I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
1–10 of 259 posts
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#2In the past I have pointed the HN moderators (contact link is the footer) to threads with sock puppets. Some are easy to recognize, e.g. new users praising a service that got submitted only 10 minutes ago. Sometimes it's harder to find a pattern. Do email the HN moderators if you suspect fraud or unfair practices.
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#3The 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, freeCodeCamp, HackerNoon, ITNEXT, JS in Plain English, Level Up, Towards Data Science, and other aggregators.
From there, they use dozens of fake Reddit and HN accounts to submit, comment on, and artificially boost their own posts. They also submit some unrelated cover posts. You can see some of these on HN here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
They have sockpuppet Reddit accounts doing the same thing across 10s of subreddits.
Here's the set of clients I know of (https://twitter.com/troyd/status/1316020415995674624):
AccessiBe
ClimaCell
Imperva
Loadmill
Rookout Labs
WhiteSource (AKA SecureCoding dot com)
Testcraft
I have no idea what they thought they were buying, but what they were receiving was black-hat content marketing at large scale. There may be other clients I don't know of.
Here's some Medium profiles of authors, where you'll see those companies get plugged over and over. I expect some of these will be removed by the authors soon:
https://medium.com/@AntonLawrence
https://medium.com/@Justin_Parsons
https://medium.com/@Dickson_Mwendia
https://medium.com/@oyetoketoby80
https://medium.com/@mrsaeeddev
https://medium.com/@ginomessmer
https://medium.com/@diptokmk47
https://medium.com/@sajjadheydari74
https://medium.com/@ngwaifoong92
https://medium.com/@henson.casper
https://hackernoon.com/u/ari-noman
https://hackernoon.com/u/diptokmk47
There's probably others I'm missing. If you run a blog and one of these companies is mentioned in a post that doesn't disclose an affiliation, it may well be fake. I contacted many of the publishers above. To quote Quincy of freeCodeCamp in https://twitter.com/ossia/status/1316216151802667008 after he researched this: "Stay vigilant, friends."
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#4In the past I have pointed the HN moderators (contact link is the footer) to threads with sock puppets. Some are easy to recognize, e.g. new users praising a service that got submitted only 10 minutes ago. Sometimes it's harder to find a pattern. Do email the HN moderators if you suspect fraud or unfair practices.
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.
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#5The 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…
Yeoman's work. TY!
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#6The 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…
Amusingly enough, if you sort Imperva posts by popularity, you'll get stories about their own breach.
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#7I think the GAN (prob actually not a GAN) that's months old on HN and posts rubbish and gets replys from mods and people and gets lots of karma is much more interesting
Imagine what it'd be like if AI wasn't all overhyped garage.
Downvoted I guess.
Oh, AI that can group think. That would be evil.
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#8The 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?
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#9Does anyone know about the legality of this? My suspicion is that this black-hat content marketing is perfectly legal under US law. It's only potentially a violation of individual platforms' TOS (or publishing agreements). Is this approximately correct?
Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
#10The 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…
Interestingly, when you look at e.g. thereyougo's submission history https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=thereyougo there are [dead] but not [flagged] or [dupe] posts from towardsdatascience, imperva, and testcraft. Maybe the sustained campaign got those companies' domains banned from HN? Or there was something specific to those submissions that triggered the spam filter.