted in SV" that this is how you do startups. Ironically they usually turn out to be classic technical types who are clumsy at marketing and influenced by the wrong kind of blogs. I say ironically because if they would just be themselves and present their work in a direct way, they'd more likely do well on HN. In this case the cure is to educate and hopefully make real community members out of them.
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#38The solution is not regulate it. The solution is to stop pretending like social media have anything to do with reality.
This is sort of like saying the solution to gambling is not to gamble. I mean, on one level, that works for many people, but on another, Las Vegas isn't going anywhere.
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#39Reminds me 18th century Paris where professional applauders and influencers were paid to influence the crowd. Or the retro seo trick where you ask a question on yahoo questions so you can answer it with another account to backlink "relevant" website. Literally nothing new, internet has of course changed the scale and took away the monopoly from newspapers and tv.
To me this is exactly the problem of our times and should not be trivialized. Were there too few gatekeepers of news in the past? Maybe, but the "new" problem is that it has become too efficient (IMO) to spread misinformation while peoples ability and tolerance to spend time on researching the facts has diminished. To say it another way, misinformation/obfuscation/misdirection are not new but the scale of it is and it is critical for us to come up with better solutions to deal with it than we have today. Our climate and our democracies depend on it.
Re: Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
#40I really don't like PR operations like this, but here's a thought experiment: Presumably it's OK to voice one's opinions on social media, but: 1. Is it acceptable for private interests to do the same? 2. At what point does something turn from personal opinion to propaganda? 3. Is it more problematic that a private entity (e.g. a PR firm) is _pretending_ to express an honest opinion? Would this be acceptable if this w…
Personal take: any government that can selectively silence speech is too powerful. Troll farms are a problem, but government is a horrible solution to that problem. What we need is a mechanism for digital proof-of-human. Ideally this would be decentralised, but there's no obvious way to do this well (I consider the web of trust model easily exploitable if used at scale). Estonia has a system for verifying humans that…
Not Estonia, but Lithuania has a process to combat "fake news". Per last week's Economist [0] :
"Demaskuok, which means “debunk” in Lithuanian, is a piece of software that searches for the patient zeros of fake news. It was developed by Delfi, a media group headquartered in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, in conjunction with Google, a large American information-technology company. It works by sifting through reams of online verbiage in Lithuanian, Russian and English, scoring items for the likelihood that they are disinformation. Then, by tracking back through the online history of reports that look suspicious, it attempts to pin down a disinformation campaign’s point of origin—its patient zero."
[0] https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/10/24/...