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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

#181

Post by Cthulhu_ »

OrderlyTiamat wrote: post #168
higerordermap wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN / reddit / lobsters whatever programmer link aggregators may be astroturfed. But after a while you will learn to recognise the smell of astroturfing and even otherwise, they are refuted by commenters. More likely that there are fanboys that come with irrational arguments rather than astroturfing in these forums. The greater harm of these content marketing bullshit is it pollutes Google search results. If you searc…

I've been pleasantly surprised by content om DZone at least, though the others less so.

It's a hit and miss site tbh.

I was once told that one of my rambly blog posts had appeared on there without me knowing; it wasn't the best, but still. My blog post was on our 'company' blog, turns out the marketing department of another segment of it just took it and reposted it on dzone.

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

#182

Post by barumi »

Const-me wrote: post #169
barumi wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to keep things in perspective, $200/month is already the median income of some places.

Which places do you have in mind? Globally, the median is close to $800/month per household.

> Globally, the median is close to $800/month per household.

You pulled that number out of thin air, didn't you?

I mean, some european countries like Bulgaria have a median household income of around 400€/month.

Do you honestly believe that Bulgaria is one of the world's poorest countries?

Getting back to reality, according to wikipedia, which cites OECD, India's median income in PPP is currently around 2500$/year.

India ranks 43rd in the world's median household income ranking.

https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=IDD

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

#183

Post by krageon »

fogetti wrote: post #176
walrus01 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Censoring isn't bad in and of it's own, so it would help if you illustrated this with perhaps some undesirable examples of things happening today.

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

#184

Post by barumi »

oefrha wrote: post #166
barumi wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be a good idea to present stronger evidence before saying HN is astroturfable. What? You do realize anyone can create HN accounts to post any link and comment on any discussion, right? Even if you argue that there are magical ex post facto measures to tackle obvious and rampant abuse, you do understand that the system is indeed vulnerable to astroturfers right in its very design, don't you?

Anyone can create HN accounts to post any link and comment on any discussion, but certain accounts are dead on arrival, and votes from certain accounts don’t count, so you can pollute /new or discussions (especially for users with showdead on), but that doesn’t mean your content automatically get prime spot placement just by registering more accounts. Meanwhile, clickbaiting is much more effective than creating accou…

> but that doesn’t mean your content automatically get prime spot placement

That's not how it works. It might be a desirable goal, but that doesn't mean that the role of a content marketer is not to a) astroturf discusssions, b) generate content that's SEO-friendly even if they don't blow up.

Customers already get their money's worth if you get your minions sparking causal low-key discussions about their product/service/PR talking point on random places in order to raise awareness and focus on topics in ways that serves your best interests.

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

#185

Post by krageon »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #172
evgen wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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.

In aggregate downvoted posts are practically always low-effort (or sometimes just really unhinged or otherwise patently wrong), so I'm not convinced that downvotes being used unkindly is a big problem.

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

#186

Post by krageon »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #171
dang wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It has already been pointed out that discussing anti-astroturfing measures in detail is not done, for reasons that have been explained. It doesn't seem reasonable to keep demanding explanations given what has been said before.

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

#187

Post by krageon »

lemax wrote: post #137

Is this really any less ethical than a more sophisticated marketing scheme? "Black Hat Firm" vs. Expensive Growth Marketing Firm: – unestablished writer vs credentialed, domain experienced writer (with a salary?) – spammy Medium.com presence vs Editor Connections at TechCrunch – network of "dozens" of nearly ineffectual sockpuppets vs dozens of employees with "real" accounts ready to upvote and engage on Boss's call…

Most "sophisticated" marketing schemes are incredibly unethical (and I've even argued that marketing at it's core is unethical, but that's a hard sell most places). That might mean that it's not any less ethical, but equally scummy.

The fact that it's not a surprise (and implying that everyone does it) is not an excuse to keep manipulating people at a mass scale when they're browsing the internet in (primarily) good faith. I'd say that pointing that out and accepting it as a good justification is in and of itself unethical.

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

#188

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

krageon wrote: post #186
throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It has already been pointed out that discussing anti-astroturfing measures in detail is not done, for reasons that have been explained. It doesn't seem reasonable to keep demanding explanations given what has been said before.

"The difference is evidence, and that's what we require."

So how do I supply the required?

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

#189

Post by littlestymaar »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #43
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…

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 don't know about astroturfing on HN, but I've seen enough patrolling here to be skeptical about any kind of “HN has strong defenses” claims.

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

#190

Post by cblconfederate »

I mean, it wasn't exactly a secret right?

I 'd like to see sites like HN become vigilant against this kind of fluff marketing content (which has been making the rounds for a loooong time) from now on, as much as they are vigilant against political content.

Any new rules?

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