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>They going to abuse your platform to the extreme to promote their views. Facebook and twitter _encourage_ people to abuse their platform, that's why you can w
by mattigames 7y ago
>They going to abuse your platform to the extreme to promote their views.
Facebook and twitter _encourage_ people to abuse their platform, that's why you can write 100 tweets from one account on a single day and they don't try to stop you at all, they know all that content will show up in their statistics, it will also make other users reply to those comments and so on; so in the end they have all incentives to keep their platform filled with people enraged with each other.
>If a small group of dedicated people wanted to ruin Hacker News for the rest of us, I have no doubt in my mind that they could.
I'm not so sure, unlike Facebook HN is not a for-profit (Ycombinator is, Hacker news is not) so something as simple as only allowing comments from user accounts created before the attack started would mitigate the problem until a better solution is slowly deployed.
Also, Facebook cannot ban an IP because other non-attacking users may be using that very same IP, a little site like HN loses nothing by banning offending IPs, a site like Facebook would get a gigantic backlash that would hurt the bottom line: Their valuation.
- olefoo 7y agoIP banning is not effective in an era of disposable VPNs and Tor. I mean you could try to keep up with Tor exit nodes and VPN gateways but pretty soon you'd be banning all of Azerbaijan or something.
- carokann 7y agoYeah and regardless of their efficiency, there are people who use dynamic IP. (not by choice)
- SiempreViernes 7y agoIp banning for new accounts together with creation time exceptions seems pretty good thought: almost all existing users would be unaffected. Only costs you growth untill you find some extras to put into the account creation process.
- icebraining 7y agoWhich "extras", though?
- satanspastaroll 7y agoA lot of users also post from mobile devices, which is usually behind a carrier-nat, which tends to swap the address very, very often
- TeMPOraL 7y agoIP banning has lost a lot of its effectiveness when ISPs started putting people behind NATs and recycling their IPs (which was a long time ago), and further lost effectiveness with the advent of smartphones and mobile Internet connections.
- mattigames 7y agoYeah, I stand corrected
- swebs 7y ago>a little site like HN loses nothing by banning offending IPs They would gain nothing either, since you get a new IP address every time you reset your router or connect to 4g.
- TheAdamAndChe 7y agoNo, something would be gained. It would increase the energy required to continue their campaign. There are many people who won't put forth that energy.
- wvenable 7y agoIf you haven't experienced it yourself it can be difficult to grasp exactly how much energy people will put towards harassment. Coupled with infinite creativity and no shame even a single person can do a lot of damage. My original point is the equation is actually the other way around; mitigations on attacks will ultimately require more energy than the attacks themselves. For you it's exhausting, for them it's exhilarating.