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I wonder how many pro-China green accounts, accounts used solely for anti-US sentiment, etc we will see commenting on this story. It seems the propaganda folks

I wonder how many pro-China green accounts, accounts used solely for anti-US sentiment, etc we will see commenting on this story. It seems the propaganda folks are turning more attention to HN. There were 3 at the time of this posting with the usual bothersiderisms, etc. One even went full "Sharia law in the US!"

marcelluspye 8y ago
It's nice that the green name is there for easy screening, but eventually, that goes away. HN is still small enough that this kind of spam is easy to detect, but it may not always be that way. Botting/this type of spam on reddit has gotten increasingly sophisticated over the years, and some of the things the people implementing that stuff have learned there would work pretty well on HN too.
- mrep 8y ago
  The green name goes away but if you aren't very active, you will then get automatically shadowbanned. I had a second account which I used to disclose specific things about the company I worked at but when I tried to reuse it after a while, all my posts went immediately to dead.
dang 8y ago
Please don't break the site guidelines by insinuating astroturfing or shillage without evidence. Someone having an opposing view to yours is not evidence. Neither is an account being new. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- JohnTHaller 8y ago
  I wasn't insinuating, I was stating. These types of troll/propaganda/astroturf accounts are obvious on the left/right or pro/anti-US side of things on Twitter/reddit and are similarly obvious here. You banned the specific account I mentioned for trolling. I was unaware that discussing astroturfing, trolling, and propaganda on HN was prohibited. Apologies, I will refrain from calling attention to it in the future.
  - dang 8y ago
    Ok—please don't state it without evidence either! I know it looks and feels super obvious, but I assure you this is an illusion. On the internet, people are orders of magnitude too quick to leap from "random user with obviously wrong opinion" to "obvious bot/astroturfer/paid shill". It's a crazy bias. We look into this stuff all the time, and 99% of the time it's just that some people disagree with you. More than 99% actually. Even when we ban an account for trolling, that's almost always someone whose sincere passions about a topic led them to violate the guidelines and not stop when we asked them to stop. That's not astroturfing. People are just very passionate about divisive issues.
TheForumTroll 8y ago
Please don't try to make this into Reddit.

marcelluspye 8y ago

It's nice that the green name is there for easy screening, but eventually, that goes away. HN is still small enough that this kind of spam is easy to detect, but it may not always be that way. Botting/this type of spam on reddit has gotten increasingly sophisticated over the years, and some of the things the people implementing that stuff have learned there would work pretty well on HN too.

mrep 8y ago
The green name goes away but if you aren't very active, you will then get automatically shadowbanned. I had a second account which I used to disclose specific things about the company I worked at but when I tried to reuse it after a while, all my posts went immediately to dead.

dang 8y ago

Please don't break the site guidelines by insinuating astroturfing or shillage without evidence. Someone having an opposing view to yours is not evidence. Neither is an account being new. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

JohnTHaller 8y ago
I wasn't insinuating, I was stating. These types of troll/propaganda/astroturf accounts are obvious on the left/right or pro/anti-US side of things on Twitter/reddit and are similarly obvious here. You banned the specific account I mentioned for trolling. I was unaware that discussing astroturfing, trolling, and propaganda on HN was prohibited. Apologies, I will refrain from calling attention to it in the future.
- dang 8y ago
  Ok—please don't state it without evidence either! I know it looks and feels super obvious, but I assure you this is an illusion. On the internet, people are orders of magnitude too quick to leap from "random user with obviously wrong opinion" to "obvious bot/astroturfer/paid shill". It's a crazy bias. We look into this stuff all the time, and 99% of the time it's just that some people disagree with you. More than 99% actually. Even when we ban an account for trolling, that's almost always someone whose sincere passions about a topic led them to violate the guidelines and not stop when we asked them to stop. That's not astroturfing. People are just very passionate about divisive issues.

TheForumTroll 8y ago

Please don't try to make this into Reddit.