12 ms·

Reddit Is Being Manipulated by Professional Shills [video]

171 points by teslacar 10y ago

equivocates 10y ago
next week: hacker news is being manipulated by professional shills every day.
- askafriend 10y ago
  By definition, Hacker News is a professional shill. It's an arm of YC and has special interests as a community.
  - sametmax 10y ago
    All communites have, but people from YC usually don't seem to hide their intention in communication (or they are good at it and I didn't notice). The problem is when people are doing PR for an entity, while pretending they are sharing news, insights or data.
    - alva 10y ago
      I agree that "shilling" really comes down to intent and transparency. Are you presenting the information and disclosing (this can be implicit if connection is obvious) your interests? I don't think most have a problem with that, however the particular forum or board might not be suitable for it.
      - sametmax 10y ago
        Indeed. The line is not clear though. Some people present a new services with show HN and are acclaimed, others are rejected as advertisers. HN like underdogs, innovators and good-doers, but is less laxed with big companies, status quo and money lovers. So if the later can disguise as the formers, they can game the system.
    - fullshark 10y ago
      Everyone here pretty much has a professional stake in the topics discussed, and most people don't disclose that stake. People may be honest about their thinking but their analysis is certainly biased.
  - logicallee 10y ago
    it just so happens that those interests are around supporting founders so they can build huge companies and disrupt major industries. (No joke.) Question: do threads that are critical of YC companies get buried just because they're YC companies? (For example if Uber had YC investment, which a cursory glance says it doesn't, would the criticism of it have been buried by mods here)? (I say this because there were a lot of critical stories about Uber recently, and in the past, too.)
    - dang 10y ago
      The answer to your question is "of course not". When stories are critical of YC or YC-funded companies, we moderate them less than we otherwise would. I've posted about this many times: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20moderate%20yc%20less https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20pg%20chair https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&date.... This isn't because YC doesn't care about HN's business value. It's because YC knows what HN's value consists of: the community's curiosity and trust. That's the global optimum, so that's what's in YC's interests. It would be foolish to optimize for anything else.
      - logicallee 10y ago
        Thanks, dang. Though you've posted about it a lot I hadn't run across those comments yet - thanks for the links.
  - dang 10y ago
    Isn't part of the definition of shilling that it's undisclosed? In that case, no: HN's business concessions to YC (job ads, and more recently Launch HNs) are public. Beyond those, we don't moderate HN specifically to promote YC's interests, and in fact err on the side of not doing so. You should see how sharply I scold YC startups who haven't yet had this drilled sufficiently into them. The best way to make HN valuable for YC is to optimize its value for the community, which is gratifying intellectual curiosity—so that's what we spend our time thinking about. I wrote more about this here if anyone's interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13861971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13861971.
    - gist 10y ago
      > Isn't it part of that definition that the shillage is undisclosed? I will point out before as I did the other day that both you and PG (very ironically) didn't/don't identify who you are with respect to HN. I haven't checked the other partners I have noticed that some do identify as YC partners. Would also expect that any YC funded company might identify themselves as such so their comments or postings could be taken in context. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang I personally think it's fine the way it operates but in all fairness the disclosure could be more than it is.
      - dang 10y ago
        That's a different concern. HN's culture has always been informal and implicit. That has upsides and downsides, but it's the way HN is and I'm loth to mess with it. People invoke 'disclosure', 'transparency', etc. as if these were unmitigated benefits, but when you delve into a complex system like HN they turn out to be tradeoffs. On HN the culture is not to spell everything out. That doesn't have to do with hiding anything; the information is all out there. It has to do with respecting users' intelligence, liking minimalism, liking users to have to work just a little, and so on. The downside of this approach is not that it obscures business interests—just think how excited the community would be to hit on something like that were we ever so dumb as to hide it!—but that it makes things harder for newcomers.
- frik 10y ago
  Sadly it's true. Some companies game the HN ranking algo, and employ shills to divert the discussion of their product. At least two companies (that are infamous for such shady tactics anyway) do it actively regularly on HN. The first thing to prevent it, would be to change the HN ranking algo so that stories with more comments than votes are not automatically punished and forced many pages backwards from the frontpage. Add a report button to report users. Implement an admin interface to monitor certain users and ban them.
  - whitepoplar 10y ago
    Please name these companies!
    - cowpig 10y ago
      this--plus evidence too if you can find it please!
    - randomname2 10y ago
      This probably refers to Uber and Peter Thiel and companies associated to him? If they're manipulating HN they're not very good at it. Lately I'm seeing smear pieces against them appear on the front page on almost a daily basis and the tone in these threads is overwhelmingly toxic rather than positive.
  - wickawic 10y ago
    I could be wrong but I felt this happened on the Spotify thread that is currently on the front page. All the inital reaction was negative, about how the piece was a 'submarine,' etc. Now the top 5 comments are about Spotify's new killer feature and how happy the customers are...
    - dang 10y ago
      I took a look at the thread I think you're referring to, and both those comments and their upvotes are by established users with no signs of fakery that either we or our software could pick up on. What you observed is probably a different phenomenon: early comments in a thread often start off negative, and only later do other users show up to post positively—their motivation being to balance things out. Often the positive comments to get the most upvotes in the end, but the whole process takes a while to play out. If you've ever run across a thread where the top comment says, "I can't believe how negative this thread is!" and proceeds to make a positive case with great fervor, this dynamic is probably why.
- sametmax 10y ago
  Well, sometime you see a personality or a topic getting traction out of the blue. Any critic get quickly downvoted. No debate seems to take place. I noticed that with Bill Gates. Before 2015, nothing different. In 2017, business as usual. But in 2016, Reddit, HN, Imgur suddenly had a surge of Gate support : success stories, interviews, praising using comments... It's just a supposition of course, I have nothing to back it up. But it makes sense to me that the PR experts have learned now that it can be very efficient to target online communities instead of spamming mass media. If they can influence them, then the PR will develop itself in an organic way, feel more honest and natural, and the community will spread the message outside of itself, giving the impression it's genuine. The best communication is the one that doesn't look like it. Controlling the big medias has been the challenge of the last century, but the intellectuals grew defiant of them. They rely more and more on cross referencing various sources and debating with communities made of their peers or people experts in one niche. This is the logical next move. Although it seems harder to pull out, in the long run the cost/benefit ration seems better because it relies on a intimate feeling of trust we develop with the communities. I know I do: I always read the comments before the articles on HN, because I trust the community to give me a better insight on the matter than the article itself. It's often the case. People are brilliant here, having a lot of accumulated knowledge, offering pieces of analysis, missing information, stories and counter points or even just summary that are the real added value of the site. So if the community now hosts subtle communication experts, they will (and probably already have) influence my point of view.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - duncanawoods 10y ago
    > I noticed that with Bill Gates I suspect that one is probably just natural trend/popularity/fashion at work with the hive mind flocking in the same direction. Gates rebounded from the tech nadir to philanthropist, humanitarian and intelligent sayer of sensible things. A lot easier to like than when he had a foot on all our throats. Similar effect with GWB. He is rebounding from pariah status and people can't help but warm to the guy's personality now that his crimes are being overshadowed by much larger bogeymen.
- awqrre 10y ago
  Admins/mods on HN manipulate/modify a lot of the content created by users.
  - grzm 10y ago
    Would you elaborate on this? What are your examples? Mods are known to update submission titles (in accordance with the guidelines), but I'm unaware of any other content changes they make.
    - awqrre 10y ago
      Some examples off the top of my head: 1. They detach comments from comment threads (to hide them?) 2. They boost some stories so that they remain on the home page for a longer time 3. They also remove some posts from the front page... (because they are duplicates, not "quality" content, etc...) I could probably come up with more examples, but I'm sure that you get the idea...
      - grzm 10y ago
        Thanks for clarifying. I read your comment as to mean mods updated the content of comments. All of the items you mention are actions the mods engage in in their role as moderators, which they themselves have described elsewhere.
M_Grey 10y ago
Just run under the assumption that all information is subject to intentional and unintentional bias, and requires careful analysis. It's a safe assumption most of the time, and you need to form that habit of thinking anyway. To be honest, those shills on Reddit tend to be pretty obvious, but then they have to be given their target audience. More importantly they only really exist on some parts of Reddit, and it's only really easy for them to get lost in the scrum on the big boards like politics and news. You get the occasional obvious bit of PR floating through ELI5 or AskScience, but it's quickly spotted and killed. When PR can be accomplished by random flaks, it's useful. When they require expertise on part with their targets to achieve their goals, it necessarily restricts their target pool, and increases their overhead.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  I don't think shills are obvious, and I think the knee-jerk reaction to them is harmful. I don't mind reading shill posts when they're informational (heck, I read RT), but there is a real danger of discussion manipulation. I routinely get accused of being a shill just for having a counter-group-think position on a topic Im read up on. It's meant to end discussion around a topic, like calling someine racist or sexist. At this point, I feel most of the people calling people shills are themselves shills trying to derail honest discussions. (There are definitely at least a few shills doing this on reddit.) I agree with your first point though: all media is the same, in that you need a diverse stream and critical thinking.
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  "To be honest, those shills on Reddit tend to be pretty obvious" It's often difficult to distinguish between people who are first-order shills and people who have just swallowed and regurgitated piece of PR from elsewhere.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    It can be insanely difficult, but at the same time, does it matter? If what someone has to offer is that pathetic, I don't honestly care who or what they are; life is too short for that.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
robertelder 10y ago
I'm a huge fan of Elon Musk, and I really want him to be successful, but sometimes I feel that the overzealous tendency of his fans (and likely PR people) to automatically give praise for anything he does or says (here on HN or on reddit) is actually counter-productive. What if Elon starts doing something dumb some day and then when well-informed people try to provide meaningful criticism, they just get criticised and downvoted? I think that could actually undermine support from some of the people that Elon wants it from the most.
- Clubber 10y ago
  I think Elon Musk has a bit of the reality distortion field around him like Jobs did. If you take a step back and look what he tries to achieve vs. what just about every other business (tech or not) does, it's a stark comparison. Musk no longer represents himself and his companies, but he represents a future where we can do things we thought were just dreams (cheap space travel, electric cars that perform better than internal combustion types, ubiquitous solar power, etc). That's a lot of future from just one guy.
  - noonespecial 10y ago
    >...he represents a future where we can do things we thought were just dreams He does more than just represent. He makes smart people believe that hard things are possible and that it's going to be worth it to try. A little bit of reality distortion can be a good thing, especially when reality is tending to suck.
    - AReallyGoodName 10y ago
      If there's a lot of financial analysts and engineers saying "this isn't feasible" and they are being ignored then that's a bad reality distortion field. Hyperloop One in particular comes to mind here. Some people say its feasible. Some say it isn't. Both have valid points. I like his work. I just don't want to see Musk fail due to lack of focus on one particular part of the dream and a lack of people on his team willing to say no.
digi_owl 10y ago
Wish i could relocate the comment on a Boingboing story where one of their admins mentioned having tracked comments on a certain topic to a online PR company. His attention was drawn to the comments because they were heavily reported when made, and would be largely of the same structure but with a new user name each time. So he pulled up the IP they came from and all of them was made from the company owned address.
- cknight 10y ago
  When the shills in question are lazy, it can be pretty straightforward to detect, yeah. This sort of thing was very high on my list of "problems that will need mitigating if this has any chance of working" with my Suitocracy project. The more research one does on astroturfing and the like, the more depressing it gets. Dedicated desktop VMs running different browsers and OS's, directed through different proxies to get different IPs, etc. Where social media is involved, detailed online personas are set up for each one, with reasonable histories for using later down the track. I think the best we can realistically do is to raise the cost of successful astroturfing/shilling to the point where it might not be economical to do, at least on a meaningful scale. As others have said, community involvement and skepticism play a huge role in that.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Yeah i think things have gotten more "professional" these days. I think it was happening back when blogging was the new buzzword, and MSM had taken to referring to sites in their news reports (complete with a screengrab of the article in a corner). I was only really checking out the site because of Doctorow's stuff, and was even turned away from that as he had the annoying habit of posting random horror articles alongside his tech stuff (and the rest of the writers seemed like the typical SXSW bunch).
diogenescynic 10y ago
It's very clear around certain topics--GMOs, pesticides, gun-control, and a few others. There are accounts that follow those keywords and only comment on related articles and only during 9-5 business hours.
- AlexCoventry 10y ago
  Could you list a few?
  - diogenescynic 10y ago
    Firemylasers, jf_queeny, sleekery, and Decapentaplegia are the most frequent I've noticed.
    - randomdata 10y ago
      > jf_queeny Considering that J. F. Queeny[1] founded Monsanto, that seems like a strange choice for a covert shill account. While I don't read much about other issues you may be referring to, being a farmer[2], I end up coming across the GMO and pesticide topic fairly often and I've noticed it tends to attract a lot of misinformation about agriculture. I expect, in many cases, these accounts follow these interest groups because they are easy targets to make fun of. Bullies perhaps, but unsurprisingly the internet has them just like the real world. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Francis_Queeny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Francis_Queeny [2] It's Sunday afternoon. You'll have to trust I'm not working overtime. :)
- bittercynic 10y ago
  No doubt reddit does have this problem in a big way, but the pattern you describe could also come from a true believer who spends a lot of their work day surfing reddit and trying to advance their cause.
- toufka 10y ago
  Likely true. However those particular topics are specifically ones where people with no informed background flippanlty reject the knowledgebase of people with professional background. And that casual disdain for life-long experience also can grid the gears of the informed strongly enough to comment.
DoodleBuggy 10y ago
This is obvious and has been for years. Reddit is full of astroturfers, spammers, marketers, disinformation, trolls, and other generally undesirable behavior. I generally look at reddit like one fractional step above facebook, it's basically internet pollution curated by the most effective spammers.
- rospaya 10y ago
  Then you're on the wrong subreddits. The ones I like the most are small or medium, have in depth conversations, analysis and interesting content. Or just gifs of cats, which is also something that I need from time to time. You tailor your own reddit experience.
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 10y ago
    "Or just gifs"... This was posted a week ago in nice little subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cinemagraphs/comments/5zirfy/my_first_cinemagraph_a_never_ending_can_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Cinemagraphs/comments/5zirfy/my_fir... Quote obvious product placement, right? Now, this is today's top cinemagraph: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cinemagraphs/comments/60wpk6/woman_smoking/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Cinemagraphs/comments/60wpk6/woman_... Less obvious, right? Or am I too skeptical?
jimhefferon 10y ago
One good example of this is that every morning there is on the front page of /r/all exactly one article about the nba. Never two, never zero.
- hsod 10y ago
  The r/all algorithm was tweaked last year during the election to prevent subreddits from flooding the front page. What you observe may simply be the result of that, rather than vote manipulation.
  - jrnichols 10y ago
    I'm more likely to blame vote manipulation, especially when it's a brand new anti-Trump sub (of which there seems to be a new one every few days) rising on r/all. The number of specifically anti-Trump subs is getting out of hand and I can't believe that they're all organic up votes at this point.
- ouid 10y ago
  you should demonstrate this with some data. It would be very interesting.
  - jimhefferon 10y ago
    Go there tomorrow morning. See for yourself.
    - kd0amg 10y ago
      "You should go collect my data for me" is something you tell your lab tech, not your unconvinced interlocutor.
      - jimhefferon 10y ago
        As opposed to, "You should do a fair amount of work to satisfy the idle curiosity of a random person on the internet"?
paulcole 10y ago
Really doing a disservice to those of us who do this for no pay, day in and day out, simply for the love of shitposting.
gist 10y ago
By the way the person (upvote seller) who was called in the first part of the video ironically didn't do his part to make sure that the caller wasn't scamming him. He didn't ask any questions and he didn't put the caller on the spot. Doing that (if well done) would have allowed him to potentially uncover the true purpose of the call even if it wasn't admitted. He allowed the caller to control the conversation (with his backstory) and as a result went along with everything and just answered questions. Also hard to believe that the average caller to this service asks questions like that and sounds like that. [1] Part of what I do involves ferreting out the truth when contacted by phone and by email so maybe this was just obvious to me after hearing the interaction. [1] Because they are real customers. Anyone who takes calls for a living and isn't asleep can usually tell the patterns of what a real customer sounds like.
Shivetya 10y ago
Why does this surprise anyone? I have a relative who is part of a PAC which "mobilizes" constantly to keep certain stories up high, nuke others, and even more. they aren't limited to reddit, she has a list of sites to get the word out on. the problem with fixing such issues is that many site owners want the traffic and some support the subject matter being pushed whether politics, education, products, or more. you don't even need paid groups to slant sites, the fanatics of some games, authors, or even technologies, have enough sycophants to insure their message is the only one heard
TheAceOfHearts 10y ago
Not surprising. I've grown increasingly tired of reddit over the last few months, but I haven't found an adequate alternative. Any suggestions? What sites do you commonly visit? Maybe this is my own bias showing, but whenever I read a Microsoft article on reddit, my shilling senses start tingling. I've seen a few confirmed examples, although luckily they usually end up getting banned.
- stagbeetle 10y ago
  Have you tried Voat? I couldn't stand it, but it works for some.
  - dahdum 10y ago
    I'm glad Voat exists, but it's not somewhere I frequent. The more Reddit and Twitter crack down on speech the faster Voat and Gab will grow.
    - yellow_viper 10y ago
      Voats model is good but filled with angry men (and the people on fatpeoplehate seem to be mainly women from what I've read). We need a max exodus from Reddit to even the odds
  - dashundchen 10y ago
    Every exodus from reddit to Voat is when the most toxic subreddits are closed - /r/jailbait, which was basically child porn, /r/altright, which was doxxing and putting out hitlists on those they disagreed with, some extremely racist subreddits I'd rather not write out. It's a cesspool of white supremacists and otherwise awful people.
- xatan_dank 10y ago
  I don't know if a shill-free alternative to Reddit could ever exist- I tend to think the openness and scale of Reddit (which is the whole point of it) is what allows shilling to occur. It really bums me out.
loudandskittish 10y ago
While this is bad, in my experience, I feel that paranoia about shills does far more damage to online communities than any paid shill could. ...or maybe I'm being paid to say that. (I wish I was).
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
noobermin 10y ago
So, I just posted a comment pointing out people like upvote club sell upvotes for HN, but it looks like at least they don't have the option to sell HN upvotes anymore. What happened, did the mods finally beat them? Or did they ask nicely that they stop that?
- theDoug 10y ago
  The market for false likes/views/followers/etc becomes an increasingly difficult place to sustain (especially financially) as detection of typically fraudulent use grows constantly easier with machine learning.
strathmeyer 10y ago
I'm pretty sure interviewing Gallowboob and taking what he says at face value is a pretty good example of being manipulated by a professional shill.
rallycarre 10y ago
I thought there was a story about nike interns(or some other big company) using interns to leave good reviews and comments on reddit. Anyways this is nothing new and something that obviously goes on without saying.
stuaxo 10y ago
Worth watching, I skipped past this a few times, as we all know it goes on, but it's good seeing him phone up a reputation agency and see what they say.

171 points by teslacar 10y ago

equivocates 10y ago

next week: hacker news is being manipulated by professional shills every day.

askafriend 10y ago
By definition, Hacker News is a professional shill. It's an arm of YC and has special interests as a community.
- sametmax 10y ago
  All communites have, but people from YC usually don't seem to hide their intention in communication (or they are good at it and I didn't notice). The problem is when people are doing PR for an entity, while pretending they are sharing news, insights or data.
  - alva 10y ago
    I agree that "shilling" really comes down to intent and transparency. Are you presenting the information and disclosing (this can be implicit if connection is obvious) your interests? I don't think most have a problem with that, however the particular forum or board might not be suitable for it.
    - sametmax 10y ago
      Indeed. The line is not clear though. Some people present a new services with show HN and are acclaimed, others are rejected as advertisers. HN like underdogs, innovators and good-doers, but is less laxed with big companies, status quo and money lovers. So if the later can disguise as the formers, they can game the system.
  - fullshark 10y ago
    Everyone here pretty much has a professional stake in the topics discussed, and most people don't disclose that stake. People may be honest about their thinking but their analysis is certainly biased.
- logicallee 10y ago
  it just so happens that those interests are around supporting founders so they can build huge companies and disrupt major industries. (No joke.) Question: do threads that are critical of YC companies get buried just because they're YC companies? (For example if Uber had YC investment, which a cursory glance says it doesn't, would the criticism of it have been buried by mods here)? (I say this because there were a lot of critical stories about Uber recently, and in the past, too.)
  - dang 10y ago
    The answer to your question is "of course not". When stories are critical of YC or YC-funded companies, we moderate them less than we otherwise would. I've posted about this many times: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20moderate%20yc%20less https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20pg%20chair https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&date.... This isn't because YC doesn't care about HN's business value. It's because YC knows what HN's value consists of: the community's curiosity and trust. That's the global optimum, so that's what's in YC's interests. It would be foolish to optimize for anything else.
    - logicallee 10y ago
      Thanks, dang. Though you've posted about it a lot I hadn't run across those comments yet - thanks for the links.
- dang 10y ago
  Isn't part of the definition of shilling that it's undisclosed? In that case, no: HN's business concessions to YC (job ads, and more recently Launch HNs) are public. Beyond those, we don't moderate HN specifically to promote YC's interests, and in fact err on the side of not doing so. You should see how sharply I scold YC startups who haven't yet had this drilled sufficiently into them. The best way to make HN valuable for YC is to optimize its value for the community, which is gratifying intellectual curiosity—so that's what we spend our time thinking about. I wrote more about this here if anyone's interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13861971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13861971.
  - gist 10y ago
    > Isn't it part of that definition that the shillage is undisclosed? I will point out before as I did the other day that both you and PG (very ironically) didn't/don't identify who you are with respect to HN. I haven't checked the other partners I have noticed that some do identify as YC partners. Would also expect that any YC funded company might identify themselves as such so their comments or postings could be taken in context. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang I personally think it's fine the way it operates but in all fairness the disclosure could be more than it is.
    - dang 10y ago
      That's a different concern. HN's culture has always been informal and implicit. That has upsides and downsides, but it's the way HN is and I'm loth to mess with it. People invoke 'disclosure', 'transparency', etc. as if these were unmitigated benefits, but when you delve into a complex system like HN they turn out to be tradeoffs. On HN the culture is not to spell everything out. That doesn't have to do with hiding anything; the information is all out there. It has to do with respecting users' intelligence, liking minimalism, liking users to have to work just a little, and so on. The downside of this approach is not that it obscures business interests—just think how excited the community would be to hit on something like that were we ever so dumb as to hide it!—but that it makes things harder for newcomers.
frik 10y ago
Sadly it's true. Some companies game the HN ranking algo, and employ shills to divert the discussion of their product. At least two companies (that are infamous for such shady tactics anyway) do it actively regularly on HN. The first thing to prevent it, would be to change the HN ranking algo so that stories with more comments than votes are not automatically punished and forced many pages backwards from the frontpage. Add a report button to report users. Implement an admin interface to monitor certain users and ban them.
- whitepoplar 10y ago
  Please name these companies!
  - cowpig 10y ago
    this--plus evidence too if you can find it please!
  - randomname2 10y ago
    This probably refers to Uber and Peter Thiel and companies associated to him? If they're manipulating HN they're not very good at it. Lately I'm seeing smear pieces against them appear on the front page on almost a daily basis and the tone in these threads is overwhelmingly toxic rather than positive.
- wickawic 10y ago
  I could be wrong but I felt this happened on the Spotify thread that is currently on the front page. All the inital reaction was negative, about how the piece was a 'submarine,' etc. Now the top 5 comments are about Spotify's new killer feature and how happy the customers are...
  - dang 10y ago
    I took a look at the thread I think you're referring to, and both those comments and their upvotes are by established users with no signs of fakery that either we or our software could pick up on. What you observed is probably a different phenomenon: early comments in a thread often start off negative, and only later do other users show up to post positively—their motivation being to balance things out. Often the positive comments to get the most upvotes in the end, but the whole process takes a while to play out. If you've ever run across a thread where the top comment says, "I can't believe how negative this thread is!" and proceeds to make a positive case with great fervor, this dynamic is probably why.
sametmax 10y ago
Well, sometime you see a personality or a topic getting traction out of the blue. Any critic get quickly downvoted. No debate seems to take place. I noticed that with Bill Gates. Before 2015, nothing different. In 2017, business as usual. But in 2016, Reddit, HN, Imgur suddenly had a surge of Gate support : success stories, interviews, praising using comments... It's just a supposition of course, I have nothing to back it up. But it makes sense to me that the PR experts have learned now that it can be very efficient to target online communities instead of spamming mass media. If they can influence them, then the PR will develop itself in an organic way, feel more honest and natural, and the community will spread the message outside of itself, giving the impression it's genuine. The best communication is the one that doesn't look like it. Controlling the big medias has been the challenge of the last century, but the intellectuals grew defiant of them. They rely more and more on cross referencing various sources and debating with communities made of their peers or people experts in one niche. This is the logical next move. Although it seems harder to pull out, in the long run the cost/benefit ration seems better because it relies on a intimate feeling of trust we develop with the communities. I know I do: I always read the comments before the articles on HN, because I trust the community to give me a better insight on the matter than the article itself. It's often the case. People are brilliant here, having a lot of accumulated knowledge, offering pieces of analysis, missing information, stories and counter points or even just summary that are the real added value of the site. So if the community now hosts subtle communication experts, they will (and probably already have) influence my point of view.
- deleted 10y ago
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- duncanawoods 10y ago
  > I noticed that with Bill Gates I suspect that one is probably just natural trend/popularity/fashion at work with the hive mind flocking in the same direction. Gates rebounded from the tech nadir to philanthropist, humanitarian and intelligent sayer of sensible things. A lot easier to like than when he had a foot on all our throats. Similar effect with GWB. He is rebounding from pariah status and people can't help but warm to the guy's personality now that his crimes are being overshadowed by much larger bogeymen.
awqrre 10y ago
Admins/mods on HN manipulate/modify a lot of the content created by users.
- grzm 10y ago
  Would you elaborate on this? What are your examples? Mods are known to update submission titles (in accordance with the guidelines), but I'm unaware of any other content changes they make.
  - awqrre 10y ago
    Some examples off the top of my head: 1. They detach comments from comment threads (to hide them?) 2. They boost some stories so that they remain on the home page for a longer time 3. They also remove some posts from the front page... (because they are duplicates, not "quality" content, etc...) I could probably come up with more examples, but I'm sure that you get the idea...
    - grzm 10y ago
      Thanks for clarifying. I read your comment as to mean mods updated the content of comments. All of the items you mention are actions the mods engage in in their role as moderators, which they themselves have described elsewhere.

M_Grey 10y ago

Just run under the assumption that all information is subject to intentional and unintentional bias, and requires careful analysis. It's a safe assumption most of the time, and you need to form that habit of thinking anyway. To be honest, those shills on Reddit tend to be pretty obvious, but then they have to be given their target audience. More importantly they only really exist on some parts of Reddit, and it's only really easy for them to get lost in the scrum on the big boards like politics and news. You get the occasional obvious bit of PR floating through ELI5 or AskScience, but it's quickly spotted and killed. When PR can be accomplished by random flaks, it's useful. When they require expertise on part with their targets to achieve their goals, it necessarily restricts their target pool, and increases their overhead.

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
I don't think shills are obvious, and I think the knee-jerk reaction to them is harmful. I don't mind reading shill posts when they're informational (heck, I read RT), but there is a real danger of discussion manipulation. I routinely get accused of being a shill just for having a counter-group-think position on a topic Im read up on. It's meant to end discussion around a topic, like calling someine racist or sexist. At this point, I feel most of the people calling people shills are themselves shills trying to derail honest discussions. (There are definitely at least a few shills doing this on reddit.) I agree with your first point though: all media is the same, in that you need a diverse stream and critical thinking.
crdoconnor 10y ago
"To be honest, those shills on Reddit tend to be pretty obvious" It's often difficult to distinguish between people who are first-order shills and people who have just swallowed and regurgitated piece of PR from elsewhere.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  It can be insanely difficult, but at the same time, does it matter? If what someone has to offer is that pathetic, I don't honestly care who or what they are; life is too short for that.

deleted 10y ago

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robertelder 10y ago

I'm a huge fan of Elon Musk, and I really want him to be successful, but sometimes I feel that the overzealous tendency of his fans (and likely PR people) to automatically give praise for anything he does or says (here on HN or on reddit) is actually counter-productive. What if Elon starts doing something dumb some day and then when well-informed people try to provide meaningful criticism, they just get criticised and downvoted? I think that could actually undermine support from some of the people that Elon wants it from the most.

Clubber 10y ago
I think Elon Musk has a bit of the reality distortion field around him like Jobs did. If you take a step back and look what he tries to achieve vs. what just about every other business (tech or not) does, it's a stark comparison. Musk no longer represents himself and his companies, but he represents a future where we can do things we thought were just dreams (cheap space travel, electric cars that perform better than internal combustion types, ubiquitous solar power, etc). That's a lot of future from just one guy.
- noonespecial 10y ago
  >...he represents a future where we can do things we thought were just dreams He does more than just represent. He makes smart people believe that hard things are possible and that it's going to be worth it to try. A little bit of reality distortion can be a good thing, especially when reality is tending to suck.
  - AReallyGoodName 10y ago
    If there's a lot of financial analysts and engineers saying "this isn't feasible" and they are being ignored then that's a bad reality distortion field. Hyperloop One in particular comes to mind here. Some people say its feasible. Some say it isn't. Both have valid points. I like his work. I just don't want to see Musk fail due to lack of focus on one particular part of the dream and a lack of people on his team willing to say no.

digi_owl 10y ago

Wish i could relocate the comment on a Boingboing story where one of their admins mentioned having tracked comments on a certain topic to a online PR company. His attention was drawn to the comments because they were heavily reported when made, and would be largely of the same structure but with a new user name each time. So he pulled up the IP they came from and all of them was made from the company owned address.

cknight 10y ago
When the shills in question are lazy, it can be pretty straightforward to detect, yeah. This sort of thing was very high on my list of "problems that will need mitigating if this has any chance of working" with my Suitocracy project. The more research one does on astroturfing and the like, the more depressing it gets. Dedicated desktop VMs running different browsers and OS's, directed through different proxies to get different IPs, etc. Where social media is involved, detailed online personas are set up for each one, with reasonable histories for using later down the track. I think the best we can realistically do is to raise the cost of successful astroturfing/shilling to the point where it might not be economical to do, at least on a meaningful scale. As others have said, community involvement and skepticism play a huge role in that.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Yeah i think things have gotten more "professional" these days. I think it was happening back when blogging was the new buzzword, and MSM had taken to referring to sites in their news reports (complete with a screengrab of the article in a corner). I was only really checking out the site because of Doctorow's stuff, and was even turned away from that as he had the annoying habit of posting random horror articles alongside his tech stuff (and the rest of the writers seemed like the typical SXSW bunch).

diogenescynic 10y ago

It's very clear around certain topics--GMOs, pesticides, gun-control, and a few others. There are accounts that follow those keywords and only comment on related articles and only during 9-5 business hours.

AlexCoventry 10y ago
Could you list a few?
- diogenescynic 10y ago
  Firemylasers, jf_queeny, sleekery, and Decapentaplegia are the most frequent I've noticed.
  - randomdata 10y ago
    > jf_queeny Considering that J. F. Queeny[1] founded Monsanto, that seems like a strange choice for a covert shill account. While I don't read much about other issues you may be referring to, being a farmer[2], I end up coming across the GMO and pesticide topic fairly often and I've noticed it tends to attract a lot of misinformation about agriculture. I expect, in many cases, these accounts follow these interest groups because they are easy targets to make fun of. Bullies perhaps, but unsurprisingly the internet has them just like the real world. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Francis_Queeny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Francis_Queeny [2] It's Sunday afternoon. You'll have to trust I'm not working overtime. :)
bittercynic 10y ago
No doubt reddit does have this problem in a big way, but the pattern you describe could also come from a true believer who spends a lot of their work day surfing reddit and trying to advance their cause.
toufka 10y ago
Likely true. However those particular topics are specifically ones where people with no informed background flippanlty reject the knowledgebase of people with professional background. And that casual disdain for life-long experience also can grid the gears of the informed strongly enough to comment.

DoodleBuggy 10y ago

This is obvious and has been for years. Reddit is full of astroturfers, spammers, marketers, disinformation, trolls, and other generally undesirable behavior. I generally look at reddit like one fractional step above facebook, it's basically internet pollution curated by the most effective spammers.

rospaya 10y ago
Then you're on the wrong subreddits. The ones I like the most are small or medium, have in depth conversations, analysis and interesting content. Or just gifs of cats, which is also something that I need from time to time. You tailor your own reddit experience.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 10y ago
  "Or just gifs"... This was posted a week ago in nice little subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cinemagraphs/comments/5zirfy/my_first_cinemagraph_a_never_ending_can_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Cinemagraphs/comments/5zirfy/my_fir... Quote obvious product placement, right? Now, this is today's top cinemagraph: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cinemagraphs/comments/60wpk6/woman_smoking/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Cinemagraphs/comments/60wpk6/woman_... Less obvious, right? Or am I too skeptical?

jimhefferon 10y ago

One good example of this is that every morning there is on the front page of /r/all exactly one article about the nba. Never two, never zero.

hsod 10y ago
The r/all algorithm was tweaked last year during the election to prevent subreddits from flooding the front page. What you observe may simply be the result of that, rather than vote manipulation.
- jrnichols 10y ago
  I'm more likely to blame vote manipulation, especially when it's a brand new anti-Trump sub (of which there seems to be a new one every few days) rising on r/all. The number of specifically anti-Trump subs is getting out of hand and I can't believe that they're all organic up votes at this point.
ouid 10y ago
you should demonstrate this with some data. It would be very interesting.
- jimhefferon 10y ago
  Go there tomorrow morning. See for yourself.
  - kd0amg 10y ago
    "You should go collect my data for me" is something you tell your lab tech, not your unconvinced interlocutor.
    - jimhefferon 10y ago
      As opposed to, "You should do a fair amount of work to satisfy the idle curiosity of a random person on the internet"?

paulcole 10y ago

Really doing a disservice to those of us who do this for no pay, day in and day out, simply for the love of shitposting.

gist 10y ago

By the way the person (upvote seller) who was called in the first part of the video ironically didn't do his part to make sure that the caller wasn't scamming him. He didn't ask any questions and he didn't put the caller on the spot. Doing that (if well done) would have allowed him to potentially uncover the true purpose of the call even if it wasn't admitted. He allowed the caller to control the conversation (with his backstory) and as a result went along with everything and just answered questions. Also hard to believe that the average caller to this service asks questions like that and sounds like that. [1] Part of what I do involves ferreting out the truth when contacted by phone and by email so maybe this was just obvious to me after hearing the interaction. [1] Because they are real customers. Anyone who takes calls for a living and isn't asleep can usually tell the patterns of what a real customer sounds like.

Shivetya 10y ago

Why does this surprise anyone? I have a relative who is part of a PAC which "mobilizes" constantly to keep certain stories up high, nuke others, and even more. they aren't limited to reddit, she has a list of sites to get the word out on. the problem with fixing such issues is that many site owners want the traffic and some support the subject matter being pushed whether politics, education, products, or more. you don't even need paid groups to slant sites, the fanatics of some games, authors, or even technologies, have enough sycophants to insure their message is the only one heard

TheAceOfHearts 10y ago

Not surprising. I've grown increasingly tired of reddit over the last few months, but I haven't found an adequate alternative. Any suggestions? What sites do you commonly visit? Maybe this is my own bias showing, but whenever I read a Microsoft article on reddit, my shilling senses start tingling. I've seen a few confirmed examples, although luckily they usually end up getting banned.

stagbeetle 10y ago
Have you tried Voat? I couldn't stand it, but it works for some.
- dahdum 10y ago
  I'm glad Voat exists, but it's not somewhere I frequent. The more Reddit and Twitter crack down on speech the faster Voat and Gab will grow.
  - yellow_viper 10y ago
    Voats model is good but filled with angry men (and the people on fatpeoplehate seem to be mainly women from what I've read). We need a max exodus from Reddit to even the odds
- dashundchen 10y ago
  Every exodus from reddit to Voat is when the most toxic subreddits are closed - /r/jailbait, which was basically child porn, /r/altright, which was doxxing and putting out hitlists on those they disagreed with, some extremely racist subreddits I'd rather not write out. It's a cesspool of white supremacists and otherwise awful people.
xatan_dank 10y ago
I don't know if a shill-free alternative to Reddit could ever exist- I tend to think the openness and scale of Reddit (which is the whole point of it) is what allows shilling to occur. It really bums me out.

loudandskittish 10y ago

While this is bad, in my experience, I feel that paranoia about shills does far more damage to online communities than any paid shill could. ...or maybe I'm being paid to say that. (I wish I was).

deleted 10y ago

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noobermin 10y ago

So, I just posted a comment pointing out people like upvote club sell upvotes for HN, but it looks like at least they don't have the option to sell HN upvotes anymore. What happened, did the mods finally beat them? Or did they ask nicely that they stop that?

theDoug 10y ago
The market for false likes/views/followers/etc becomes an increasingly difficult place to sustain (especially financially) as detection of typically fraudulent use grows constantly easier with machine learning.

strathmeyer 10y ago

I'm pretty sure interviewing Gallowboob and taking what he says at face value is a pretty good example of being manipulated by a professional shill.

rallycarre 10y ago

I thought there was a story about nike interns(or some other big company) using interns to leave good reviews and comments on reddit. Anyways this is nothing new and something that obviously goes on without saying.

stuaxo 10y ago

Worth watching, I skipped past this a few times, as we all know it goes on, but it's good seeing him phone up a reputation agency and see what they say.