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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

#231

Post by dang »

luckylion wrote: post #179
dang wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For sure it's a hard problem, but in this context on HN, it doesn't come up in many cases. When it does, how we handle it is by being flexible and personally available about unbanning. That's a luxury afforded by smallness.

In the more common case, though, it's clear enough who's doing it to take action. And you'd be surprised how often we get explicit confirmation of what happened. Sometimes a site owner will even passionately profess innocence and then sheepishly come back later with "I'm so sorry, you were right, it turns out my marketing-person/friend/teammate did it."

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

#232

Post by dang »

radmuzom wrote: post #205
dang wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would be evidence that people on the internet are predictable, not evidence of manipulation.

Predictability on the internet, which increases both with group size and with the divisiveness of a topic, is also a huge problem for HN [1]. But it's not the problem we've been discussing in this thread, and I think it's important to make clear distinctions between the issues. It's common for people to leap from some other issue to "astroturfing! shill! spy!" explanations, instead of facing the original issue.

[1] Here's why, if anyone wants an explanation. Predictability is the enemy of curiosity. Worse, when discussions are predictable, there isn't anything intellectually interesting in them, and the mind seems to resort to flamewars to amuse itself in the absence of anything better to do (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). So predictability destroys community as well.

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

#233

Post by dang »

krimeo wrote: post #216
dang wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That doesn't follow (because "most of the stuff on top of HN" is a much stronger claim than what you said here) but I'm happy to answer anyway. The answer is that it frequently doesn't work. What we don't know is how many other cases there are where people are getting away with it. We can't know that; by definition, we're never going to know it.

Even there, though, one can make educated guesses, based for example on how many cases come up where people got away with it at the time, but then evidence comes to our attention later and we can figure it out in retrospect. Such cases are useful because then we can extend our software to catch them in the future.

I'd never claim that such manipulations never work; obviously we can't know that. It's possible that superclever manipulators are rolling HN in their hands like a piece of silly putty. All I'm saying is that if "most of the stuff on top of HN comes from [that]", then I don't know the first thing about my job.

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

#234

Post by dang »

fogetti wrote: post #174
nindalf wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are two different classes of user. One class checks those things and knows that their post didn't go through. (That doesn't apply to voting, though—that's important.) A second class of user doesn't check and doesn't know. That second class tends to be more naive spammers or promoters, and shadowbanning works well in those cases.

It's useful with the more sophisticated class too, though. If they have to start fresh with new accounts, it slows them down and makes what they're doing more obvious to the community.

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

#235

Post by pathseeker »

sxv wrote: post #108
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.

Flagged as suspect. Just kidding. Well, it could be argued that if you are defending S&P500 you are probably a pawn whether knowingly or not.

No more so than defending a government because you like what it has provided.

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

#236

Post by pathseeker »

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.

Maybe, but that's not astroturfing, which is what the implication was. Astroturfing is fake accounts or purchased votes.

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

#237

Post by dang »

ship_it wrote: post #220
dang wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. :)

When you're laughing at how wrong someone else is (or you assume they are) on the internet, the default is that this is a snarky way of putting them down.

If your intention is different from that, this is good, but then the burden is on you to express your feelings in a way that disambiguates your comment from the default. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

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

#238

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

troydavis wrote: post #30
warent wrote: post #18

I don't endorse this behavior at all but can it really be said to be black-hat? imho seems more gray to me. From what I understand, content _is_ being generated and there are attempts to boost the SEO, so they're providing a service and it's not outright theft. At worst it just sounds like poor practice and gaming the system. They're not acting maliciously, illegally, and/or destructively, which is how I've always de…

If this isn't black-hat, what is? Specifically, an author not disclosing an affiliation or payment, fake accounts promoting it, and fake accounts commenting on those promotions. In the continuum between white and black, what's left on the black side? :-)

Relevant, I think:

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/dis...

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

#239

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

nl wrote: post #135
ineedasername wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, according to their page, disclosure is a best practice, but doing otherwise isn't inherently illegal. Their own guide [0] begins by talking about adhering to their guidelines as "voluntary compliance", and that a failure to do so would require their investigation into the specifics to determine if it was a violation of law: It is not automatically a violation. [0] https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/a…

Those guidelines are voluntary, sure. But there are actual laws included (section 5 of of the FTC Act (15 U.S.C. 45)) that make some things actually illegal. Specifically: "Unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, are hereby declared unlawful."[1] This voluntary guide helps people understand how the FTC inteprates that law. Deciding no…

Likely to also be wire/mail fraud if my understanding is correct.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_and_wire_fraud

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

#240

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

barumi wrote: post #157
troydavis wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normally they're pretty trivial like you said. This one is extensive: 20+ sockpuppet HN and Reddit accounts and dozens of fake blog posts submitted to many of the largest Medium-style blogs. It's an entire propaganda network just devoted to content marketing.

20+ accounts is pretty small potatos for a content marketer.

Probably just one persons side hustle while they're on fire watch at work.

But then again they could be a foot soldier for an appropriately compartmentalized consortium.

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