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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

#211

Post by _b8r0 »

nitrogen wrote: post #97
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…

Do you happen to know if the follow-up emails were manual or scheduled/automated? I think it'd be interesting if someone actually wrote 8 automated follow-up emails and deliberately went aggressive in the later automated steps. Maybe that actually works enough times to be worth it?

It's mostly automated. They'll use tools to dump out data based on search metrics into an Airtable or Google spreadsheet, then templates for the mail stages and tools to send and track opens.

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

#212

Post by MichaelZuo »

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…

A distributed trust network is feasible given sufficient critical mass. I’m looking into the best way to bootstrap it.

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

#213

Post by itsoktocry »

cblconfederate wrote: post #190

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?

>I 'd like to see sites like HN become vigilant against this kind of fluff marketing content

One of the reasons I continue to use HN is that there seems to be very little marketing content that bubbles to the top articles, compared to almost every other site. Something is working.

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

#214

Post by marketingPro »

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.

That is not a good indicator. Your mind can always rationalize something.

Imagine if a large corporation bought ~50 old accounts and spoofed different computers/browsers. Only 5 votes is needed to hide a post.

Controlling the narrative is almost trivial if you can spend mere thousands of dollars.

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

#215

Post by Const-me »

barumi wrote: post #182
Const-me wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I…

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

I used a calculator. Annual figure is from there: https://news.gallup.com/poll/166211/worldwide-median-househo...

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

Irrelevant. Medians don’t aggregate the way you think they do. To compute global median, you need to know shapes of distributions in each country, and population of the countries.

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

#216

Post by krimeo »

dang wrote: post #145
krimeo wrote: post #142

Eye opening isn't it? Now you can see where most of the stuff on top of HN comes from.

Unless I don't know the first thing about my job (always possible I suppose), that is definitely not true.

Eh, so people are paying for upvotes, sock puppets accounts etc. but it doesn't work ? :o

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

#217

Post by andygcook »

rexreed wrote: post #29

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.

This happens in the real world too. IIRC, Stonyfield yogurt had their friends and family buy the product when it was newly on the shelf at groceries to make it look like it was selling well enough to get picked up permanently.

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

#218

Post by 3pt14159 »

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…

At the end of the day it's all about good faith. You either have it or you don't. It's completely obvious to me that it's ok for a product company like Apple to have industry / journalism ties that they provide information ahead of time for a bigger launch day.

I could go essentially any situation with marketing and that's what the ethics boil down to for me. It's simply not good faith to rig voting on a social network. I hate it when my friends ask me to upvote their HN post just because they've asked and they know I've been around here a long time. But if they write a cool post and say "hey if you like this spread it around a bit" then that is fair and I'm happy to submit it to others here.

So to answer your original question: Yes, it really is less ethical and the continuum does not range from spammy to sophisticated. Spam can be quite sophisticated. They're correlated, but they're different measures and, really, a true master doesn't employ these techniques because they're playing a different, better game.

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

#219

Post by coldcode »

higerordermap wrote: post #104
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…

Funny that I have learned to not click on these sites in Google search. I know that's almost always going to be shallow, SEO content.

When I search for programming topics (in my case, Swift related) I see lots of links from sites like xspdf.com and others that clearly just scraped stack overflow and other legit sites, crammed the content in a useless format that makes Google think it is original and adds tons of ads. Since it looks legit in Google search results you click on it and then realize how useless the content is. Often the sites appear earlier that the original content did.

So I don't click on them now that I know this. Google of course seems not to care or is incapable of noticing.

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

#220

Post by ship_it »

dang wrote: post #128
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 haven't laughed so hard in months :))) Please don't be a jerk in HN comments. We're trying for a different quality of discussion here. The rest of your comment would be just fine without that swipe. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Whats wrong expressing your feelings on thread and writing about it? Humans are now jerks ironically laughing at things? Okay. :)
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