81–90 of 106 posts
I'm a little unclear as to why JiaT75's github account still exists? Surely this should be nuked from orbit so that no one accidentally ends up using their shady code?
Labeling - bringing up the actor, and the method involved - is useful.-
GitHub "community" is just awful. There are people trying to get real work done in that thread, but then there are all these random bystanders piling up to throw in their comments which range from useless to actively harmful and distracting. And it's not an isolated case, this happens pretty much always when some issues attracts attention on GH. Can't we respect the project and give the people there space to work, an…
GH needs a system like most forum communities have where comments can be put in a moderation / approval queue before being public.
So, they have comment minimization by assigned moderators. Or you can just delete / edit comments and issues. Obviously not as powerful as a pre-screening queue. Less work tho!
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Ok, but to what end? Is there some karma-to-dollars pipeline that I don't know about? There a bunch of other platforms that superficially seem like much softer targets with more obvious payoffs. Like, if we put it in the classic context of 1. Farm Karma 2. ? 3. Profit! I'm not clear on step 2. What's step 2 And of course that pre-supposes malice (or at least greed), which is in violation of Hanlon's Razor.
Coincidentally, Reddit (YC05) IPO'ed in March so I'm sure you'll find plenty of analysis on that. Gallowboob reportedly got paid https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/gallowboob >. It used to be called Curation, Marketing, or Expert Advice but it's been algorithmified to death.
On Instagram, it makes sense to me:
1. I farm for likes and karma
2. I start endorsing low value crap from whatever fad is trending this hour
3. Profit
On HN, I have no idea what step 2 is: what is the middle step between farming and profit that doesn't involve, like, founding a startup? What's the specific tactic on this platform?
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Coincidentally, Reddit (YC05) IPO'ed in March so I'm sure you'll find plenty of analysis on that. Gallowboob reportedly got paid https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/gallowboob >. It used to be called Curation, Marketing, or Expert Advice but it's been algorithmified to death.
Sorry, I don't understand the point you're making here. Are you saying that karma farming on HN leads to successful IPOs? Or are you saying that karma farming in general can be profitable? Because both of those are what I was trying to speak to when I said that I feel like there are much softer targets than HN: it seems much easier to me to profit from karma farming on other platforms than it would be here. Maybe I'm…
Marketing on HN can be very powerful. The mindshare gain can be enormous. Niches in general are very rewarding if the underlying platform (Google/Facebook/Amazon/Ebay) doesn't deplatform you.
I don't have time to look it up but I'm sure minimaxir (Certified HN Influencer) has made a study on it.
PG remarked on it in What I've Learned from Hacker News[1]:
"But what happened to Reddit won't inevitably happen to HN. There are several local maxima. There can be places that are free for alls and places that are more thoughtful, just as there are in the real world; and people will behave differently depending on which they're in, just as they do in the real world.
I've observed this in the wild. I've seen people cross-posting on Reddit and Hacker News who actually took the trouble to write two versions, a flame for Reddit and a more subdued version for HN."
Anecdata: just today I reactivated an account on a startup I learned about from a Show HN[2]
[1] https://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24990238
Wild. All of these carefully inserted “seemingly innocuous” changes in the ecosystem to end up contributing to a wider exploit. This comment sums it up nicely with a gif: https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/pull/1609#issuecomm...
this explot is basically "death by a 1000 papercuts", now that i think about it.
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Sorry, I don't understand the point you're making here. Are you saying that karma farming on HN leads to successful IPOs? Or are you saying that karma farming in general can be profitable? Because both of those are what I was trying to speak to when I said that I feel like there are much softer targets than HN: it seems much easier to me to profit from karma farming on other platforms than it would be here. Maybe I'm…
Sorry, I didn't see the "much softer targets" remark but I disagree anyway. Marketing on HN can be very powerful. The mindshare gain can be enormous. Niches in general are very rewarding if the underlying platform (Google/Facebook/Amazon/Ebay) doesn't deplatform you. I don't have time to look it up but I'm sure minimaxir (Certified HN Influencer) has made a study on it. PG remarked on it in What I've Learned from Hac…
I appreciate you taking the time to respond thoroughly. Thanks!
Edit: it occurred to me that another potential reason that the tactics used to monetize karma farming on HN may be less obvious to me than on other platforms is because here, the tactics are more specifically designed to target me
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Labeling - bringing up the actor, and the method involved - is useful.-
Why do you write all your periods "." in this post (but not in others, per your comment history) as ".-"?
I beg to differ, I actually checked.-
I'd hate it if I had been less than consistent :)
PS. At least from about 2021 on ...Earlier quoted context omitted.
GH needs a system like most forum communities have where comments can be put in a moderation / approval queue before being public.
Not a bad idea. I guess the UX is not hard, but likely it would clash with GH's bias towards openness/transparency/public record. Possibly risk making moderation 1st class citizen, they may fear this would detract from the main purpose of collaborative code production. Yet...it could help that. But I understand it's a tricky nuance. So, they have comment minimization by assigned moderators. Or you can just delete / e…
GitHub "community" is just awful. There are people trying to get real work done in that thread, but then there are all these random bystanders piling up to throw in their comments which range from useless to actively harmful and distracting. And it's not an isolated case, this happens pretty much always when some issues attracts attention on GH. Can't we respect the project and give the people there space to work, an…
People treat Github like social media
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Right, but that was the exact nature of the attack: it's a small commit that doesn't look like it needs a lot of scrutiny. Like, I get that you meant "it wouldn't take much scrutiny to find this" but I mean "it doesn't look like it needs to be scrutinized". Especially because, as mentioned in the first comment of the investigation, the change to an unsafe behavior is deliberately obscured by the formatting of the dif…
Right-- A busy maintainer sees a weird looking commit-- but it's three lines long, submitted from a known contributor, and the tests pass. It was very carefully planned to be innocuous-looking enough to not trigger any concerns with a casual once-over (oh, it just changes the way an error is printed) and obfuscated enough to not be obviously malicious because of the diff formatting, and submitted by a reliable known…
What was it ... 80% of aviation accidents due human error?