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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

#241

Post by smooke »

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…

Thank you for reporting this. https://hackernoon.com/u/diptokmk47 was actively under review via our back link monitoring tool, and after this report, we've banned https://hackernoon.com/u/diptokmk47 and https://hackernoon.com/u/ari-noman --- if you see any other black hat behavior or things to improve on https://hackernoon.com/ here is the fastest way to reach the relevant person https://hackernoon.com/contact

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

#242

Post by littlestymaar »

jfengel wrote: post #224
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.

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...

Thanks for the fact-checking! I looks like I didn't recall correctly (or maybe it used to be true but changed at some point, who knows?).

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

#243

Post by darekkay »

JimDabell wrote: post #124
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…

Aside from the content itself, I’ve noticed the commenting and voting patterns on Reddit for articles about AccessiBe are suspicious. I always assumed they had “help”. It’s a shame social media doesn't have a “this looks suspicious but I have no direct evidence” report button. I expect it’s very easy in a lot of cases to determine abuse when you have access to internal data.

AccessiBe itself is rather shady [1], so it isn't really surprising to see them on the list.

[1] https://adrianroselli.com/2020/06/accessibe-will-get-you-sue...

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

#244

Post by littlestymaar »

dang wrote: post #227
littlestymaar wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I thought it was a common term, but maybe it's just some reddit slang: I use it to mean one community “attacking” or “boosting“ a submission on a forum based on the community values, and not the worth of the said submission. In can have different levels of synchronizations:

- no synchronization at all: conservatives (especially American ones) flagging socialist-sounding posts (often upvoted by Europeans when Americans are asleep), Gophers & C++ guys flagging Rust posts, etc.

- loosely synchronized: some content is getting popular on /r/rust, or /r/python, some people there will connect to HN to upvote it here.

- strongly synchronized: some influential Twitter handle posts a message about how “some shit went to the front page”, zealot followers come and flag the submission. Also works with specific subreddits (/r/programmingcirclejerk for instance, even though it's more aimed at comment posts than submission).

It happens a lot, often enough to be noticeable. Sometimes it sort of regulates itself (like in the left-right battle between Europe & US, or between the Rust Evangelist Strike Force & Rust haters), but not always.

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

#245

Post by dang »

littlestymaar wrote: post #244
dang wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does 'patrolling' mean in this context?

I thought it was a common term, but maybe it's just some reddit slang: I use it to mean one community “attacking” or “boosting“ a submission on a forum based on the community values, and not the worth of the said submission. In can have different levels of synchronizations: - no synchronization at all: conservatives (especially American ones) flagging socialist-sounding posts (often upvoted by Europeans when American…

Thank you, that's interesting! I think some of those things are going on. Other points I'm a little skeptical about—for example I don't believe that the left/right divide correlates as strongly with the US vs. Europe as you suggest. Many of the strongest leftist posts we see come from the U.S. and many of the strongest rightist posts come from Europe (to judge by IP geolocation).

Your 'no synchronization' case is tribalism. That's certainly happening here, as probably in every large-enough group. Yes, it's a significant problem. But it's not the astroturfing/manipulation problem being discussed in this thread. If your skepticism about "strong defenses" was meant to include this case, that's too general.

Your 'synchronized' cases would constitute abuse in HN's terms, and if you or anyone notice it happening in the future, we'd greatly appreciate being told about it at hn@ycombinator.com. Actually, if you can even point to cases where it happened in the past (e.g. "some content [was] getting popular on /r/rust, or /r/python, some people there [connected] to HN to upvote it here"), it would be interesting to look back and see whether we detected it and/or could do something differently.

The one thing I'd caution is that it's extremely easy to convince oneself that these things are happening when they're not. Nearly everyone with strong views about this phenomenon is massively deceiving themselves about it—if you're only guided by what feels like it must be happening, there's far too much opportunity to just project things into the situation. People do this all the time, and it's a big problem—as I've said elsewhere in this thread, it's actually a bigger problem than the abuse and manipulation being complained about. The solution is to guard against that by always looking for some extraneous indication (i.e. evidence)—for example a thread on Reddit saying "let's upvote this on HN"—and to be agnostic in the cases where one doesn't have that.

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

#246

Post by untwerth »

bondarchuk wrote: post #223
krageon wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I sincerely hope so. I fervently believe that all advertising is, by definition, paid manipulation. As such, it is deeply immoral, despicable, and should be outlawed on the constitutional level! I also believe that this manipulation is the foundation of almost every evil in the western world, because it is the perverse motive that corrupts our democracy and our economy. The ability to manipulate masses of people to buy your idea or product using money allows those with money to dominate, not those who are competent or correct (either at politics or economy). The fact that our societies not only allow this but actively celebrate the biggest manipulators as the best of us (google facebook etc.) is beyond immoral for me. It's insane!

I also believe that anybody who calls out this sick game at the level of society would be cruelly ostracised by those in power, either in media or politics or economy. Still, we should voice this more often. We should make people rethink our societies.

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

#247

Post by gingerlime »

dang wrote: post #230
gingerlime wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Thank you so much, dang. I'm completely with you 110% that just throwing accusations this way is bad, and that it's also most likely a "I couldn't disagree more" leading people to a wrong conclusion about shilling and such.

What about the other side of it though? your reply didn't really address it.

What I feel is happening now is that in those situations (and others), people downvote and flag things that they don't agree with. They're not shouting "shills / astroturfing" yet the collective power makes it easy to silence opposing opinions, especially if those opinions are in a minority.

Completely anecdotal, but I reported to you two cases of flagged stories that in my opinion had value in them for the community (and in the discussions around them). Those stories were effectively silenced. I think it's a shame. There's no evidence require to flag or downvote, there's no requirement to even give an argument/reasoning for doing it.

Are there any plans to tackle this kind of behaviour in a similar way that empty/non-evidence-based claims of astroturfing and shilling is dealt with?

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

#248

Post by krageon »

gingerlime wrote: post #209
droffel wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

At a guess, it's a post that implies a sort of soft conspiracy with very little evidence. It just doesn't contribute a whole lot of value to the subject at hand, except for attempting to foment a vague sense of wrongness.

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

#249

Post by techslave »

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

I don’t see a problem with it. It says more about the comment author than it does about the article. If he (commenter) wants to out himself as a knowitallogist, so be it?

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

#250

Post by littlestymaar »

dang wrote: post #245
littlestymaar wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was a common term, but maybe it's just some reddit slang: I use it to mean one community “attacking” or “boosting“ a submission on a forum based on the community values, and not the worth of the said submission. In can have different levels of synchronizations: - no synchronization at all: conservatives (especially American ones) flagging socialist-sounding posts (often upvoted by Europeans when American…

Thank you, that's interesting! I think some of those things are going on. Other points I'm a little skeptical about—for example I don't believe that the left/right divide correlates as strongly with the US vs. Europe as you suggest. Many of the strongest leftist posts we see come from the U.S. and many of the strongest rightist posts come from Europe (to judge by IP geolocation). Your 'no synchronization' case is tri…

> that the left/right divide correlates as strongly with the US vs. Europe as you suggest.

Right, talking about “right and left” was a mistake because the meaning of these words are pretty fuzzy and highly context-dependent. I'd give a more precise description then:

Comments containing criticism of mainstream economics, references to Keynes, arguing that “all capitalism is crony capitalism” or “capitalism didn't defeat communism, welfare state did”, being in favor of strong state intervention etc. are going to be much more upvoted when Americans are asleep. And conversely for comments referencing Milton Friedman, praising the power of the market, economic growth as the main goal for social wellware, etc.

I've seen more than once my comments on the aforementioned themes being upvoted multiple times, then grayed several hours later, to end-up with a positive score the next day. I didn't notice the temporal correlation until someone brought it in a thread, and many people shared the same experience.

If you want to have a look, the recent thread on the Nobel prize in Economics smells like a good candidate for investigation (even though I didn't participate in the thread, so I have no evidences there).

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