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I use it in my mobile browser, mainly to try to force myself to visit other places, too. HN seems to have virtually no protection against large-scale astroturfi
by Sylos 8y ago
I use it in my mobile browser, mainly to try to force myself to visit other places, too. HN seems to have virtually no protection against large-scale astroturfing, and is big enough to be a target of it, so while I am skeptical of most things I read on here, I try to also just not expose myself too much to it.
And that also just because being skeptical of every piece of unsourced information isn't too great when having personal conversations. You don't have to believe every single rumor, but making people prove everything they tell you, that's just not very sociable.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoHave you noticed instances on HN that seem to you to be astroturfing ?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Sylos 8y agoI mean, it's impossible to say for sure that something is astroturfing, maybe it's just me having a particularly bad opinion of these companies, but for example Google and Microsoft often feel that way. When you look at controversial topics with these two companies in them, you often see a whole load of negative comments and then one or two chains of comments that defend them, declare people being negative about it as being unreasonable and you generally have multiple accounts responding to each other, agreeing that this really isn't too bad. And of course, these comment chains have been voted to the top. The last part doesn't have to be a result of astroturfing, HN's voting system encourages controversial comments, as more people are able to upvote than downvote comments, but yeah, that doesn't exactly make the platform as a whole a better place.