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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

#201

Post by littlestymaar »

ratww wrote: post #198
littlestymaar wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IP-based recognition is annoying for people leaving in third world countries[1] though, because there little IPV4, they are many behind the same NAT. Also, with tethering it's really easy to circumvent, without needing a VPN. [1]: IIRC, the whole Laos only has a /32 subnet… yes you read it right: a single IPV4 address for end entire country. And many country only have a few /16.

Please read my message again. I'm not restricting anything and there's nothing to be circumvented, it's about letting unlogged/anonymous users view more stuff to deter detection of shadowbanning.

Maybe “circumvent” isn't adequate here (not a native English speaker), what I meant is that's easy to bypass your countermeasures: post from my computer, and check from my phone if my comment is visible, if not I shadowbanned.

And regarding third world country, your idea doesn't prevent them to access the website, but they will access a site where the shadowbanning feature is pretty much disabled, which could lead to the proliferation of trolls or spam targeted at this specific country.

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

#202

Post by ratww »

fogetti wrote: post #199
ratww wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way I fixed this in a small gamedev forum I help maintain was by letting users view shadowbanned comments created by the same IP. There's still the chance of the user using Tor/VPNs, but it's rarer. Shadowban is not perfect by all means, but it's still a good deterrent in my experience.

This doesn't make any sense. Most IPv4 addresses change every day if not multiple times during the day. I guess you can only filter the dumbest of the dumbest this way. And if someone has the wit to open an incognito window it doesn't take a genius to notice that he can only see the same day's comments.

There's a lot more involved in my case than that, but suffice to say it worked well in the forum I maintain, so your intuition disagrees with my practical experience. And yes, my trolls/spammers are dumb.

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

#203

Post by ratww »

littlestymaar wrote: post #201
ratww wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please read my message again. I'm not restricting anything and there's nothing to be circumvented, it's about letting unlogged/anonymous users view more stuff to deter detection of shadowbanning.

Maybe “circumvent” isn't adequate here (not a native English speaker), what I meant is that's easy to bypass your countermeasures: post from my computer, and check from my phone if my comment is visible, if not I shadowbanned. And regarding third world country, your idea doesn't prevent them to access the website, but they will access a site where the shadowbanning feature is pretty much disabled, which could lead to…

If this ever happens I can just change my approach. It helped me a lot so far. I'd rather have an approach that is currently working on >99% of the cases I need than chase some hypothetical 100% solution that is virtually impossible to achieve.

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

#204

Post by jimbomorrison »

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…

Super interesting. We're working on something similar within the news ecosystem.

See https://onesub.io/chrome for the extension (and https://onesub.io/mission for our wider mission)..

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

#205

Post by radmuzom »

dang wrote: post #147
api wrote: post #36

Social media -- including this site -- is far more manipulated than people even begin to realize. Social media propaganda and sock puppetry is a huge industry.

I'm curious how you think you know that about HN, because if that's true, you know much more about it than I do.

Not the OP and I cannot provide any evidence. However, for a large number of controversial topics, I try to guess the top comment in my head before opening the comments page. My estimate is that 70-80% of the times I guess it right.

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

#206

Post by [deleted] »

jbm wrote: post #127
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 was a Heroku employee until recently. I know the people who work on those blog posts, and I tried to contribute one myself. To my knowledge, employees absolutely do work on those; articles are edited and go through several rounds of review, but they aren't ghost written. Even the ones written by the management team seem entirely congruous with their level of product knowledge. There are external people (usually for…

[deleted]

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

#207

Post by marketingPro »

luckylion wrote: post #177
pathseeker wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

1 or 2 posting accounts, hundreds or thousands of upvoting accounts.

All of this can change the narrative.

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

#208

Post by icanhackit »

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'd be interesting if we could train AI to spot fake accounts. A good sized sample would be lovely...

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

#209

Post by gingerlime »

droffel wrote: post #200
krageon wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Downvoting is also restricted to accounts who exceed a point threshold. I think that particular feature (ensuring people who can downvote at least have some level of trust within the site) has been critical to prevent hive mind-style downvoting. I rarely see downvoted comments where I don't understand why they were downvoted.

perhaps ironic, but can you help me understand why the GP comment was downvoted on this thread? I’m genuinely wondering. (the one from throwaway_pdp09)

I’m definitely happy that there’s minimum Karma for downvotes, but how does it prevent hive-mind downvoting?

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

#210

Post by troydavis »

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…

New submissions appear here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest. Eventually, consider enabling "showdead" on the settings/profile page.
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