I am curious if it actually works.
Do the people paying for the content get any net benefit?
I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
221–230 of 259 posts
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#222This isn't new at all. If I wasnt under an NDA I'd tell you more about how deep the rabbit hole goes. Keep digging, lots to find and crooked stuff to expose.
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#223Is 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…
>(and I've even argued that marketing at it's core is unethical, but that's a hard sell most places)
100% agreed, and I gather from other times/places where this was brought up that there's more of us than you might think.
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#224Earlier 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.
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.
I was intrigued enough to look it up. According to[1], Laos has 54,784 addresses. The smallest is Santa Lucia, with a /24. North Korea and Dominica have a /22.
(Apologies if I'm getting that number wrong. I don't do much with subnetting.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_IPv4_addr...
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#225The 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…
PS: Maybe one of these companies would like to comment. What services did you intend to purchase, and who are you buying them from?
> approach freelance bloggers to write articles about their clients
This particular industry isn't particularly secretive. I know of mature agencies in the UK and US doing this with real offices, full time staff, nice websites, senior staff with LinkedIn profiles, etc. And I'm sure there are others outside the anglophone world.
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#226[deleted]
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#227Earlier 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 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.
What does 'patrolling' mean in this context?
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#228The 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 think HN is one of those rare site I really wish they had ad or some donation button where I can paid. Dang is doing an exceptional job in holding things together. And despite a slight downward trend in terms discussion quality, HN is still by far the best tech and other "nerd" interest forum. And the community as a whole self police each other. The vibrant and large number of active users, compared to a SubReddit, Dev.to and other site makes astroturfing HN really really really hard.
Anyone who have submitted anything on HN would know. Getting on the Front page isn't an easy task at all. And staying on front page is even harder.
And Cunningham's law doesn't always work on HN. Sometimes the community just decide to ignore it. Lol
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that's not it; it's because anti-abuse is a cat-and-mouse game, so while you can discuss it (in an appropriate setting like a junky meta thread you didn't start), you can't expect HN to be forthcoming with details, because those details lower costs for abusers, and maximizing costs is the whole ballgame. Kibitzing HN moderation itself is one of our oldest pastimes.
Its funny because the most hardcore in open source and security would argue that good techniques don't rely on obfuscation and secrets because those cats can get out of the bag. Never purrsonally subscribed to those as I agree with the cat and mouse perspective. Information assymetry is effective.
People in security who say that categorically are betraying ignorance, because there are several "hardcore" settings in software security where the same dynamic --- attacker/defender cost competition occurring by degrees --- plays out. Anti-ATO, content protection, botnets, anti-DDOS, hardware platform security, just to rattle a few off my head.
The correct security objection is to obfuscation being deployed in settings where there are decisively effective controls that could be deployed instead: where it doesn't make sense to raise attacker costs by degrees, because those costs can be raised to intractable levels instead. I'd cite an example, but it would spawn a 500 comment thread about how Linux sysadmins manage their networks.
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#230Earlier 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…
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.
By evidence I mean something in some data somewhere that's more than just the opinion being posted, which we can look at and evaluate objectively. I know that's a bit of a lame answer, but I can't give you specific examples without giving the same examples to others who would want to circumvent leaving evidence in that way.
The main thing to understand is that we need something to look at other than just an opinion that one commenter was expressing which another commenter didn't like. That's evidence only of difference-of-opinion, not abuse.
Such data isn't always secret and isn't always just on HN. For example, if someone is asking for HN upvotes on Twitter, we sometimes get links from eagle-eyed HNers. Similarly when someone is sending out spam emails trying to organize a voting ring. And sometimes spammers copy comments from other forums and paste them into HN. Those are pretty basic examples but I hope you can see that in each case there is some objective data that supports a judgment of abuse.
Conversely, suppose you like $BigCo and someone else hates $BigCo, sees your comment praising them, and replies "how much are they paying you, shill?" That's the kind of thing we don't allow, because there's literally nothing supporting that judgment. The same type of commenter will see various comment arguing for $BigCo in HN threads and then post to other threads with high confidence that "HN is overrun with astroturfing". What they mean is that it's overrun with comments they don't like—and even then, "overrun" is an exaggeration.