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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).
They're not 'refuting claims you never made'. They're simply responding to your comment by making their own points. Which is a completely standard way to carry discussion forward.
Isn't this extremely common honestly? Isn't this so common it has names like "astroturfing" and "growth hacking"? This so not black hat that it's basically just regular ol' hat. Yeah creating fake grass roots support isn't particularly new, and I would venture that it's been around as long as there's been marketing.
The 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…
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…
I consider this a highly censored website with particular objectives, but a decent userbase.
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https://www.cultofmac.com/311171/crazy-iphone-rig-shows-chin...
looks honestly like the worst job ever.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/dec/04/the-grim-tr...
"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…
Now he runs an SEO agency that focuses on backlink building.
Anything pro S&P500 should be suspect, especially when the comments are defending bad news.
Heck if Aldi astroturfs on reddit Frugal, you bet everyone else has a reputation management team outsourced for plausible deniability.
"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…
The biggest companies can astroturf and never get caught because they can pay a premium for high value accounts. Anything pro S&P500 should be suspect, especially when the comments are defending bad news. Heck if Aldi astroturfs on reddit Frugal, you bet everyone else has a reputation management team outsourced for plausible deniability.
That's a pretty ridiculous assertion when you consider how many people benefit from these companies' products/services. (Look at how many people like Apple products.) Subsequently, they will defend the companies that they think are getting unfair treatment.
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".
> 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.