4 ms·

Spambots on HN posting in cryptocurrency discussion

5 points by StanAngeloff 9y ago

I recently stumbled upon a Ripple article submitted on HN [1] [2]. The discussion itself seems to be dominated by spambots. This got me thinking, how much of the comments on HN are submitted by bots? If the article got more attention, the spambots would be virtually indistinguishable from regular chatter. Who benefits from "inventing" these bots? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14922965 [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170814204950/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14922965

gus_massa 9y ago
Most of these cases are detected automatically and the site is banned by the mods. See for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14886728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14886728 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14858303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14858303 In most cases they use only 5 or 6. Sometimes they are real users that only create an account to write a comment that says "Amazing!!!". Depending of the number of fake comments and if they retry, the site and users get a warning or are marked as autokilled. Anyway, it's better to send this kind of reports to hn@ycombinator.com , because these post may disappear unnoticed.
sctb 9y ago
We take this kind of abuse seriously, so please email us at hn@ycombinator.com if you ever see anything like it. The community is pretty sharp at detecting this kind of organized behavior though, especially with the combination of new accounts all about the same age with few or no prior contributions. We spend a lot of time on anti-abuse software to catch these as well.
greenyoda 9y ago
Interesting... In that thread, none of the commenters replied to any existing comment - they all replied at the top level. And it seems like a few skeptical comments were thrown in to make the discussion seem more credible - the users "cryptoscam" and "anash23" were also newly-created accounts with no other activity. The text doesn't seem like it was generated by bots, however. The comments get shorter and shorter (with more typos) as if someone was getting tired of typing all that stuff.

5 points by StanAngeloff 9y ago

gus_massa 9y ago

Most of these cases are detected automatically and the site is banned by the mods. See for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14886728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14886728 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14858303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14858303 In most cases they use only 5 or 6. Sometimes they are real users that only create an account to write a comment that says "Amazing!!!". Depending of the number of fake comments and if they retry, the site and users get a warning or are marked as autokilled. Anyway, it's better to send this kind of reports to hn@ycombinator.com , because these post may disappear unnoticed.

sctb 9y ago

We take this kind of abuse seriously, so please email us at hn@ycombinator.com if you ever see anything like it. The community is pretty sharp at detecting this kind of organized behavior though, especially with the combination of new accounts all about the same age with few or no prior contributions. We spend a lot of time on anti-abuse software to catch these as well.

greenyoda 9y ago

Interesting... In that thread, none of the commenters replied to any existing comment - they all replied at the top level. And it seems like a few skeptical comments were thrown in to make the discussion seem more credible - the users "cryptoscam" and "anash23" were also newly-created accounts with no other activity. The text doesn't seem like it was generated by bots, however. The comments get shorter and shorter (with more typos) as if someone was getting tired of typing all that stuff.