18 ms·

I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts

393 points by troydavis 6y ago

mtmail 6y ago
In the past I have pointed the HN moderators (contact link is the footer) to threads with sock puppets. Some are easy to recognize, e.g. new users praising a service that got submitted only 10 minutes ago. Sometimes it's harder to find a pattern. Do email the HN moderators if you suspect fraud or unfair practices.
- troydavis 6y ago
  Normally they're pretty trivial like you said. This one is extensive: 20+ sockpuppet HN and Reddit accounts and dozens of fake blog posts submitted to many of the largest Medium-style blogs. It's an entire propaganda network just devoted to content marketing.
  - barumi 6y ago
    20+ accounts is pretty small potatos for a content marketer.
    - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
      Probably just one persons side hustle while they're on fire watch at work. But then again they could be a foot soldier for an appropriately compartmentalized consortium.
- walrus01 6y ago
  An interesting question is to what extent they're jumping through hoops to appear as distinct, legitimate, real users. Such as: a) using a proxy from a residential ISP somewhere b) never putting two or more sock puppets behind the same IP. Or assuming exclusive ipv4 use, not even any two clients from within the same /20 to /18 sized netblocks. c) a reasonably varied selection of ISPs. Also variation in ISP netblock geolocation (maxmind geoIP database or similar) based on ARIN, RIPE, APNIC etc registration data. Obviously if you're promoting something that's very tech/startup industry oriented it would not be as suspicious if you had a bunch of posters "authentically discussing it" that geolocated to the SF bay area and Seattle. d) a reasonably varied selection of common user agents. Also intentional variation on operating system and browser fingerprinting variables. e) intentional training to avoid writing patterns and phrases that might seem similar, when one person is driving ten accounts f) not doing dumb stuff that gives away your time zone, like if you have a bunch of people in a GMT+4 time zone that post things regularly on a 9-5 daytime work schedule, when they're supposed to be pretending to be ordinary internet users in a USA time zone. From a black hat network engineering perspective there are a lot of ways that one human driving 30 sock puppets can appear from 30 distinct locations, as if there were 30 real humans with 30 different operating systems/computers/browser user agents and browser fingerprints. As to what level of analysis tools are run on the server side to detect "low effort" sock puppets, that's another question. From the point of view of a place where fake accounts/sock puppets post things, obviously an organization like twitter has a lot more staff resources to devote to writing custom analysis and correlation tools. Specifically for the purpose of identifying common patterns in inauthentic accounts. I presume that dang and the people who run the ycombinator admin interface can see the IP address of every poster next to the post's timestamp, and might notice in a manual fashion if a lot of suspicious posts started showing up all from the same netblocks. But then again maybe not. If you want to see the tip of an iceberg of one method for running sockpuppets, go google "residential proxies for sale" and start looking through the slickly presented marketing material. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=residential+proxies+for+sale https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=residenti...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
troydavis 6y ago
The Twitter thread has a lot more. There's a person or firm who is doing black-hat content marketing at scale. They either approach freelance bloggers to write articles about their clients (to be submitted to Medium-hosted and similar blogs as if written by unaffiliated users), or create Medium profiles for fake names and write the posts themselves. Posts have appeared in Better Programming, DEV.to, FAUN, freeCodeCamp, HackerNoon, ITNEXT, JS in Plain English, Level Up, Towards Data Science, and other aggregators. From there, they use dozens of fake Reddit and HN accounts to submit, comment on, and artificially boost their own posts. They also submit some unrelated cover posts. You can see some of these on HN here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Aabjecton%20by%3Aargh-man%20by%3Acryptofits%20by%3Abreadandcrumbel%20by%3AEdward9%20by%3Aflywithdolp%20by%3AGeneloJ%20by%3Ahaybanusa%20by%3Ahyustan%20by%3Aiflywithbook%20by%3Ainvestologia%20by%3Aiunternik%20by%3AOwnsE%20by%3Aplastic_teeth%20by%3Apoticer%20by%3Aprescojan%20by%3Apresiozo%20by%3Aruffmill%20by%3Ashirak_untel%20by%3Athereyougo%20by%3Atruckster%20by%3Auinerimak%20by%3AWoodenKatana&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... They have sockpuppet Reddit accounts doing the same thing across 10s of subreddits. Here's the set of clients I know of (https://twitter.com/troyd/status/1316020415995674624 https://twitter.com/troyd/status/1316020415995674624): AccessiBe ClimaCell Imperva Loadmill Rookout Labs WhiteSource (AKA SecureCoding dot com) Testcraft I have no idea what they thought they were buying, but what they were receiving was black-hat content marketing at large scale. There may be other clients I don't know of. Here's some Medium profiles of authors, where you'll see those companies get plugged over and over. I expect some of these will be removed by the authors soon: https://medium.com/@AntonLawrence https://medium.com/@AntonLawrence https://medium.com/@Justin_Parsons https://medium.com/@Justin_Parsons https://medium.com/@geeostan8 https://medium.com/@geeostan8 https://medium.com/@Dickson_Mwendia https://medium.com/@Dickson_Mwendia https://medium.com/@arinoman https://medium.com/@arinoman https://medium.com/@oyetoketoby80 https://medium.com/@oyetoketoby80 https://medium.com/@mrsaeeddev https://medium.com/@mrsaeeddev https://medium.com/@ginomessmer https://medium.com/@ginomessmer https://medium.com/@diptokmk47 https://medium.com/@diptokmk47 https://medium.com/@sajjadheydari74 https://medium.com/@sajjadheydari74 https://medium.com/@ngwaifoong92 https://medium.com/@ngwaifoong92 https://medium.com/@SeanHig https://medium.com/@SeanHig https://medium.com/@henson.casper https://medium.com/@henson.casper https://hackernoon.com/u/ari-noman https://hackernoon.com/u/ari-noman https://hackernoon.com/u/diptokmk47 https://hackernoon.com/u/diptokmk47 There's probably others I'm missing. If you run a blog and one of these companies is mentioned in a post that doesn't disclose an affiliation, it may well be fake. I contacted many of the publishers above. To quote Quincy of freeCodeCamp in https://twitter.com/ossia/status/1316216151802667008 https://twitter.com/ossia/status/1316216151802667008 after he researched this: "Stay vigilant, friends."
aaron695 6y ago
I think the GAN (prob actually not a GAN) that's months old on HN and posts rubbish and gets replys from mods and people and gets lots of karma is much more interesting Imagine what it'd be like if AI wasn't all overhyped garage. Downvoted I guess. Oh, AI that can group think. That would be evil.
- tomcam 6y ago
  I have upvoted you in hopes that you will provide a link to some of the posts you suspect were generated by a GAN
  - aaron695 6y ago
    It's prolific. If you read comments you will have seen it. Question is why only one person has called it ( I can see ) It's not against written HN rules, bots are not allowed in unwritten rules, but is it a bot bot? What more interesting is it's not a ring ( I assume it's upvoted by normal users) They will be hard to detect. This bot could just calm down and fly under the radar and use upvoting and downvoting to control naratives. By the hundreds. Need to get people to read comments, as compared to finding a word in them that confirms groupthink and upvoting.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - tomcam 6y ago
      One of the main reasons I read hacker news is the comments. To me they make this site one of the great wonders of the Internet world. Would you mind linking to a few of them that you regard as non-human generated?
      - aaron695 6y ago
        I sent you a email. I just ask you don't pass it on since I think what is more important is people on HN think more about comments. (Or call it themselves) Its history and upward karma are interesting. I think it's clever in that it anthropomorphizes itself to reduce attack. Next step would be to hint at mental illness. But it's about comment quality. Blackhat, pretend OpenAI intelligence don't matter. Comments need to speak for themselves.
kaffee 6y ago
Does anyone know about the legality of this? My suspicion is that this black-hat content marketing is perfectly legal under US law. It's only potentially a violation of individual platforms' TOS (or publishing agreements). Is this approximately correct?
- dr-detroit 6y ago
  When I learned about SEO the guides all started from flimsy scams like these (Virtual Private Blogs used to be all the rage in SEO) and worked backwards to good inbound marketing fundamentals. Its legal but the algorithms punish it.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  It may fall under the FTC’s regulations on influencer endorsements: https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-releases/ftc-publishes-final-guides-governing-endorsements-testimonials/091005revisedendorsementguides.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-re...
  - kaffee 6y ago
    I thought this was mostly unenforced or unenforceable in cases like this -- where it would be really hard to prove that someone took a payment. I'll keep digging. Thanks! One more thing -- this isn't an explicit endorsement. It's content marketing. I rather thought that made even the FTC rules hard to apply. Also: "The Guides are not regulations, and so there are no civil penalties associated with them. But if advertisers don’t follow the guides, the FTC may decide to investigate whether the practices are unfair or deceptive under the FTC Act." https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/media-resources/truth-advertising/advertisement-endorsements https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/media-resources/truth-advert... edit: more details
    - JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
      I would presume there is a 1099 or W2 somewhere, unless this is happening internationally.
- 6y ago
jchb 6y ago
What about building a service, perhaps a web browser plugin, that overlays a trust-worthiness score + contextual information, over text (bonus for images) on the web? If a user posts "I recommend product X", the overlay would say "Caution: This user also recommended the product Y,Z in the last 48 hours. 34/34 of the users post in the last month are product recommendations. Sentiment score for users posts: 100% positive. The following internet accounts are likely controlled by the same individual or organization: ..." Is it feasible? Does it already exist?
- jimbomorrison 6y ago
  Super interesting. We're working on something similar within the news ecosystem. See https://onesub.io/chrome https://onesub.io/chrome for the extension (and https://onesub.io/mission https://onesub.io/mission for our wider mission)..
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- sjg007 6y ago
  Somewhat feasible. You really need distributed fact checking to scale up especially since you don’t have source ips. If you can do that you might have something if you can keep participation up.
  - Pokepokalypse 6y ago
    and never forget: the black hats will never stop trying to game any system you try to come up with. At this point in time, I think it's pretty clear they have a strong upper-hand.
  - noizejoy 6y ago
    Do source ips still help at all? These days it seems to be rather easy to visit a website from numerous different source ips.
    - dang 6y ago
walrus01 6y ago
> I didn't know that black-hat content marketing existed seriously? I think I first saw it in 1996. Sock puppets are nothing new or innovative as a general concept.
- reactchain 6y ago
  Yeah, this has been going on for a long time. The methods evolve, but the bullshit stays the same [1]. Good rules of thumb: 1. If it praises a product, the article was paid for 2. If it has a link that looks even slightly out of place, that link was paid for 3. With few exceptions, most of the revenue for the publication comes from selling features and backlinks (much more than subscriptions and ads). [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- troydavis 6y ago
  > seriously? I think I first saw it in 1996. Sock puppets are nothing new or innovative as a general concept. Sock puppets have existed for a long time, but turning it into a contract service for clients, selling it to well-known startups, and scaling it up this big is not something I've seen before. (also, hi from NANOG and the SIX ages ago!)
  - walrus01 6y ago
    Hi Troy! Response below written not so much for you to read, but everyone else looking at the thread. On a large scale there is a big overlap between the general concept of operating a low-cost call center in a developing nation that speaks English (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh). This has been taken to its most blackhat extent by the people who are running call centers for the fake "fix your PC it has viruses now, we are Microsoft support" scammers. Or even worse the fake Internal Revenue Service / Canada Revenue Agency type scam call centers. The operating costs in monthly salary per human, and office rental, basic desktop PCs, electricity, telecom services are all very similar between the different grey/black hat business models. If you have humans talking to other humans by voice, you've got a bunch of $20 headsets with boom mics plugged directly into the desktop PCs, some SIP softphones, an asterisk setup, and a router/VPN connection back to a bunch of grey market SIP trunks. The voice part is obviously not necessary if it's just click workers. Assume for a moment that your office and computer equipment is a sunk cost, and you've got a room full of dudes working a 6-day work week and paying them each $250 a month. They each need to bring in revenue of something like $10-11 per day to break even on the payroll. Obviously this "business model" is somewhat dependent upon finding a place that has a sufficiently large pool of low-wage, but moderately educated people who can drive desktop PCs, and a place to put your call center type environment in low cost commercial real estate. Thus my mention in another comment about Bangladesh. Some organizations went into the gold farming market to hire people at the equivalent of $250 USD/month to repetitively perform tasks in MMORPG games and then sell the virtual currency/assets to people in the US/Canada/Europe with extra money to spend. After that, they quickly discovered that it could be more lucrative to have one person run 30 reddit accounts (or twitter, whatever) and get paid to upvote stuff to the front page. If one business model fails, you take the same office environment and temporarily convert the workers to doing another task. Or you have a mixture of tasks going on simultaneously for the click workers. People with difficult accents or less than optimal phone skills, that cannot successfully scam a person and then transfer them to the higher-ranked "closer", are positioned for these click worker tasks.
warent 6y ago
I don't endorse this behavior at all but can it really be said to be black-hat? imho seems more gray to me. From what I understand, content _is_ being generated and there are attempts to boost the SEO, so they're providing a service and it's not outright theft. At worst it just sounds like poor practice and gaming the system. They're not acting maliciously, illegally, and/or destructively, which is how I've always defined black-hat. Am I missing something?
- troydavis 6y ago
  If this isn't black-hat, what is? Specifically, an author not disclosing an affiliation or payment, fake accounts promoting it, and fake accounts commenting on those promotions. In the continuum between white and black, what's left on the black side? :-)
  - twmahna 6y ago
    Some examples that come to mind: click fraud, phishing, malware.
    - bilbo0s 6y ago
      That doesn't preclude the techniques we're discussing here, it only adds other techniques to the black hat tool box.
      - ineedasername 6y ago
        I think the point is that those activities are clearly "black hat", while astroturfing isn't inherently illegal. (well, maybe in some jurisdictions it is. I seem to recall that the UK has much stricter "truth in advertising" laws than the US) It all exists on a spectrum though, and we can disagree on where the line for black hat is drawn, with no one being wrong because it's a matter of opinion.
  - bootcampwhere 6y ago
    You dummy. How about actual fraud? Hijacking sites, puting in secret back links. Paying for content is not black hat.
justiceforsaas 6y ago
"I didn't know that black-hat content marketing existed" (from the Twitter thread) I haven't laughed so hard in months :))) I've talked with over 150 founders (I'm running a website that deals with acquisition channels & user growth [1]) and this is like uncovering 0.01% of what's going on out there. I became friends with some of these founders, and some of them admitted that a significant part of their growth was "paying for being featured in publication X" Don't get me wrong, I'm against this "black hat content marketing" practice, but let's also consider the other perspective: a) 80% of the content on publications like TechCrunch [2] is all about Google/Apple/Tesla/Virgin. I challenge, you go there RIGHT NOW. COUNT the % of stories about FAANG companies. As the markets go into a "winner takes all" mode, these publications only cover the big winners. So people only hear about them, which amplifies the whole "winner takes all" thing, and the vicious circle continues. Some of these big publications have made "attempts" to be "indie-friendly", but that's one big BS. I won't name the company I contacted (it's a biger publication). I basically told them: Hey guys, got an interesting article that was featured on HN front page 3 days ago, can I do a deeper piece for your publication? Their answer: "Oh, that's great, go to our sister website X.com, we feature non-FAANG there". X.com was a website that wasn't even in the Alexa top 1M list. I also have some doubts that the OP has removed some bigger publication names (maybe afraid of getting sued? No idea). My point is: As publications get more "closed", the incentive for getting there via other means is going to get bigger. [1] https://www.firstpayingusers.com https://www.firstpayingusers.com [2] https://techcrunch.com https://techcrunch.com
- troydavis 6y ago
  > I also have some doubts that the OP has removed some bigger publication names (maybe afraid of getting sued? No idea). Just for completeness: I have not. This is everything I have near-certainty of. I omitted 2 or 3 possible authors who I'm not sure of because I'm not willing to accuse someone with less than near-certainty (where certainty would be their admission). If I knew anything else, I'd have posted it. Maybe more importantly, I don't have any reason to believe publishers knew this was happening, and have every reason to believe the opposite. Many of these blogs take transparency and disclosure really seriously.
- ztusers 6y ago
_where 6y ago
There are no fake accounts. There are only accounts or not. There are no sockpuppet bloggers; those are called bloggers. If you go down the fake road, you have to realize real news by real reporters is often wrong. I’ve had someone in law enforcement tell me the news accidentally labeled them the victim on televised news and didn’t correct it. Classbooks written for US public school students- I understand that some content in them has been incorrect and intentionally biased. There is truth, but it’s an ideal. I’m glad that this is calling out those that are manipulating people, but on the other hand- what is the goal? Will shaming bring fairness? We could have communist dictatorial leaders enforcing their version of truth, if you’d rather have that sort of thing. Our president should tell the truth, and it should be a scandal if not, to a point of course, because I’d bet most have lied at times. But if it’s time to activate something like a libel superpower on the internet, how would that even work in a fair and practical way? Freedom of speech cannot be freedom only to tell truth; truth can be aspired to, but not necessarily known by all, and what’s understood to be truth by some may change. So, really, what should be done? Btw- I’ve done my best in past years to tell the truth as much as I can when I’m not kidding around, and it typically makes things difficult, but better. I’m not recommending anyone fake up things to boost rep. But, it’s happening, it’s not good, and I don’t see how AI or oversight or a control play would end well when it comes to enforcing truth. However, the notion of a “fake” account is what allows most of the users to post content on HN and Reddit more freely.
- walrus01 6y ago
  > By the way, there are no fake accounts. There are only accounts or not. Yes, until we see a great advancement in AI, actual meat based mammals are driving these accounts. > There are no sockpuppet Sometimes it seems like half of Twitter is fake accounts. You've never seen photos or videos of a Bangladeshi click farm? 50 people sitting in small cubicles running proxy-connected virtual machines on desktop PCs, posting stuff, upvoting things on reddit, etc? I assure you that such things exist. Some of the places that used to do MMORPG gold mining to trade virtual currency for real money have shifted into the market, because it's much more lucrative. You've never seen the pictures from China of 1 person sitting in front of a board with 40 budget android phones mounted on it, upvoting and reviewing apps?
rexreed 6y ago
Isn't this extremely common honestly? Isn't this so common it has names like "astroturfing" and "growth hacking"? This so not black hat that it's basically just regular ol' hat. Yeah creating fake grass roots support isn't particularly new, and I would venture that it's been around as long as there's been marketing.
- austinpena 6y ago
  Yes. Reddit upvotes are dirt cheap and sites sell article spots all the time.
- chrisweekly 6y ago
  I feel it's unfortunate "growth hacking" took on this connotation (ie, "comparable to astroturfing / fraudulent by definition", given the need for a term to describe (genuine / above-board / white-hat) creative approaches to connecting your idea with a market. Reminiscent of "hacker:cracker" usage divide, more generally.
- whoisjuan 6y ago
  It is extremely common. These companies probably bought something that was described as something more benign and ethical. And I totally understand. If you’re a small company you don’t have time to do further check-ins. They probably get you with a good pitch about influencer marketing for a niche area and that sounds nice enough to many to consider putting some money on it.
- ziml77 6y ago
  I read a couple of the tweets and some other comments, but I didn't realize until I reached your comment that they were talking about legit services using those marketing techniques! I thought they meant black hat services were trying to act legit by paying for publicity that would paint them that way...
- andygcook 6y ago
  This happens in the real world too. IIRC, Stonyfield yogurt had their friends and family buy the product when it was newly on the shelf at groceries to make it look like it was selling well enough to get picked up permanently.
twmahna 6y ago
Is this actually news to people? This has been happening for decades. The purpose is largely for SEO / sometimes for actual traffic. Just go google "private blog networks" (pbn) or "link farm".
- troydavis 6y ago
  > Is this actually news to people? Good question. The thing that was news to me is that it's happening on very large blogs, not random sites and that it's being sold to and used by well-known startups. Like you, I expect sockpuppet accounts and random linkbuilding garbage, just not at this scale or with this much distribution.
  - twmahna 6y ago
    Welcome to the world of black hat services => https://www.blackhatworld.com/forums/seo-packages.206/ https://www.blackhatworld.com/forums/seo-packages.206/
    - w-ll 6y ago
      lol. sus tho I like how this site has a cookie policy overlay.
    - technion 6y ago
      The thing to note there is that despite being on a "black hat" website, most of those ads are from marketing or SEO companies linking to their own legitimate company websites. It's clear most of them just see this as how internet marketing is done. I also note that as a not logged in user, the Twitter just shows me "related tweets" from people actually hiring or offering to sell social media content.
  - solumos 6y ago
    Not only very large blogs - the Forbes contributor program is probably the biggest example of "linkbuilding garbage"
- chrisweekly 6y ago
api 6y ago
Social media -- including this site -- is far more manipulated than people even begin to realize. Social media propaganda and sock puppetry is a huge industry.
- dang 6y ago
  I'm curious how you think you know that about HN, because if that's true, you know much more about it than I do.
  - radmuzom 6y ago
    Not the OP and I cannot provide any evidence. However, for a large number of controversial topics, I try to guess the top comment in my head before opening the comments page. My estimate is that 70-80% of the times I guess it right.
    - dang 6y ago
      That would be evidence that people on the internet are predictable, not evidence of manipulation. Predictability on the internet, which increases both with group size and with the divisiveness of a topic, is also a huge problem for HN [1]. But it's not the problem we've been discussing in this thread, and I think it's important to make clear distinctions between the issues. It's common for people to leap from some other issue to "astroturfing! shill! spy!" explanations, instead of facing the original issue. [1] Here's why, if anyone wants an explanation. Predictability is the enemy of curiosity. Worse, when discussions are predictable, there isn't anything intellectually interesting in them, and the mind seems to resort to flamewars to amuse itself in the absence of anything better to do (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=mind%20amuse%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). So predictability destroys community as well.
wholien 6y ago
Disheartening, but definitely not a new thing. As OP / others pointed out, many are super obvious. Others are less so. As more and more companies try to go the content marketing route, getting the all-too important backlinks become basically required. If you aren't getting them organically, then this is a great way to "kickstart" that process. Once you are in front of more eyeballs, then the organic growth can start (if your products are good/useful)
jacquesm 6y ago
I get request quite frequently to have 'guest' blog posts on my domain. Obviously, I tell them to get lost but I'm sure the money is good. So it's not just the fake accounts you have to watch out for.
ryandward 6y ago
I guess it isn't news to me, but I'm running out of places for legit conversations and product recommendations.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  It's a constant uphill battle, but it seems the harder a platform is to use, the less likely it is to gather big crowd and thus the marketers. So perhaps an old style BBS, IRC , or a newsgroupserver, and a client built intentionally with bad UI
calibas 6y ago
>I think it would have been less work for them to be legit My neighbor had a brother who was a "black hat" and when he explained to me how he ran his scams, I came to the same conclusion.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  >I think it would have been less work for them to be legit I had the same conclusion when someone told me about the dozens of cheap/used Android devices they and their roommates used to get paid to "watch" ads. Apparently there are apps that will pay you for ads you watch, and you can babysit them pretty easily to make like..... $200/mo.
  - barumi 6y ago
    Just to keep things in perspective, $200/month is already the median income of some places.
    - Const-me 6y ago
      Which places do you have in mind? Globally, the median is close to $800/month per household.
      - barumi 6y ago
        > Globally, the median is close to $800/month per household. You pulled that number out of thin air, didn't you? I mean, some european countries like Bulgaria have a median household income of around 400€/month. Do you honestly believe that Bulgaria is one of the world's poorest countries? Getting back to reality, according to wikipedia, which cites OECD, India's median income in PPP is currently around 2500$/year. India ranks 43rd in the world's median household income ranking. https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=IDD https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=IDD
        Const-me 6y ago
sk2020 6y ago
If I employ someone like an ‘evangelist’ to post on HN to talk my book every day, is that more legitimate? Or if I’m friends with or share common interest with Or otherwise court an established taste maker and he or she boosts my content and features me in puff pieces to the exclusion of others, is that more legitimate? Flacks are inexorable from places of public attention.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
whalesalad 6y ago
Why is this being referred to as black hat? Everyone does this. You think the Heroku blog posts are written by Heroku employees? It’s really just online ghost writing. I don’t see how this is a big deal.
- troydavis 6y ago
  > I don’t see how this is a big deal. It may not be a big deal to you, and that's fine, but it was a big deal to some of these publishers. Many of them take their neutrality seriously, to the point that they edited the articles to remove mentions and/or links when they learned about the undisclosed conflicts and the sockpuppet promotion. Also, many (most?) of the publishers hadn't seen something like this: for-hire operation, well-known startups, and getting distribution in some of the largest technical blogs. While that certainly doesn't mean it isn't happening, it does mean that there's value to publicizing the details.
- jbm 6y ago
  I was a Heroku employee until recently. I know the people who work on those blog posts, and I tried to contribute one myself. To my knowledge, employees absolutely do work on those; articles are edited and go through several rounds of review, but they aren't ghost written. Even the ones written by the management team seem entirely congruous with their level of product knowledge. There are external people (usually former Herokai) who contribute to the Heroku blog; their names / positions are listed on the byline of the article. I wouldn't see the point of having a non-employee writing the canonical description of a new feature; they wouldn't have the context necessary to do the best job.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
cblconfederate 6y ago
i m sure there are others, there was some website to buy hn upvotes too
- dang 6y ago
  Using that site will get your accounts and sites banned here.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    How do you determine that it's the site's owner? If I buy 1000 upvotes for mycompetitor.com, will you boot them? Attribution is a terribly hard problem, Google has the same issue with paid links, and handles with the Disavow Links tool, but that's a hack, not a solution, as it essentially means you have to buy services that get you and up to date list of links to your page so you can disavow them before Google hands out penalties.
    - dang 6y ago
      For sure it's a hard problem, but in this context on HN, it doesn't come up in many cases. When it does, how we handle it is by being flexible and personally available about unbanning. That's a luxury afforded by smallness. In the more common case, though, it's clear enough who's doing it to take action. And you'd be surprised how often we get explicit confirmation of what happened. Sometimes a site owner will even passionately profess innocence and then sheepishly come back later with "I'm so sorry, you were right, it turns out my marketing-person/friend/teammate did it."
harrisonjackson 6y ago
There is a huge difference between endorsing a product and writing a tutorial about it... but content marketing is a gray area. I couldn't find any articles through those medium accounts that really seemed like spam to me - so I would say the authors are in the clear despite being called out really hard on social media right now. It's really the sockpuppet treatment that is "blackhat" which the authors might not even be aware of.
marketingPro 6y ago
The biggest companies can astroturf and never get caught because they can pay a premium for high value accounts. Anything pro S&P500 should be suspect, especially when the comments are defending bad news. Heck if Aldi astroturfs on reddit Frugal, you bet everyone else has a reputation management team outsourced for plausible deniability.
- pathseeker 6y ago
  >Anything pro S&P500 should be suspect, especially when the comments are defending bad news. That's a pretty ridiculous assertion when you consider how many people benefit from these companies' products/services. (Look at how many people like Apple products.) Subsequently, they will defend the companies that they think are getting unfair treatment.
  - sxv 6y ago
    Flagged as suspect. Just kidding. Well, it could be argued that if you are defending S&P500 you are probably a pawn whether knowingly or not.
    - pathseeker 6y ago
      No more so than defending a government because you like what it has provided.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > Look at how many people like Apple products. Maybe Apple is just really good at public relations and turns customers into zealots with their marketing techniques. They get plausible deniability when the fans show up and advocate for Apple and they get a lot of "boots on the ground" (fingers on the keyboard?) for free. Even better, plenty of their PR soldiers are paying them to be on the team.
    - marketingPro 6y ago
      1 or 2 posting accounts, hundreds or thousands of upvoting accounts. All of this can change the narrative.
iron0013 6y ago
These must be some of those those “sufficiently smart manipulators (SSM)”, whose genius HN’s moderation is so utterly helpless against
- dang 6y ago
  We caught those accounts months ago and their patterns were within the range we understand. I haven't had a chance yet to look at Troy's latest report to see if there's more that needs cleaning up, but that's a question of inbox load, not smartness. Edit: it would be interesting if anyone found recent submissions by these accounts that made HN's front page. If anyone does, please let me know at hn@ycombinator.com because I'd like to look at whether and why we missed something. HN has anti-abuse measures that do not show up publicly (because we don't want abusers to observe it) that ought to have prevented most if not all of that.
dchasson 6y ago
Tragedy of the commons. A problem waiting for a solver
hardwaresofton 6y ago
dev.to and itnext are in the twitter thread thanking the poster for bringing this to light as if the existence of accounts that do this isn't a major boon to their platforms. dev.to and itnext, just like medium and other such sites are essentially content marketing farms. It is possible that they both dislike that activity and benefit from it, but I couldn't read those tweets without some skepticism. I for one find that most really high quality blog posts I read are not really on medium/dev.to/itnext, unless some large organization has committed to making every employee post there, but rather on small blogs run by people who pay the $5/month or year or whatever to run their own blog. Maybe I just haven't looked around enough.
mxcrossb 6y ago
I see a lot of “I can’t be hypnotized” comments here. I’ve got bad news for you: you can be hypnotized, advertising works, and comments by astroturfed accounts will affect your view of the world. This is a serious issue for those of us who enjoy content aggregators. What I want to know is what the owners of this site can do to assure readers of the effectiveness of their countermeasures. Given that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a negative news story about Reddit on Reddit, I think I know their approach.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ThinkBeat 6y ago
I do not understand the term “black hat” in this context. Astroturfing as been around for decades. Companies reaching out to influencers to have them write something nice is also an open secret to the extent it is any secret.
gyudin 6y ago
I found hundreds of fake accounts on ProductHunt used to promote startups to get status Product of the day. What Produchunt team did? Nothing)) Met some people in startup community who reported this fraud too, zero action taken.
lemax 6y ago
Is this really any less ethical than a more sophisticated marketing scheme? "Black Hat Firm" vs. Expensive Growth Marketing Firm: – unestablished writer vs credentialed, domain experienced writer (with a salary?) – spammy Medium.com presence vs Editor Connections at TechCrunch – network of "dozens" of nearly ineffectual sockpuppets vs dozens of employees with "real" accounts ready to upvote and engage on Boss's call If you're surprised by this, spend a day in the pits of a product launch in literally any industry. We welcome ingenuity when we talk about growth hacks but criminalize it when it's not classy. This is all a matter of access, Marketing and PR generally comes down to what resources people have and what they can get away with.
- krageon 6y ago
  Most "sophisticated" marketing schemes are incredibly unethical (and I've even argued that marketing at it's core is unethical, but that's a hard sell most places). That might mean that it's not any less ethical, but equally scummy. The fact that it's not a surprise (and implying that everyone does it) is not an excuse to keep manipulating people at a mass scale when they're browsing the internet in (primarily) good faith. I'd say that pointing that out and accepting it as a good justification is in and of itself unethical.
  - bondarchuk 6y ago
    >(and I've even argued that marketing at it's core is unethical, but that's a hard sell most places) 100% agreed, and I gather from other times/places where this was brought up that there's more of us than you might think.
    - untwerth 6y ago
      I sincerely hope so. I fervently believe that all advertising is, by definition, paid manipulation. As such, it is deeply immoral, despicable, and should be outlawed on the constitutional level! I also believe that this manipulation is the foundation of almost every evil in the western world, because it is the perverse motive that corrupts our democracy and our economy. The ability to manipulate masses of people to buy your idea or product using money allows those with money to dominate, not those who are competent or correct (either at politics or economy). The fact that our societies not only allow this but actively celebrate the biggest manipulators as the best of us (google facebook etc.) is beyond immoral for me. It's insane! I also believe that anybody who calls out this sick game at the level of society would be cruelly ostracised by those in power, either in media or politics or economy. Still, we should voice this more often. We should make people rethink our societies.
hevelvarik 6y ago
Thanks for this, this thread has been an eye opener for me.
krimeo 6y ago
Eye opening isn't it? Now you can see where most of the stuff on top of HN comes from.
- dang 6y ago
  Unless I don't know the first thing about my job (always possible I suppose), that is definitely not true.
  - pvg 6y ago
    (always possible I suppose) It would be funny (both -haha and -peculiar) if it turned out you do it all largely by instinct, like one of those fungus-cultivating ants.
  - krimeo 6y ago
    Eh, so people are paying for upvotes, sock puppets accounts etc. but it doesn't work ? :o
    - dang 6y ago
      That doesn't follow (because "most of the stuff on top of HN" is a much stronger claim than what you said here) but I'm happy to answer anyway. The answer is that it frequently doesn't work. What we don't know is how many other cases there are where people are getting away with it. We can't know that; by definition, we're never going to know it. Even there, though, one can make educated guesses, based for example on how many cases come up where people got away with it at the time, but then evidence comes to our attention later and we can figure it out in retrospect. Such cases are extremely useful because then we can extend our software to catch them in the future. I'd never claim that such manipulations never work; obviously we can't know that. It's possible that superclever manipulators are rolling HN in their hands like a piece of silly putty. All I'm saying is that if "most of the stuff on top of HN comes from [that]", then I don't know the first thing about my job.
      - krimeo 6y ago
lolkbye 6y ago
So companies pay to get featured everywhere. How is this "black hat"? That's how the world works, bud.
bengale 6y ago
I'm not sure this is surprising really. It wasn't that long ago when there was clearly a targeted campaign against zoom across channels where you'd expect engagement from technical people. I don't know if it wasn't doing its job, or if something like that just can't be maintained long term but it seemed to peter off relatively quickly.
throwaway4good 6y ago
I remember working out of a coworking place in Thailand. There were a group of guys next to me running a marketing agency based upon hundreds of fake profiles they maintained and talking about it like it was the most natural thing in the world. People who are surprised about these things forget that in large part of the world doing this (black hat marketing) is not illegal at all.
cblconfederate 6y ago
I mean, it wasn't exactly a secret right? I 'd like to see sites like HN become vigilant against this kind of fluff marketing content (which has been making the rounds for a loooong time) from now on, as much as they are vigilant against political content. Any new rules?
- itsoktocry 6y ago
  >I 'd like to see sites like HN become vigilant against this kind of fluff marketing content One of the reasons I continue to use HN is that there seems to be very little marketing content that bubbles to the top articles, compared to almost every other site. Something is working.
tmaly 6y ago
I am curious if it actually works. Do the people paying for the content get any net benefit?
mtnGoat 6y ago
This isn't new at all. If I wasnt under an NDA I'd tell you more about how deep the rabbit hole goes. Keep digging, lots to find and crooked stuff to expose.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
troydavis 6y ago
I'm the OP. It's been about a week since my tweets. As most of us know, some sites are intentionally filled with promoted garbage (Forbes contributors, a lot of Quora and dZone, etc.). Many blog maintainers/curators really are trying to be transparent, though, including most or all of the ones I mentioned. They either don't want content that was paid for or will only consider it when they know about it and it's disclosed to readers. For those blog maintainers/curators, here's a few thoughts: * I think the generalization here are probably that if an author links words/phrases other than a company's name to a company Web site (like linking a type of product or the problem that the company solves), a curator should be more suspicious of the submission. It probably should be changed to link to an editor-chosen neutral discussion of that topic, like a Wikipedia page, trade group, or RFC. About 2/3rds of the posts that I suspect had a conflict of interest would have stood out this way. For example, one post links "usability testing" to a company. That should stand out during review, regardless of the company or author. I'd also be suspicious of posts that have more than 1 link to any company. Obviously it could be totally innocuous, but it's unusual and generally unnecessary. * Don't blindly trust my assessment or the list of companies I provided. As with any random person on the Internet, I can't say authoritatively how any given post was motivated; I can only point to lots of people who are writing very similar things about the same few otherwise-unrelated companies. Each publisher will need to decide for themselves when a coincidence goes from unlikely to impossible. The lesson here is probably to think about that for yourself: where do you draw the line? Would you prefer to err on the side of false negatives, false positives, or exercising editorial discretion (allowing the article but removing parts about specific companies)? * I strongly recommend _against_ penalizing authors who are in developing countries. I think the content marketing firm made victims out of the authors in developing countries. At best, they thought they were providing a real service to the public. At worst, they thought they were making good money doing something that might be a bit shady, but is common in their area. I have no reason to think they knew about the after-the-fact promotion. (Authors in developed countries like the US - which includes all of the suspected made-up authors - obviously shouldn't be doing this and probably know it. Different rules apply.) Moreover, someone in a developing country has limited opportunities for career growth and visibility (and some authors clearly have technical talent). I don't think this should justify taking those opportunities away. For example, I do not suggest refusing future articles from these people or otherwise limiting their distribution. Perhaps their future submissions need tighter review or can't be about specific companies/products, just technologies, but it's important that they still have this avenue. Good luck.
pushcx 6y ago
These are the same people who made dedicated effort to trick Lobsters users into giving them invites so they could spam our site back around the start of 2020: https://lobste.rs/s/utbyws/mitigating_content_marketing https://lobste.rs/s/utbyws/mitigating_content_marketing If they're still spamming for LoadMill eight months later, that strongly implies to me that the clients know what they're getting and are OK with the tactics.

393 points by troydavis 6y ago

In the past I have pointed the HN moderators (contact link is the footer) to threads with sock puppets. Some are easy to recognize, e.g. new users praising a service that got submitted only 10 minutes ago. Sometimes it's harder to find a pattern. Do email the HN moderators if you suspect fraud or unfair practices.

troydavis 6y ago
Normally they're pretty trivial like you said. This one is extensive: 20+ sockpuppet HN and Reddit accounts and dozens of fake blog posts submitted to many of the largest Medium-style blogs. It's an entire propaganda network just devoted to content marketing.
- barumi 6y ago
  20+ accounts is pretty small potatos for a content marketer.
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
    Probably just one persons side hustle while they're on fire watch at work. But then again they could be a foot soldier for an appropriately compartmentalized consortium.
walrus01 6y ago
An interesting question is to what extent they're jumping through hoops to appear as distinct, legitimate, real users. Such as: a) using a proxy from a residential ISP somewhere b) never putting two or more sock puppets behind the same IP. Or assuming exclusive ipv4 use, not even any two clients from within the same /20 to /18 sized netblocks. c) a reasonably varied selection of ISPs. Also variation in ISP netblock geolocation (maxmind geoIP database or similar) based on ARIN, RIPE, APNIC etc registration data. Obviously if you're promoting something that's very tech/startup industry oriented it would not be as suspicious if you had a bunch of posters "authentically discussing it" that geolocated to the SF bay area and Seattle. d) a reasonably varied selection of common user agents. Also intentional variation on operating system and browser fingerprinting variables. e) intentional training to avoid writing patterns and phrases that might seem similar, when one person is driving ten accounts f) not doing dumb stuff that gives away your time zone, like if you have a bunch of people in a GMT+4 time zone that post things regularly on a 9-5 daytime work schedule, when they're supposed to be pretending to be ordinary internet users in a USA time zone. From a black hat network engineering perspective there are a lot of ways that one human driving 30 sock puppets can appear from 30 distinct locations, as if there were 30 real humans with 30 different operating systems/computers/browser user agents and browser fingerprints. As to what level of analysis tools are run on the server side to detect "low effort" sock puppets, that's another question. From the point of view of a place where fake accounts/sock puppets post things, obviously an organization like twitter has a lot more staff resources to devote to writing custom analysis and correlation tools. Specifically for the purpose of identifying common patterns in inauthentic accounts. I presume that dang and the people who run the ycombinator admin interface can see the IP address of every poster next to the post's timestamp, and might notice in a manual fashion if a lot of suspicious posts started showing up all from the same netblocks. But then again maybe not. If you want to see the tip of an iceberg of one method for running sockpuppets, go google "residential proxies for sale" and start looking through the slickly presented marketing material. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=residential+proxies+for+sale https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=residenti...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

troydavis 6y ago

The Twitter thread has a lot more. There's a person or firm who is doing black-hat content marketing at scale. They either approach freelance bloggers to write articles about their clients (to be submitted to Medium-hosted and similar blogs as if written by unaffiliated users), or create Medium profiles for fake names and write the posts themselves. Posts have appeared in Better Programming, DEV.to, FAUN, freeCodeCamp, HackerNoon, ITNEXT, JS in Plain English, Level Up, Towards Data Science, and other aggregators. From there, they use dozens of fake Reddit and HN accounts to submit, comment on, and artificially boost their own posts. They also submit some unrelated cover posts. You can see some of these on HN here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Aabjecton%20by%3Aargh-man%20by%3Acryptofits%20by%3Abreadandcrumbel%20by%3AEdward9%20by%3Aflywithdolp%20by%3AGeneloJ%20by%3Ahaybanusa%20by%3Ahyustan%20by%3Aiflywithbook%20by%3Ainvestologia%20by%3Aiunternik%20by%3AOwnsE%20by%3Aplastic_teeth%20by%3Apoticer%20by%3Aprescojan%20by%3Apresiozo%20by%3Aruffmill%20by%3Ashirak_untel%20by%3Athereyougo%20by%3Atruckster%20by%3Auinerimak%20by%3AWoodenKatana&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... They have sockpuppet Reddit accounts doing the same thing across 10s of subreddits. Here's the set of clients I know of (https://twitter.com/troyd/status/1316020415995674624 https://twitter.com/troyd/status/1316020415995674624): AccessiBe ClimaCell Imperva Loadmill Rookout Labs WhiteSource (AKA SecureCoding dot com) Testcraft I have no idea what they thought they were buying, but what they were receiving was black-hat content marketing at large scale. There may be other clients I don't know of. Here's some Medium profiles of authors, where you'll see those companies get plugged over and over. I expect some of these will be removed by the authors soon: https://medium.com/@AntonLawrence https://medium.com/@AntonLawrence https://medium.com/@Justin_Parsons https://medium.com/@Justin_Parsons https://medium.com/@geeostan8 https://medium.com/@geeostan8 https://medium.com/@Dickson_Mwendia https://medium.com/@Dickson_Mwendia https://medium.com/@arinoman https://medium.com/@arinoman https://medium.com/@oyetoketoby80 https://medium.com/@oyetoketoby80 https://medium.com/@mrsaeeddev https://medium.com/@mrsaeeddev https://medium.com/@ginomessmer https://medium.com/@ginomessmer https://medium.com/@diptokmk47 https://medium.com/@diptokmk47 https://medium.com/@sajjadheydari74 https://medium.com/@sajjadheydari74 https://medium.com/@ngwaifoong92 https://medium.com/@ngwaifoong92 https://medium.com/@SeanHig https://medium.com/@SeanHig https://medium.com/@henson.casper https://medium.com/@henson.casper https://hackernoon.com/u/ari-noman https://hackernoon.com/u/ari-noman https://hackernoon.com/u/diptokmk47 https://hackernoon.com/u/diptokmk47 There's probably others I'm missing. If you run a blog and one of these companies is mentioned in a post that doesn't disclose an affiliation, it may well be fake. I contacted many of the publishers above. To quote Quincy of freeCodeCamp in https://twitter.com/ossia/status/1316216151802667008 https://twitter.com/ossia/status/1316216151802667008 after he researched this: "Stay vigilant, friends."

aaron695 6y ago

I think the GAN (prob actually not a GAN) that's months old on HN and posts rubbish and gets replys from mods and people and gets lots of karma is much more interesting Imagine what it'd be like if AI wasn't all overhyped garage. Downvoted I guess. Oh, AI that can group think. That would be evil.

tomcam 6y ago
I have upvoted you in hopes that you will provide a link to some of the posts you suspect were generated by a GAN
- aaron695 6y ago
  It's prolific. If you read comments you will have seen it. Question is why only one person has called it ( I can see ) It's not against written HN rules, bots are not allowed in unwritten rules, but is it a bot bot? What more interesting is it's not a ring ( I assume it's upvoted by normal users) They will be hard to detect. This bot could just calm down and fly under the radar and use upvoting and downvoting to control naratives. By the hundreds. Need to get people to read comments, as compared to finding a word in them that confirms groupthink and upvoting.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - tomcam 6y ago
    One of the main reasons I read hacker news is the comments. To me they make this site one of the great wonders of the Internet world. Would you mind linking to a few of them that you regard as non-human generated?
    - aaron695 6y ago
      I sent you a email. I just ask you don't pass it on since I think what is more important is people on HN think more about comments. (Or call it themselves) Its history and upward karma are interesting. I think it's clever in that it anthropomorphizes itself to reduce attack. Next step would be to hint at mental illness. But it's about comment quality. Blackhat, pretend OpenAI intelligence don't matter. Comments need to speak for themselves.

kaffee 6y ago

Does anyone know about the legality of this? My suspicion is that this black-hat content marketing is perfectly legal under US law. It's only potentially a violation of individual platforms' TOS (or publishing agreements). Is this approximately correct?

dr-detroit 6y ago
When I learned about SEO the guides all started from flimsy scams like these (Virtual Private Blogs used to be all the rage in SEO) and worked backwards to good inbound marketing fundamentals. Its legal but the algorithms punish it.
ceejayoz 6y ago
It may fall under the FTC’s regulations on influencer endorsements: https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-releases/ftc-publishes-final-guides-governing-endorsements-testimonials/091005revisedendorsementguides.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-re...
- kaffee 6y ago
  I thought this was mostly unenforced or unenforceable in cases like this -- where it would be really hard to prove that someone took a payment. I'll keep digging. Thanks! One more thing -- this isn't an explicit endorsement. It's content marketing. I rather thought that made even the FTC rules hard to apply. Also: "The Guides are not regulations, and so there are no civil penalties associated with them. But if advertisers don’t follow the guides, the FTC may decide to investigate whether the practices are unfair or deceptive under the FTC Act." https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/media-resources/truth-advertising/advertisement-endorsements https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/media-resources/truth-advert... edit: more details
  - JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
    I would presume there is a 1099 or W2 somewhere, unless this is happening internationally.
6y ago

jchb 6y ago

What about building a service, perhaps a web browser plugin, that overlays a trust-worthiness score + contextual information, over text (bonus for images) on the web? If a user posts "I recommend product X", the overlay would say "Caution: This user also recommended the product Y,Z in the last 48 hours. 34/34 of the users post in the last month are product recommendations. Sentiment score for users posts: 100% positive. The following internet accounts are likely controlled by the same individual or organization: ..." Is it feasible? Does it already exist?

jimbomorrison 6y ago
Super interesting. We're working on something similar within the news ecosystem. See https://onesub.io/chrome https://onesub.io/chrome for the extension (and https://onesub.io/mission https://onesub.io/mission for our wider mission)..
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sjg007 6y ago
Somewhat feasible. You really need distributed fact checking to scale up especially since you don’t have source ips. If you can do that you might have something if you can keep participation up.
- Pokepokalypse 6y ago
  and never forget: the black hats will never stop trying to game any system you try to come up with. At this point in time, I think it's pretty clear they have a strong upper-hand.
- noizejoy 6y ago
  Do source ips still help at all? These days it seems to be rather easy to visit a website from numerous different source ips.
  - dang 6y ago

walrus01 6y ago

> I didn't know that black-hat content marketing existed seriously? I think I first saw it in 1996. Sock puppets are nothing new or innovative as a general concept.

reactchain 6y ago
Yeah, this has been going on for a long time. The methods evolve, but the bullshit stays the same [1]. Good rules of thumb: 1. If it praises a product, the article was paid for 2. If it has a link that looks even slightly out of place, that link was paid for 3. With few exceptions, most of the revenue for the publication comes from selling features and backlinks (much more than subscriptions and ads). [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
troydavis 6y ago
> seriously? I think I first saw it in 1996. Sock puppets are nothing new or innovative as a general concept. Sock puppets have existed for a long time, but turning it into a contract service for clients, selling it to well-known startups, and scaling it up this big is not something I've seen before. (also, hi from NANOG and the SIX ages ago!)
- walrus01 6y ago
  Hi Troy! Response below written not so much for you to read, but everyone else looking at the thread. On a large scale there is a big overlap between the general concept of operating a low-cost call center in a developing nation that speaks English (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh). This has been taken to its most blackhat extent by the people who are running call centers for the fake "fix your PC it has viruses now, we are Microsoft support" scammers. Or even worse the fake Internal Revenue Service / Canada Revenue Agency type scam call centers. The operating costs in monthly salary per human, and office rental, basic desktop PCs, electricity, telecom services are all very similar between the different grey/black hat business models. If you have humans talking to other humans by voice, you've got a bunch of $20 headsets with boom mics plugged directly into the desktop PCs, some SIP softphones, an asterisk setup, and a router/VPN connection back to a bunch of grey market SIP trunks. The voice part is obviously not necessary if it's just click workers. Assume for a moment that your office and computer equipment is a sunk cost, and you've got a room full of dudes working a 6-day work week and paying them each $250 a month. They each need to bring in revenue of something like $10-11 per day to break even on the payroll. Obviously this "business model" is somewhat dependent upon finding a place that has a sufficiently large pool of low-wage, but moderately educated people who can drive desktop PCs, and a place to put your call center type environment in low cost commercial real estate. Thus my mention in another comment about Bangladesh. Some organizations went into the gold farming market to hire people at the equivalent of $250 USD/month to repetitively perform tasks in MMORPG games and then sell the virtual currency/assets to people in the US/Canada/Europe with extra money to spend. After that, they quickly discovered that it could be more lucrative to have one person run 30 reddit accounts (or twitter, whatever) and get paid to upvote stuff to the front page. If one business model fails, you take the same office environment and temporarily convert the workers to doing another task. Or you have a mixture of tasks going on simultaneously for the click workers. People with difficult accents or less than optimal phone skills, that cannot successfully scam a person and then transfer them to the higher-ranked "closer", are positioned for these click worker tasks.

warent 6y ago

I don't endorse this behavior at all but can it really be said to be black-hat? imho seems more gray to me. From what I understand, content _is_ being generated and there are attempts to boost the SEO, so they're providing a service and it's not outright theft. At worst it just sounds like poor practice and gaming the system. They're not acting maliciously, illegally, and/or destructively, which is how I've always defined black-hat. Am I missing something?

troydavis 6y ago
If this isn't black-hat, what is? Specifically, an author not disclosing an affiliation or payment, fake accounts promoting it, and fake accounts commenting on those promotions. In the continuum between white and black, what's left on the black side? :-)
- twmahna 6y ago
  Some examples that come to mind: click fraud, phishing, malware.
  - bilbo0s 6y ago
    That doesn't preclude the techniques we're discussing here, it only adds other techniques to the black hat tool box.
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      I think the point is that those activities are clearly "black hat", while astroturfing isn't inherently illegal. (well, maybe in some jurisdictions it is. I seem to recall that the UK has much stricter "truth in advertising" laws than the US) It all exists on a spectrum though, and we can disagree on where the line for black hat is drawn, with no one being wrong because it's a matter of opinion.
- bootcampwhere 6y ago
  You dummy. How about actual fraud? Hijacking sites, puting in secret back links. Paying for content is not black hat.

justiceforsaas 6y ago

"I didn't know that black-hat content marketing existed" (from the Twitter thread) I haven't laughed so hard in months :))) I've talked with over 150 founders (I'm running a website that deals with acquisition channels & user growth [1]) and this is like uncovering 0.01% of what's going on out there. I became friends with some of these founders, and some of them admitted that a significant part of their growth was "paying for being featured in publication X" Don't get me wrong, I'm against this "black hat content marketing" practice, but let's also consider the other perspective: a) 80% of the content on publications like TechCrunch [2] is all about Google/Apple/Tesla/Virgin. I challenge, you go there RIGHT NOW. COUNT the % of stories about FAANG companies. As the markets go into a "winner takes all" mode, these publications only cover the big winners. So people only hear about them, which amplifies the whole "winner takes all" thing, and the vicious circle continues. Some of these big publications have made "attempts" to be "indie-friendly", but that's one big BS. I won't name the company I contacted (it's a biger publication). I basically told them: Hey guys, got an interesting article that was featured on HN front page 3 days ago, can I do a deeper piece for your publication? Their answer: "Oh, that's great, go to our sister website X.com, we feature non-FAANG there". X.com was a website that wasn't even in the Alexa top 1M list. I also have some doubts that the OP has removed some bigger publication names (maybe afraid of getting sued? No idea). My point is: As publications get more "closed", the incentive for getting there via other means is going to get bigger. [1] https://www.firstpayingusers.com https://www.firstpayingusers.com [2] https://techcrunch.com https://techcrunch.com

troydavis 6y ago
> I also have some doubts that the OP has removed some bigger publication names (maybe afraid of getting sued? No idea). Just for completeness: I have not. This is everything I have near-certainty of. I omitted 2 or 3 possible authors who I'm not sure of because I'm not willing to accuse someone with less than near-certainty (where certainty would be their admission). If I knew anything else, I'd have posted it. Maybe more importantly, I don't have any reason to believe publishers knew this was happening, and have every reason to believe the opposite. Many of these blogs take transparency and disclosure really seriously.
ztusers 6y ago

_where 6y ago

There are no fake accounts. There are only accounts or not. There are no sockpuppet bloggers; those are called bloggers. If you go down the fake road, you have to realize real news by real reporters is often wrong. I’ve had someone in law enforcement tell me the news accidentally labeled them the victim on televised news and didn’t correct it. Classbooks written for US public school students- I understand that some content in them has been incorrect and intentionally biased. There is truth, but it’s an ideal. I’m glad that this is calling out those that are manipulating people, but on the other hand- what is the goal? Will shaming bring fairness? We could have communist dictatorial leaders enforcing their version of truth, if you’d rather have that sort of thing. Our president should tell the truth, and it should be a scandal if not, to a point of course, because I’d bet most have lied at times. But if it’s time to activate something like a libel superpower on the internet, how would that even work in a fair and practical way? Freedom of speech cannot be freedom only to tell truth; truth can be aspired to, but not necessarily known by all, and what’s understood to be truth by some may change. So, really, what should be done? Btw- I’ve done my best in past years to tell the truth as much as I can when I’m not kidding around, and it typically makes things difficult, but better. I’m not recommending anyone fake up things to boost rep. But, it’s happening, it’s not good, and I don’t see how AI or oversight or a control play would end well when it comes to enforcing truth. However, the notion of a “fake” account is what allows most of the users to post content on HN and Reddit more freely.

walrus01 6y ago
> By the way, there are no fake accounts. There are only accounts or not. Yes, until we see a great advancement in AI, actual meat based mammals are driving these accounts. > There are no sockpuppet Sometimes it seems like half of Twitter is fake accounts. You've never seen photos or videos of a Bangladeshi click farm? 50 people sitting in small cubicles running proxy-connected virtual machines on desktop PCs, posting stuff, upvoting things on reddit, etc? I assure you that such things exist. Some of the places that used to do MMORPG gold mining to trade virtual currency for real money have shifted into the market, because it's much more lucrative. You've never seen the pictures from China of 1 person sitting in front of a board with 40 budget android phones mounted on it, upvoting and reviewing apps?

rexreed 6y ago

Isn't this extremely common honestly? Isn't this so common it has names like "astroturfing" and "growth hacking"? This so not black hat that it's basically just regular ol' hat. Yeah creating fake grass roots support isn't particularly new, and I would venture that it's been around as long as there's been marketing.

austinpena 6y ago
Yes. Reddit upvotes are dirt cheap and sites sell article spots all the time.
chrisweekly 6y ago
I feel it's unfortunate "growth hacking" took on this connotation (ie, "comparable to astroturfing / fraudulent by definition", given the need for a term to describe (genuine / above-board / white-hat) creative approaches to connecting your idea with a market. Reminiscent of "hacker:cracker" usage divide, more generally.
whoisjuan 6y ago
It is extremely common. These companies probably bought something that was described as something more benign and ethical. And I totally understand. If you’re a small company you don’t have time to do further check-ins. They probably get you with a good pitch about influencer marketing for a niche area and that sounds nice enough to many to consider putting some money on it.
ziml77 6y ago
I read a couple of the tweets and some other comments, but I didn't realize until I reached your comment that they were talking about legit services using those marketing techniques! I thought they meant black hat services were trying to act legit by paying for publicity that would paint them that way...
andygcook 6y ago
This happens in the real world too. IIRC, Stonyfield yogurt had their friends and family buy the product when it was newly on the shelf at groceries to make it look like it was selling well enough to get picked up permanently.

twmahna 6y ago

Is this actually news to people? This has been happening for decades. The purpose is largely for SEO / sometimes for actual traffic. Just go google "private blog networks" (pbn) or "link farm".

troydavis 6y ago
> Is this actually news to people? Good question. The thing that was news to me is that it's happening on very large blogs, not random sites and that it's being sold to and used by well-known startups. Like you, I expect sockpuppet accounts and random linkbuilding garbage, just not at this scale or with this much distribution.
- twmahna 6y ago
  Welcome to the world of black hat services => https://www.blackhatworld.com/forums/seo-packages.206/ https://www.blackhatworld.com/forums/seo-packages.206/
  - w-ll 6y ago
    lol. sus tho I like how this site has a cookie policy overlay.
  - technion 6y ago
    The thing to note there is that despite being on a "black hat" website, most of those ads are from marketing or SEO companies linking to their own legitimate company websites. It's clear most of them just see this as how internet marketing is done. I also note that as a not logged in user, the Twitter just shows me "related tweets" from people actually hiring or offering to sell social media content.
- solumos 6y ago
  Not only very large blogs - the Forbes contributor program is probably the biggest example of "linkbuilding garbage"
chrisweekly 6y ago

api 6y ago

Social media -- including this site -- is far more manipulated than people even begin to realize. Social media propaganda and sock puppetry is a huge industry.

dang 6y ago
I'm curious how you think you know that about HN, because if that's true, you know much more about it than I do.
- radmuzom 6y ago
  Not the OP and I cannot provide any evidence. However, for a large number of controversial topics, I try to guess the top comment in my head before opening the comments page. My estimate is that 70-80% of the times I guess it right.
  - dang 6y ago
    That would be evidence that people on the internet are predictable, not evidence of manipulation. Predictability on the internet, which increases both with group size and with the divisiveness of a topic, is also a huge problem for HN [1]. But it's not the problem we've been discussing in this thread, and I think it's important to make clear distinctions between the issues. It's common for people to leap from some other issue to "astroturfing! shill! spy!" explanations, instead of facing the original issue. [1] Here's why, if anyone wants an explanation. Predictability is the enemy of curiosity. Worse, when discussions are predictable, there isn't anything intellectually interesting in them, and the mind seems to resort to flamewars to amuse itself in the absence of anything better to do (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=mind%20amuse%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). So predictability destroys community as well.

wholien 6y ago

Disheartening, but definitely not a new thing. As OP / others pointed out, many are super obvious. Others are less so. As more and more companies try to go the content marketing route, getting the all-too important backlinks become basically required. If you aren't getting them organically, then this is a great way to "kickstart" that process. Once you are in front of more eyeballs, then the organic growth can start (if your products are good/useful)

jacquesm 6y ago

I get request quite frequently to have 'guest' blog posts on my domain. Obviously, I tell them to get lost but I'm sure the money is good. So it's not just the fake accounts you have to watch out for.

ryandward 6y ago

I guess it isn't news to me, but I'm running out of places for legit conversations and product recommendations.

cblconfederate 6y ago
It's a constant uphill battle, but it seems the harder a platform is to use, the less likely it is to gather big crowd and thus the marketers. So perhaps an old style BBS, IRC , or a newsgroupserver, and a client built intentionally with bad UI

calibas 6y ago

>I think it would have been less work for them to be legit My neighbor had a brother who was a "black hat" and when he explained to me how he ran his scams, I came to the same conclusion.

nitrogen 6y ago
>I think it would have been less work for them to be legit I had the same conclusion when someone told me about the dozens of cheap/used Android devices they and their roommates used to get paid to "watch" ads. Apparently there are apps that will pay you for ads you watch, and you can babysit them pretty easily to make like..... $200/mo.
- barumi 6y ago
  Just to keep things in perspective, $200/month is already the median income of some places.
  - Const-me 6y ago
    Which places do you have in mind? Globally, the median is close to $800/month per household.
    - barumi 6y ago
      > Globally, the median is close to $800/month per household. You pulled that number out of thin air, didn't you? I mean, some european countries like Bulgaria have a median household income of around 400€/month. Do you honestly believe that Bulgaria is one of the world's poorest countries? Getting back to reality, according to wikipedia, which cites OECD, India's median income in PPP is currently around 2500$/year. India ranks 43rd in the world's median household income ranking. https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=IDD https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=IDD
      - Const-me 6y ago

sk2020 6y ago

If I employ someone like an ‘evangelist’ to post on HN to talk my book every day, is that more legitimate? Or if I’m friends with or share common interest with Or otherwise court an established taste maker and he or she boosts my content and features me in puff pieces to the exclusion of others, is that more legitimate? Flacks are inexorable from places of public attention.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

whalesalad 6y ago

Why is this being referred to as black hat? Everyone does this. You think the Heroku blog posts are written by Heroku employees? It’s really just online ghost writing. I don’t see how this is a big deal.

troydavis 6y ago
> I don’t see how this is a big deal. It may not be a big deal to you, and that's fine, but it was a big deal to some of these publishers. Many of them take their neutrality seriously, to the point that they edited the articles to remove mentions and/or links when they learned about the undisclosed conflicts and the sockpuppet promotion. Also, many (most?) of the publishers hadn't seen something like this: for-hire operation, well-known startups, and getting distribution in some of the largest technical blogs. While that certainly doesn't mean it isn't happening, it does mean that there's value to publicizing the details.
jbm 6y ago
I was a Heroku employee until recently. I know the people who work on those blog posts, and I tried to contribute one myself. To my knowledge, employees absolutely do work on those; articles are edited and go through several rounds of review, but they aren't ghost written. Even the ones written by the management team seem entirely congruous with their level of product knowledge. There are external people (usually former Herokai) who contribute to the Heroku blog; their names / positions are listed on the byline of the article. I wouldn't see the point of having a non-employee writing the canonical description of a new feature; they wouldn't have the context necessary to do the best job.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

cblconfederate 6y ago

i m sure there are others, there was some website to buy hn upvotes too

dang 6y ago
Using that site will get your accounts and sites banned here.
- luckylion 6y ago
  How do you determine that it's the site's owner? If I buy 1000 upvotes for mycompetitor.com, will you boot them? Attribution is a terribly hard problem, Google has the same issue with paid links, and handles with the Disavow Links tool, but that's a hack, not a solution, as it essentially means you have to buy services that get you and up to date list of links to your page so you can disavow them before Google hands out penalties.
  - dang 6y ago
    For sure it's a hard problem, but in this context on HN, it doesn't come up in many cases. When it does, how we handle it is by being flexible and personally available about unbanning. That's a luxury afforded by smallness. In the more common case, though, it's clear enough who's doing it to take action. And you'd be surprised how often we get explicit confirmation of what happened. Sometimes a site owner will even passionately profess innocence and then sheepishly come back later with "I'm so sorry, you were right, it turns out my marketing-person/friend/teammate did it."

harrisonjackson 6y ago

There is a huge difference between endorsing a product and writing a tutorial about it... but content marketing is a gray area. I couldn't find any articles through those medium accounts that really seemed like spam to me - so I would say the authors are in the clear despite being called out really hard on social media right now. It's really the sockpuppet treatment that is "blackhat" which the authors might not even be aware of.

marketingPro 6y ago

The biggest companies can astroturf and never get caught because they can pay a premium for high value accounts. Anything pro S&P500 should be suspect, especially when the comments are defending bad news. Heck if Aldi astroturfs on reddit Frugal, you bet everyone else has a reputation management team outsourced for plausible deniability.

pathseeker 6y ago
>Anything pro S&P500 should be suspect, especially when the comments are defending bad news. That's a pretty ridiculous assertion when you consider how many people benefit from these companies' products/services. (Look at how many people like Apple products.) Subsequently, they will defend the companies that they think are getting unfair treatment.
- sxv 6y ago
  Flagged as suspect. Just kidding. Well, it could be argued that if you are defending S&P500 you are probably a pawn whether knowingly or not.
  - pathseeker 6y ago
    No more so than defending a government because you like what it has provided.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > Look at how many people like Apple products. Maybe Apple is just really good at public relations and turns customers into zealots with their marketing techniques. They get plausible deniability when the fans show up and advocate for Apple and they get a lot of "boots on the ground" (fingers on the keyboard?) for free. Even better, plenty of their PR soldiers are paying them to be on the team.
  - marketingPro 6y ago
    1 or 2 posting accounts, hundreds or thousands of upvoting accounts. All of this can change the narrative.

iron0013 6y ago

These must be some of those those “sufficiently smart manipulators (SSM)”, whose genius HN’s moderation is so utterly helpless against

dang 6y ago
We caught those accounts months ago and their patterns were within the range we understand. I haven't had a chance yet to look at Troy's latest report to see if there's more that needs cleaning up, but that's a question of inbox load, not smartness. Edit: it would be interesting if anyone found recent submissions by these accounts that made HN's front page. If anyone does, please let me know at hn@ycombinator.com because I'd like to look at whether and why we missed something. HN has anti-abuse measures that do not show up publicly (because we don't want abusers to observe it) that ought to have prevented most if not all of that.

dchasson 6y ago

Tragedy of the commons. A problem waiting for a solver

hardwaresofton 6y ago

dev.to and itnext are in the twitter thread thanking the poster for bringing this to light as if the existence of accounts that do this isn't a major boon to their platforms. dev.to and itnext, just like medium and other such sites are essentially content marketing farms. It is possible that they both dislike that activity and benefit from it, but I couldn't read those tweets without some skepticism. I for one find that most really high quality blog posts I read are not really on medium/dev.to/itnext, unless some large organization has committed to making every employee post there, but rather on small blogs run by people who pay the $5/month or year or whatever to run their own blog. Maybe I just haven't looked around enough.

mxcrossb 6y ago

I see a lot of “I can’t be hypnotized” comments here. I’ve got bad news for you: you can be hypnotized, advertising works, and comments by astroturfed accounts will affect your view of the world. This is a serious issue for those of us who enjoy content aggregators. What I want to know is what the owners of this site can do to assure readers of the effectiveness of their countermeasures. Given that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a negative news story about Reddit on Reddit, I think I know their approach.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

ThinkBeat 6y ago

I do not understand the term “black hat” in this context. Astroturfing as been around for decades. Companies reaching out to influencers to have them write something nice is also an open secret to the extent it is any secret.

gyudin 6y ago

I found hundreds of fake accounts on ProductHunt used to promote startups to get status Product of the day. What Produchunt team did? Nothing)) Met some people in startup community who reported this fraud too, zero action taken.

lemax 6y ago

Is this really any less ethical than a more sophisticated marketing scheme? "Black Hat Firm" vs. Expensive Growth Marketing Firm: – unestablished writer vs credentialed, domain experienced writer (with a salary?) – spammy Medium.com presence vs Editor Connections at TechCrunch – network of "dozens" of nearly ineffectual sockpuppets vs dozens of employees with "real" accounts ready to upvote and engage on Boss's call If you're surprised by this, spend a day in the pits of a product launch in literally any industry. We welcome ingenuity when we talk about growth hacks but criminalize it when it's not classy. This is all a matter of access, Marketing and PR generally comes down to what resources people have and what they can get away with.

krageon 6y ago
Most "sophisticated" marketing schemes are incredibly unethical (and I've even argued that marketing at it's core is unethical, but that's a hard sell most places). That might mean that it's not any less ethical, but equally scummy. The fact that it's not a surprise (and implying that everyone does it) is not an excuse to keep manipulating people at a mass scale when they're browsing the internet in (primarily) good faith. I'd say that pointing that out and accepting it as a good justification is in and of itself unethical.
- bondarchuk 6y ago
  >(and I've even argued that marketing at it's core is unethical, but that's a hard sell most places) 100% agreed, and I gather from other times/places where this was brought up that there's more of us than you might think.
  - untwerth 6y ago
    I sincerely hope so. I fervently believe that all advertising is, by definition, paid manipulation. As such, it is deeply immoral, despicable, and should be outlawed on the constitutional level! I also believe that this manipulation is the foundation of almost every evil in the western world, because it is the perverse motive that corrupts our democracy and our economy. The ability to manipulate masses of people to buy your idea or product using money allows those with money to dominate, not those who are competent or correct (either at politics or economy). The fact that our societies not only allow this but actively celebrate the biggest manipulators as the best of us (google facebook etc.) is beyond immoral for me. It's insane! I also believe that anybody who calls out this sick game at the level of society would be cruelly ostracised by those in power, either in media or politics or economy. Still, we should voice this more often. We should make people rethink our societies.

hevelvarik 6y ago

Thanks for this, this thread has been an eye opener for me.

krimeo 6y ago

Eye opening isn't it? Now you can see where most of the stuff on top of HN comes from.

dang 6y ago
Unless I don't know the first thing about my job (always possible I suppose), that is definitely not true.
- pvg 6y ago
  (always possible I suppose) It would be funny (both -haha and -peculiar) if it turned out you do it all largely by instinct, like one of those fungus-cultivating ants.
- krimeo 6y ago
  Eh, so people are paying for upvotes, sock puppets accounts etc. but it doesn't work ? :o
  - dang 6y ago
    That doesn't follow (because "most of the stuff on top of HN" is a much stronger claim than what you said here) but I'm happy to answer anyway. The answer is that it frequently doesn't work. What we don't know is how many other cases there are where people are getting away with it. We can't know that; by definition, we're never going to know it. Even there, though, one can make educated guesses, based for example on how many cases come up where people got away with it at the time, but then evidence comes to our attention later and we can figure it out in retrospect. Such cases are extremely useful because then we can extend our software to catch them in the future. I'd never claim that such manipulations never work; obviously we can't know that. It's possible that superclever manipulators are rolling HN in their hands like a piece of silly putty. All I'm saying is that if "most of the stuff on top of HN comes from [that]", then I don't know the first thing about my job.
    - krimeo 6y ago

lolkbye 6y ago

So companies pay to get featured everywhere. How is this "black hat"? That's how the world works, bud.

bengale 6y ago

I'm not sure this is surprising really. It wasn't that long ago when there was clearly a targeted campaign against zoom across channels where you'd expect engagement from technical people. I don't know if it wasn't doing its job, or if something like that just can't be maintained long term but it seemed to peter off relatively quickly.

throwaway4good 6y ago

I remember working out of a coworking place in Thailand. There were a group of guys next to me running a marketing agency based upon hundreds of fake profiles they maintained and talking about it like it was the most natural thing in the world. People who are surprised about these things forget that in large part of the world doing this (black hat marketing) is not illegal at all.

cblconfederate 6y ago

I mean, it wasn't exactly a secret right? I 'd like to see sites like HN become vigilant against this kind of fluff marketing content (which has been making the rounds for a loooong time) from now on, as much as they are vigilant against political content. Any new rules?

itsoktocry 6y ago
>I 'd like to see sites like HN become vigilant against this kind of fluff marketing content One of the reasons I continue to use HN is that there seems to be very little marketing content that bubbles to the top articles, compared to almost every other site. Something is working.

tmaly 6y ago

I am curious if it actually works. Do the people paying for the content get any net benefit?

mtnGoat 6y ago

This isn't new at all. If I wasnt under an NDA I'd tell you more about how deep the rabbit hole goes. Keep digging, lots to find and crooked stuff to expose.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

troydavis 6y ago

I'm the OP. It's been about a week since my tweets. As most of us know, some sites are intentionally filled with promoted garbage (Forbes contributors, a lot of Quora and dZone, etc.). Many blog maintainers/curators really are trying to be transparent, though, including most or all of the ones I mentioned. They either don't want content that was paid for or will only consider it when they know about it and it's disclosed to readers. For those blog maintainers/curators, here's a few thoughts: * I think the generalization here are probably that if an author links words/phrases other than a company's name to a company Web site (like linking a type of product or the problem that the company solves), a curator should be more suspicious of the submission. It probably should be changed to link to an editor-chosen neutral discussion of that topic, like a Wikipedia page, trade group, or RFC. About 2/3rds of the posts that I suspect had a conflict of interest would have stood out this way. For example, one post links "usability testing" to a company. That should stand out during review, regardless of the company or author. I'd also be suspicious of posts that have more than 1 link to any company. Obviously it could be totally innocuous, but it's unusual and generally unnecessary. * Don't blindly trust my assessment or the list of companies I provided. As with any random person on the Internet, I can't say authoritatively how any given post was motivated; I can only point to lots of people who are writing very similar things about the same few otherwise-unrelated companies. Each publisher will need to decide for themselves when a coincidence goes from unlikely to impossible. The lesson here is probably to think about that for yourself: where do you draw the line? Would you prefer to err on the side of false negatives, false positives, or exercising editorial discretion (allowing the article but removing parts about specific companies)? * I strongly recommend _against_ penalizing authors who are in developing countries. I think the content marketing firm made victims out of the authors in developing countries. At best, they thought they were providing a real service to the public. At worst, they thought they were making good money doing something that might be a bit shady, but is common in their area. I have no reason to think they knew about the after-the-fact promotion. (Authors in developed countries like the US - which includes all of the suspected made-up authors - obviously shouldn't be doing this and probably know it. Different rules apply.) Moreover, someone in a developing country has limited opportunities for career growth and visibility (and some authors clearly have technical talent). I don't think this should justify taking those opportunities away. For example, I do not suggest refusing future articles from these people or otherwise limiting their distribution. Perhaps their future submissions need tighter review or can't be about specific companies/products, just technologies, but it's important that they still have this avenue. Good luck.

pushcx 6y ago

These are the same people who made dedicated effort to trick Lobsters users into giving them invites so they could spam our site back around the start of 2020: https://lobste.rs/s/utbyws/mitigating_content_marketing https://lobste.rs/s/utbyws/mitigating_content_marketing If they're still spamming for LoadMill eight months later, that strongly implies to me that the clients know what they're getting and are OK with the tactics.