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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

#171

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

dang wrote: post #123
marketingPro wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never thought HN was impartial. The fact that discussing astroturfing is against the rules was highly suspect. I consider this a highly censored website with particular objectives, but a decent userbase.

The rule is against insinuating astroturfing without evidence. The alternative is threads full of pointless insinuation about astroturfing—the favorite junk pastime of internet forums. HN doesn't have "particular objectives", it has one objective: to gratify intellectual curiosity, and that guideline is obviously integral to this. That doesn't make actual astroturfing ok. We spend many hours combating it and banning…

But as I've pointed out before, how do I as a user of this site, get access to the very evidence I need?

There are numerous suspicious posts - which may just be my biases, or not - such as this thread with a guy posting a lot of facts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24746397

I applaud this because we need facts, but one guy there has an astonishing level of facts ready to go and a rather slick and way of putting things which I recognise. Why? because I used to work in publicity (though not of the spinning kind). I recognise the style. I want the guy here and posting because we need facts not shouting but if he has a financial interest, we need to know. It should not stop him being there if there is because in some respects his pro-niclear posts are pretty good but it needs to be open.

Other problems - there's a certain style of posting that proposes stuff with zero facts and magically gets voted to the top of the thread. No facts, slight whiff of fud, pushed to the top. That's not actually how the HN crowd tends to react to info-free posts (or myabe there's a subset who does, I may be mistaken). But how do I analyse the voting patterns when I don't have the voting data?

I'll not mention what happens when china becomes the subject.

Is it me? I don't know. But then I can't tell without evidence. There seem to be other problems. Is it me? I dunno. I'm posting less here because I feel good stuff is getting swamped (not just my stuff, a lot of other people's stuff. My posts aren't generally a pinnacle).

Edit: so how do I get the evidence you require?

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

#172

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

evgen wrote: post #161
gingerlime wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, but what constitutes evidence in this context? And how do you deal with the other side of "unfair" behaviour, e.g. excessive flagging or downvoting for legitimate posts or comments. As far as I'm aware there isn't any evidence required to downvote or flag.

'Fairness' has no relevance when it comes to a site's participants deciding among themselves what is and is not worth discussing. Perhaps those posts and commands that were flagged or downvoted were considered less legitimate than you might have suspected by the rest of the userbase.

IDK. Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Be kind.

Please don't sneer

Please don't post shallow dismissals

But downvotes are sometimes used unkindly, dismissively and as a way to supress a different view (which may or may not be justified). You nuke me and say why, I'm happy - we can talk! I can learn something new! Downvoting factual posts silently is... frustrating. And ill mannered.

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

#173

Post by masswerk »

walrus01 wrote: post #133
masswerk wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Without naming your site or sharing any details, would you be willing to share how many daily unique visitors you are getting that it has reached over this threshold?

It's just a small site that has been out there for some time. I kicked out any analytics for good some time ago, so I do not have any reliable data myself. There have been times with hyped content collecting millions of hits in a few days, but those have been years ago. (Then, this only resulted in offers for buying the domain, for, what I can only guess to be business of varying trustworthy.) I added a blog two years ago with rather infrequent post activity. The content is quite specialized and probably far from general interest. Ad revenue from a few Google adds sprinkled here and there is about nil. Currently, Google search stats indicates varying performance from 1 to 1.5 M impressions and about 20 to 30 K clicks at the beginning of the year and a rather steep decline towards the summer. (Only estimated pages with first impression are slightly up. I've actually no idea what these figures do indicate nowadays, whether there's anything noticeable about them or not.) Ironically, the mails started, when the performance was going down. (Full disclosure: https://www.masswerk.at/)

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

#174

Post by fogetti »

nindalf wrote: post #165
sillysaurusx wrote: post #43

Earlier 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…

HN hands out shadowbans like candy for people suspected of vote manipulation. I completely agree with this approach because it keeps the site clean. An interesting question to ask is if HN owes it to its users to be more transparent about responses like shadow banning and provide ways to appeal such responses. Most of would say no, the current approach is working for us and we should keep it going. But then I wonder…

I wonder how can shadowban work at all to begin with. It only takes 10 seconds to open a public thread in an incognito window and confirm if voting, commenting, etc indeed happened as the commenter intended or was it only happening in a private echo chamber.

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

#175

Post by throwaway4good »

I remember working out of a coworking place in Thailand. There were a group of guys next to me running a marketing agency based upon hundreds of fake profiles they maintained and talking about it like it was the most natural thing in the world.

People who are surprised about these things forget that in large part of the world doing this (black hat marketing) is not illegal at all.

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

#176

Post by fogetti »

walrus01 wrote: post #47
sillysaurusx wrote: post #43

Earlier 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…

I think that anti-astroturf systems are definitely one of the things that should qualify to remain as proprietary data of the people who run the servers. Much the same as the best online payment processing anti-fraud services are an opaque black box that you feed some data into, and you get a result back. They don't tell you what's going on inside the black box. I would not be surprised at all if the top vendors for…

There is a problem though. In a physical setting you cannot do shadow banning. Now in the past 100% of public discussion happened in public spaces, but let's say that now this happens in 50% of the cases online. Let's also say that this grows considerably to something like 75%. The issue is that public discussion becomes increasingly easy to be censored.

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

#177

Post by luckylion »

pathseeker wrote: post #99
marketingPro wrote: post #96

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.

>Anything pro S&P500 should be suspect, especially when the comments are defending bad news. 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.

> Look at how many people like Apple products.

Maybe Apple is just really good at public relations and turns customers into zealots with their marketing techniques. They get plausible deniability when the fans show up and advocate for Apple and they get a lot of "boots on the ground" (fingers on the keyboard?) for free. Even better, plenty of their PR soldiers are paying them to be on the team.

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

#178

Post by Cthulhu_ »

JimDabell wrote: post #124
troydavis wrote: post #3

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…

Aside from the content itself, I’ve noticed the commenting and voting patterns on Reddit for articles about AccessiBe are suspicious. I always assumed they had “help”. It’s a shame social media doesn't have a “this looks suspicious but I have no direct evidence” report button. I expect it’s very easy in a lot of cases to determine abuse when you have access to internal data.

They don't have a report button like that because competitors would abuse it to flag stuff.

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

#179

Post by luckylion »

dang wrote: post #152
cblconfederate wrote: post #80

i m sure there are others, there was some website to buy hn upvotes too

Using that site will get your accounts and sites banned here.

How do you determine that it's the site's owner? If I buy 1000 upvotes for mycompetitor.com, will you boot them?

Attribution is a terribly hard problem, Google has the same issue with paid links, and handles with the Disavow Links tool, but that's a hack, not a solution, as it essentially means you have to buy services that get you and up to date list of links to your page so you can disavow them before Google hands out penalties.

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

#180

Post by Cthulhu_ »

barlo wrote: post #56
troydavis wrote: post #3

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…

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.

Yeah I get e-mails every once in a while on a (non tech) website I run asking if we can do a guest post for money. It's a common advertising program I'm sure.
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