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I agree that its poisonous and it destroys discourse. But what else are we supposed to do? Pretend such things are honest discourse, and be manipulated by them?

by throwaway2048 9y ago

I agree that its poisonous and it destroys discourse. But what else are we supposed to do? Pretend such things are honest discourse, and be manipulated by them? Pretending that the widespread existence of paid shilling isn't reality is at least as toxicly corrosive to honest discourse that moves things forward. Both choices suck, but what the hell are we supposed to do exactly? Let these clowns win?

dang 9y ago
Actually the solution is simple: email your concerns about specific cases to hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into them, but don't make posts to HN insinuating astroturfing or shillage unless you have evidence, and remember that someone happening to hold a different view than you doesn't count as evidence. If we all follow that approach I'm pretty sure the community will be ok. Believe me, we take great pleasure on behalf of the community in clubbing actual manipulation when we find it. The problem with what you're saying above is that you don't have any way to distinguish "such things" from what merely look like "such things". There are many more of the latter, and there are plenty of HN users who feel the same way as you but who see a completely different set of posts as "such things". If we take the union of all those sets it amounts to most of what gets posted to HN. Just imagine everybody with such perceptions doing a j'accuse on everybody else with such perceptions; this would destroy the community much more quickly than astroturfing ever could. So we all have to be disciplined about this—vigilant, sure, but also disciplined in how we react to what we think we see. I like a thing that Rilke said: Doubt, but turn your doubt also upon itself.
- 68c12c16 9y ago
  It is the doubt and suspicion thus generated that are really toxic...as it takes one a long time and non-trivial effort in order to concretely verify any evidence of paid shilling -- and before that, for all this long time, we have to doubt and suspect, which would soon make it quite discouraging to have any interesting discussion... We could send emails to hn@ycombinator.com , but the thing is that I don't know how long it would take for us to get any feedback -- as presumably, this is largely a manual investigation on the mod's part; and I don't know how many such emails a mod would receive in a day...and during all this time of waiting for feedback or a possible action, a regular user engaging in a discussion might have to bear all the attacks and gaslighting -- and sometimes the attacker(s) could be quite insidious... For instance, I used to have another new account, which had very little karma points...And after making a few comments for the first time, one of which contained some discussion about the censorship by the Chinese government ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14742211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14742211 ) -- then two of my other comments (relatively neutral and containing nothing about Chinese government or so), which I did not think were aggressive or factually erroneous, soon had been downvoted multiple times. As a result, my karma points dropped sharply, and my account was soon forbidden by the system to make any new comment for some time (basically, it had been DoS'ed)... I still do not know at this time if there was any intentional manipulation behind that case... Well, I could have reported the incident, as a possible malicious DoS attack on my account, to the mod -- but I was also banned by the system at the time and could not continue with the discussion for a while...Or I could register another new account...The thing is, it is just getting quite uninteresting and discouraging for people who want to have some real discussion to stay on... I have to say that I don't know a better solution, as in such similar situations, than sending complaints to the mod...but I just feel that perhaps this solution is still not enough to fix the whole problem... ====================== Edit 1: I just looked it up and found that gaslighting is indeed an attack vector: a form of manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or members of a group, hoping to make targets question their own memory, perception, and sanity. Using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying, it attempts to destabilize the target and delegitimize the target's belief. (as defined in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting)
68c12c16 9y ago
sigh...what if the real purpose of a potential instigator is to spread doubt and suspicion among a community, instead of promoting favorable views for a specific government or organization? Just look at America in this post-911 era -- the real cost of that attack to our society has been several magnitudes greater than the cost of the original damage...

dang 9y ago

Actually the solution is simple: email your concerns about specific cases to hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into them, but don't make posts to HN insinuating astroturfing or shillage unless you have evidence, and remember that someone happening to hold a different view than you doesn't count as evidence. If we all follow that approach I'm pretty sure the community will be ok. Believe me, we take great pleasure on behalf of the community in clubbing actual manipulation when we find it. The problem with what you're saying above is that you don't have any way to distinguish "such things" from what merely look like "such things". There are many more of the latter, and there are plenty of HN users who feel the same way as you but who see a completely different set of posts as "such things". If we take the union of all those sets it amounts to most of what gets posted to HN. Just imagine everybody with such perceptions doing a j'accuse on everybody else with such perceptions; this would destroy the community much more quickly than astroturfing ever could. So we all have to be disciplined about this—vigilant, sure, but also disciplined in how we react to what we think we see. I like a thing that Rilke said: Doubt, but turn your doubt also upon itself.

68c12c16 9y ago
It is the doubt and suspicion thus generated that are really toxic...as it takes one a long time and non-trivial effort in order to concretely verify any evidence of paid shilling -- and before that, for all this long time, we have to doubt and suspect, which would soon make it quite discouraging to have any interesting discussion... We could send emails to hn@ycombinator.com , but the thing is that I don't know how long it would take for us to get any feedback -- as presumably, this is largely a manual investigation on the mod's part; and I don't know how many such emails a mod would receive in a day...and during all this time of waiting for feedback or a possible action, a regular user engaging in a discussion might have to bear all the attacks and gaslighting -- and sometimes the attacker(s) could be quite insidious... For instance, I used to have another new account, which had very little karma points...And after making a few comments for the first time, one of which contained some discussion about the censorship by the Chinese government ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14742211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14742211 ) -- then two of my other comments (relatively neutral and containing nothing about Chinese government or so), which I did not think were aggressive or factually erroneous, soon had been downvoted multiple times. As a result, my karma points dropped sharply, and my account was soon forbidden by the system to make any new comment for some time (basically, it had been DoS'ed)... I still do not know at this time if there was any intentional manipulation behind that case... Well, I could have reported the incident, as a possible malicious DoS attack on my account, to the mod -- but I was also banned by the system at the time and could not continue with the discussion for a while...Or I could register another new account...The thing is, it is just getting quite uninteresting and discouraging for people who want to have some real discussion to stay on... I have to say that I don't know a better solution, as in such similar situations, than sending complaints to the mod...but I just feel that perhaps this solution is still not enough to fix the whole problem... ====================== Edit 1: I just looked it up and found that gaslighting is indeed an attack vector: a form of manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or members of a group, hoping to make targets question their own memory, perception, and sanity. Using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying, it attempts to destabilize the target and delegitimize the target's belief. (as defined in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting)

68c12c16 9y ago

sigh...what if the real purpose of a potential instigator is to spread doubt and suspicion among a community, instead of promoting favorable views for a specific government or organization? Just look at America in this post-911 era -- the real cost of that attack to our society has been several magnitudes greater than the cost of the original damage...