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I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts

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Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts

#71

Post by twmahna »

chrisweekly wrote: post #64
twmahna wrote: post #31

Is this actually news to people? This has been happening for decades. The purpose is largely for SEO / sometimes for actual traffic. Just go google "private blog networks" (pbn) or "link farm".

There's a big difference between "this happens" and "this is happening now, via these accounts, take a look and see precisely how, as it happens". Also, if the threshold for posting something of potential interest to HN were "exclusive / breaking news" there'd be far too few posts and likely no community here at all for [redacted; aiming to practice civility and kindness] all of us to enjoy.

You seem to be refuting claims I never made. I'm simply perplexed that so many people don't know this market exists (as is indicated/suggested by the number of upvotes).

Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts

#72

Post by walrus01 »

Igelau wrote: post #62
walrus01 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely that.

Those are iPhones.

I can't find the photo right now, but absolutely the same thing exists in the android app ecosystem. If you read and write fluent Mandarin you can probably find such in 30 seconds of searching within-the-GFW search engines.

Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts

#73

Post by troydavis »

whalesalad wrote: post #69

Why is this being referred to as black hat? Everyone does this. You think the Heroku blog posts are written by Heroku employees? It’s really just online ghost writing. I don’t see how this is a big deal.

> I don’t see how this is a big deal.

It may not be a big deal to you, and that's fine, but it was a big deal to some of these publishers. Many of them take their neutrality seriously, to the point that they edited the articles to remove mentions and/or links when they learned about the undisclosed conflicts and the sockpuppet promotion.

Also, many (most?) of the publishers hadn't seen something like this: for-hire operation, well-known startups, and getting distribution in some of the largest technical blogs. While that certainly doesn't mean it isn't happening, it does mean that there's value to publicizing the details.

Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts

#74

Post by tptacek »

chrisweekly wrote: post #66
bathtub365 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which, sadly, is hard to discuss openly Why is this?

Because discussing the moderation system is strongly discouraged and leads to downvotes.

No, that's not it; it's because anti-abuse is a cat-and-mouse game, so while you can discuss it (in an appropriate setting like a junky meta thread you didn't start), you can't expect HN to be forthcoming with details, because those details lower costs for abusers, and maximizing costs is the whole ballgame.

Kibitzing HN moderation itself is one of our oldest pastimes.

Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts

#75

Post by [deleted] »

aaron695 wrote: post #59
tomcam wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cont…

[deleted]

Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts

#76

Post by the__alchemist »

jchb wrote: post #13

What about building a service, perhaps a web browser plugin, that overlays a trust-worthiness score + contextual information, over text (bonus for images) on the web? If a user posts "I recommend product X", the overlay would say "Caution: This user also recommended the product Y,Z in the last 48 hours. 34/34 of the users post in the last month are product recommendations. Sentiment score for users posts: 100% positi…

I'm working on something like that.

Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts

#77

Post by bilbo0s »

twmahna wrote: post #33
troydavis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? :-)

Some examples that come to mind: click fraud, phishing, malware.

That doesn't preclude the techniques we're discussing here, it only adds other techniques to the black hat tool box.

Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts

#78

Post by troydavis »

justiceforsaas wrote: post #21

"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…

> I also have some doubts that the OP has removed some bigger publication names (maybe afraid of getting sued? No idea).

Just for completeness: I have not. This is everything I have near-certainty of. I omitted 2 or 3 possible authors who I'm not sure of because I'm not willing to accuse someone with less than near-certainty (where certainty would be their admission). If I knew anything else, I'd have posted it.

Maybe more importantly, I don't have any reason to believe publishers knew this was happening, and have every reason to believe the opposite. Many of these blogs take transparency and disclosure really seriously.

Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts

#79

Post by BryanBigs »

duskwuff wrote: post #54
troydavis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Dont forget SAPE. When I heard of that I knew the SEO world was rougher than I had previously imagined. For those that don't know, its a Russian run marketplace for link injected/hacked sites. Really big, high quality sites.
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