There are no fake accounts. There are only accounts or not. There are no sockpuppet bloggers; those are called bloggers. If you go down the fake road, you have to realize real news by real reporters is often wrong. I’ve had someone in law enforcement tell me the news accidentally labeled them the victim on televised news and didn’t correct it. Classbooks written for US public school students- I understand that some c…
> By the way, there are no fake accounts. There are only accounts or not. Yes, until we see a great advancement in AI, actual meat based mammals are driving these accounts. > There are no sockpuppet Sometimes it seems like half of Twitter is fake accounts. You've never seen photos or videos of a Bangladeshi click farm? 50 people sitting in small cubicles running proxy-connected virtual machines on desktop PCs, postin…
I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
51–60 of 259 posts
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be a good idea to present stronger evidence before saying HN is astroturfable. It has one of the strongest anti astroturf systems I’ve seen, primarily because of how HN works (which, sadly, is hard to discuss openly). I believe you about Reddit, but it’s going to be quite hard to buy your way into HN, no matter how cleverly you do it. I’m not saying it’s impossible. But it’s so easy to believe, and so hard t…
How I initially joined HN: Made an account to point out an astroturf post I saw someone promoting elsewhere to upvote spam. I was just a passive consumer before.
Ha! I made an account here to astroturf. I wonder if I’m the one who inspired you to create your account?
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
> By the way, there are no fake accounts. There are only accounts or not. Yes, until we see a great advancement in AI, actual meat based mammals are driving these accounts. > There are no sockpuppet Sometimes it seems like half of Twitter is fake accounts. You've never seen photos or videos of a Bangladeshi click farm? 50 people sitting in small cubicles running proxy-connected virtual machines on desktop PCs, postin…
https://www.cultofmac.com/311171/crazy-iphone-rig-shows-chin...
Precisely that.
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#54I don't endorse this behavior at all but can it really be said to be black-hat? imho seems more gray to me. From what I understand, content _is_ being generated and there are attempts to boost the SEO, so they're providing a service and it's not outright theft. At worst it just sounds like poor practice and gaming the system. They're not acting maliciously, illegally, and/or destructively, which is how I've always de…
If this isn't black-hat, what is? Specifically, an author not disclosing an affiliation or payment, fake accounts promoting it, and fake accounts commenting on those promotions. In the continuum between white and black, what's left on the black side? :-)
Outright spam, like forum and blog comments. Exploiting web sites, or abusing trust relationships (like updates to WordPress plugins or browser extensions) to inject spam into legitimate pages, or to create entire networks of spam pages within unaware sites. Launching deliberately obvious spam campaigns to discredit competing sites.
That's black-hat SEO -- where the behavior itself is probably illegal, even without the intent.
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#55"I didn't know that black-hat content marketing existed" (from the Twitter thread) I haven't laughed so hard in months :))) I've talked with over 150 founders (I'm running a website that deals with acquisition channels & user growth [1]) and this is like uncovering 0.01% of what's going on out there. I became friends with some of these founders, and some of them admitted that a significant part of their growth was "p…
Anecdotally, my website has apparently cracked some SEO metrics threshold, as I'm enjoying the questionable honour of receiving various offerings on a daily basis. These are from agencies either directly asking for link placements, or offering payed posts, or, the other way round, offering ready made content (which may or may not contain an endorsement of some kind, most probably the latter). One thing these have in common is that those are the most stubborn cold call campaigns, I've ever seen. They do not give up, there's a 7th and 8th followup on an answered mail, eventually turning towards the passive-aggressive side. (While, clearly, they couldn't be bothered to have just a quick look at the site in question, just to recognise, how inappropriate and meaningless their advances are.) There seems to be quite a flourishing industry behind this.
(Not so serious theory regarding overconfident influencers: Maybe they are just copying the style of the agencies, they get their pay checks from.)
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#56The Twitter thread has a lot more. There's a person or firm who is doing black-hat content marketing at scale. They either approach freelance bloggers to write articles about their clients (to be submitted to Medium-hosted and similar blogs as if written by unaffiliated users), or create Medium profiles for fake names and write the posts themselves. Posts have appeared in Better Programming, DEV.to, FAUN, freeCodeCam…
I think the Reddit and guest blog post part of this are pretty well-known and even heavily advertised, even directly on Google Ads.
Try searching for 'buy reddit upvotes' and you'll get ads for services that do exactly what you're talking about.
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#57I guess it isn't news to me, but I'm running out of places for legit conversations and product recommendations.
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#58>I think it would have been less work for them to be legit
My neighbor had a brother who was a "black hat" and when he explained to me how he ran his scams, I came to the same conclusion.
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#59I think the GAN (prob actually not a GAN) that's months old on HN and posts rubbish and gets replys from mods and people and gets lots of karma is much more interesting Imagine what it'd be like if AI wasn't all overhyped garage. Downvoted I guess. Oh, AI that can group think. That would be evil.
I have upvoted you in hopes that you will provide a link to some of the posts you suspect were generated by a GAN
It's prolific. If you read comments you will have seen it.
Question is why only one person has called it ( I can see )
It's not against written HN rules, bots are not allowed in unwritten rules, but is it a bot bot?
What more interesting is it's not a ring ( I assume it's upvoted by normal users)
They will be hard to detect. This bot could just calm down and fly under the radar and use upvoting and downvoting to control naratives. By the hundreds.
Need to get people to read comments, as compared to finding a word in them that confirms groupthink and upvoting.
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is this actually news to people? Good question. The thing that was news to me is that it's happening on very large blogs, not random sites and that it's being sold to and used by well-known startups. Like you, I expect sockpuppet accounts and random linkbuilding garbage, just not at this scale or with this much distribution.
Welcome to the world of black hat services => https://www.blackhatworld.com/forums/seo-packages.206/
lol. sus tho I like how this site has a cookie policy overlay.