Russia opposition leader poisoned with Novichok

I'm just being overly self-satisfied with the idea a shadowy army of shillologists and astoTERFs are diabolically manipulating HN by darkly warning about shilling and astroturfing for unknown but definitely nefarious ends.

It sounds like you’re saying you’re fine with users doing things like creating unlimited sock puppet accounts and engaging in vote manipulation (which is what the troll farms you’re describing as SSMs have been accused of doing)? I’m genuinely not trying to be snide here—I’m just reading “we won’t enforce the rules because someone’s probably smart enough to break them (i.e. ‘do whatever they want’) and get away with it”. Is it officially okay for HN users to engage in coordinated inauthentic behavior?

So you guys don’t trust the polls results because polls in Russia are obviously inaccurate. You also don’t trust the Russians who said that from their experience, there’s still a huge number of people supporting the current president - because that’s only the Kremlin bots who would say that. Though for some reason you immediately believe a person who says that the majority of population is against Putin, not providing a single proof. Doesn’t that tell us that you actually speak with voices in your head and trust only what these voices say?

There’s a thing that you should understand about Russia.

Here it goes: Russia is a huge country and Moscow is only a part of it. A small and the richest part. Moscow is basically a country inside the country. It has almost nothing to do with Russia. And the overwhelming majority of the information you are getting is coming from Moscow only.

The polls, the internet blabbering, the protests happen in Moscow, mostly (do notice that I said “mostly” before calling me a liar. I’m well aware of the exceptions, believe me). All of the money is there as well - all the cash flow through the capital. All the money from regions flow through Moscow and only a small portion of it goes back.

People from Moscow mostly look down upon the people from the regions. Consciously or not. Some of them are outright aggressive towards the “country folks”. Many of them believe that Moscow is “feeding the regions”, and it should stop, because people there are lazy and not smart enough. I’ve had conversations like this with Muscovites during my life there, it was hilarious.

The rest of the country is concentrated on their own lives. The majority of them earn something around $300USD a month that barely allows them to live from pay check to pay check. Teachers, doctors, you name it. That’s the salary of low-skilled workers in Moscow.

These people realise that changing the president won’t help them, but in fact might make their lives miserable. And they are not wrong - I can only imagine what may start after the change of leadership and what consequences for the regions it might have.

This country has its roots in the USSR. The change in the headquarters won’t replace the people in charge in the regions - at least it won’t happen immediately. And if/when it does, the majority of the replacement would be just the same people from the same ruling party (or what’s left of it). That’s how things work in Russia, that’s how it’s always been, since 1917. That’s the system that we have. That’s us, Russians, who are the system, and the president is only a small part of the problem.

The majority of Russians either don’t use Internet or use it for social networking only.

The majority of Russians don’t have an international passport (the document that allows you to travel abroad). Why would they? They will never have the money to travel.

The majority of Russians that I know, people from outside Moscow, vote for Putin. Some of them do that because they support him and the ruling party, but the most of them (as per my personal experience) just believe that he’s a lesser evil. I can’t blame them for that.

There’s more to that. What I’m trying to say here is - Russia is far more complex and diverse than you guys might think. It’s not very obvious even for many Russians. So please, don’t downvote people who say things that are against your agenda simply because of that fact. Their reasoning might be more subtle than you think.

What you might want to do to better understand them is to ask them. They know better than you about the situation over there, the historical reasons and consequences. The only thing that you probably need to ask them first is where are they from. If they are from Moscow, chances are they are biased.

Absolutely not. We're not fine with those things and we ban people for astroturfing and other abuses. I believe that is the one thing that's in both the site guidelines and the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. That's how important that is.

It's just that we need to have some evidence, something objective to go on, before we ban people. Absent that (absent that), what one is encountering on the internet is a gigantic Rohrschach diagram, in which people routinely see the opposite of what they like or identify with. This internet experience is like being surrounded by demons of one's own creation: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Sock puppet accounts and vote manipulation are not what I understood BrianOnHN to be talking about upthread. Maybe one could adapt the point to those cases though. Imagine someone who was coordinating inauthentic behavior so cleverly that we couldn't detect it at all. Fortunately I don't think we're there yet—but of course we wouldn't know it if we were. Either way, just imagine for a moment that this is the case. What are our options? The way I see it, we have two:

1. Go after each other based on subjective interpretations of whatever deviousness we imagine we see;

2. Have a functioning community with a healthy immune system based on clear thinking and responding to bad arguments with better arguments.

Surely we all choose #2, at least in our better moments. The key insight here is that #2 doesn't depend on what manipulators, even the cleverest manipulators, do. It depends on us. I'm not saying that it's the only defense we have against manipulation; I'm saying that if the day ever comes when it is the only defense we have, well, it's what we ought to be doing anyway, so we should work at getting good at it now.

I don't think that wording is very accurate, but certainly there is a wide range of geopolitical opinion among real, legitimate HN users. There's no question about it—anyone who wants to pore over just the public history of commenters here can easily establish this. Besides that, it would be bizarre if it weren't the case. Why should the disagreements and conflicts that pervade the world somehow be absent here?

That's my point, in fact. The spectrum of legitimate opinion is much wider than people imagine it is. When they encounter views which don't belong on their much-smaller imaginary spectrum, they don't go "wow, I wonder what your background is that you would see this so differently than I do!", they go "Shill! Manipulator spy! Putin poison puppet! GRU agent!" and similar variations.

Here's another version of this comment from a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23867707. That was in the different context of China not Russia, but the internet dynamics in all these cases are exactly the same—which, btw, is strong evidence that they're not really about what people say they are.

I didn't say there was "no consistent astroturfing", but rather that (a) we've found no evidence of it (on geopolitical topics—corporate propaganda is a different issue) and (b) there needs to be evidence of it before taking action against it. I've been posting this for years—alas it's not clear that it has any effect. This is starting to feel a tad Sisyphean.

Are we the best at finding evidence, or even particularly qualified? How would I know? I'd never claim we were. But surely you're not arguing that we should take action without finding evidence, and the argument, "get better at finding evidence until you find the evidence that I'm sure must be there" is pretty questionable too. This way of thinking leads into the wilderness of mirrors. There are much simpler explanations for everything we see in the comments on China, Russia, unions (that one came up today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24344699) and whatever else people are battling about in HN threads.