12 ms·

It would be a good idea to present stronger evidence before saying HN is astroturfable. It has one of the strongest anti astroturf systems I’ve seen, primarily

It would be a good idea to present stronger evidence before saying HN is astroturfable. It has one of the strongest anti astroturf systems I’ve seen, primarily because of how HN works (which, sadly, is hard to discuss openly). I believe you about Reddit, but it’s going to be quite hard to buy your way into HN, no matter how cleverly you do it. I’m not saying it’s impossible. But it’s so easy to believe, and so hard to do, that it warrants skepticism.

walrus01 6y ago
I think that anti-astroturf systems are definitely one of the things that should qualify to remain as proprietary data of the people who run the servers. Much the same as the best online payment processing anti-fraud services are an opaque black box that you feed some data into, and you get a result back. They don't tell you what's going on inside the black box. I would not be surprised at all if the top vendors for online payment processing fraud detection also offer services for anti-sockpuppet/anti-inauthentic user detection. Some of the methods going on in the back end to analyze the validity of a transaction will also apply. Considering the modern weaponization of social media to manipulate stocks, elections, protests and such, I would consider that sort of SaaS to be a growth market.
- fogetti 6y ago
  There is a problem though. In a physical setting you cannot do shadow banning. Now in the past 100% of public discussion happened in public spaces, but let's say that now this happens in 50% of the cases online. Let's also say that this grows considerably to something like 75%. The issue is that public discussion becomes increasingly easy to be censored.
  - krageon 6y ago
    Censoring isn't bad in and of it's own, so it would help if you illustrated this with perhaps some undesirable examples of things happening today.
searchableguy 6y ago
How I initially joined HN: Made an account to point out an astroturf post I saw someone promoting elsewhere to upvote spam. I was just a passive consumer before.
- paulcole 6y ago
  Ha! I made an account here to astroturf. I wonder if I’m the one who inspired you to create your account?
bathtub365 6y ago
> which, sadly, is hard to discuss openly Why is this?
- chrisweekly 6y ago
  Because discussing the moderation system is strongly discouraged and leads to downvotes.
  - tptacek 6y ago
    No, that's not it; it's because anti-abuse is a cat-and-mouse game, so while you can discuss it (in an appropriate setting like a junky meta thread you didn't start), you can't expect HN to be forthcoming with details, because those details lower costs for abusers, and maximizing costs is the whole ballgame. Kibitzing HN moderation itself is one of our oldest pastimes.
    - danimal88 6y ago
      Its funny because the most hardcore in open source and security would argue that good techniques don't rely on obfuscation and secrets because those cats can get out of the bag. Never purrsonally subscribed to those as I agree with the cat and mouse perspective. Information assymetry is effective.
      - tptacek 6y ago
        People in security who say that categorically are betraying ignorance, because there are several "hardcore" settings in software security where the same dynamic --- attacker/defender cost competition occurring by degrees --- plays out. Anti-ATO, content protection, botnets, anti-DDOS, hardware platform security, just to rattle a few off my head. The correct security objection is to obfuscation being deployed in settings where there are decisively effective controls that could be deployed instead: where it doesn't make sense to raise attacker costs by degrees, because those costs can be raised to intractable levels instead. I'd cite an example, but it would spawn a 500 comment thread about how Linux sysadmins manage their networks.
ebg13 6y ago
It would be a good idea to present stronger evidence before saying HN is _not_ astroturfable. Yada yada. Just pretend I flipped the rest of what you said around too.
marketingPro 6y ago
I've never thought HN was impartial. The fact that discussing astroturfing is against the rules was highly suspect. I consider this a highly censored website with particular objectives, but a decent userbase.
- dang 6y ago
  The rule is against insinuating astroturfing without evidence. The alternative is threads full of pointless insinuation about astroturfing—the favorite junk pastime of internet forums. HN doesn't have "particular objectives", it has one objective: to gratify intellectual curiosity, and that guideline is obviously integral to this. That doesn't make actual astroturfing ok. We spend many hours combating it and banning accounts and sites that do it, including the ones that Troy's reporting on here. There's just a huge difference between it-really-happening and pointless-toxic-speculation. The difference is evidence, and that's what we require. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - gingerlime 6y ago
    Just curious, but what constitutes evidence in this context? And how do you deal with the other side of "unfair" behaviour, e.g. excessive flagging or downvoting for legitimate posts or comments. As far as I'm aware there isn't any evidence required to downvote or flag.
    - evgen 6y ago
      'Fairness' has no relevance when it comes to a site's participants deciding among themselves what is and is not worth discussing. Perhaps those posts and commands that were flagged or downvoted were considered less legitimate than you might have suspected by the rest of the userbase. <insert xkcd 1357 here>
      - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
        IDK. Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Be kind. Please don't sneer Please don't post shallow dismissals But downvotes are sometimes used unkindly, dismissively and as a way to supress a different view (which may or may not be justified). You nuke me and say why, I'm happy - we can talk! I can learn something new! Downvoting factual posts silently is... frustrating. And ill mannered.
higerordermap 6y ago
HN / reddit / lobsters whatever programmer link aggregators may be astroturfed. But after a while you will learn to recognise the smell of astroturfing and even otherwise, they are refuted by commenters. More likely that there are fanboys that come with irrational arguments rather than astroturfing in these forums. The greater harm of these content marketing bullshit is it pollutes Google search results. If you search Google for some mainstream enough technical terms, all you get is shallow information, poorly written, posts on bullshit sites. I'd like someone to make a search engine for authentic programming related websites and blogs, even if hand aggregated. Instead of surfing through 5 pages of ZDNet, geeksforgeeks, DZone, thenewstack, quora etc.. highly SEO'd sites.
- OrderlyTiamat 6y ago
  I've been pleasantly surprised by content om DZone at least, though the others less so.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    It's a hit and miss site tbh. I was once told that one of my rambly blog posts had appeared on there without me knowing; it wasn't the best, but still. My blog post was on our 'company' blog, turns out the marketing department of another segment of it just took it and reposted it on dzone.
barumi 6y ago
> It would be a good idea to present stronger evidence before saying HN is astroturfable. What? You do realize anyone can create HN accounts to post any link and comment on any discussion, right? Even if you argue that there are magical ex post facto measures to tackle obvious and rampant abuse, you do understand that the system is indeed vulnerable to astroturfers right in its very design, don't you?
- oefrha 6y ago
  Anyone can create HN accounts to post any link and comment on any discussion, but certain accounts are dead on arrival, and votes from certain accounts don’t count, so you can pollute /new or discussions (especially for users with showdead on), but that doesn’t mean your content automatically get prime spot placement just by registering more accounts. Meanwhile, clickbaiting is much more effective than creating accounts.
  - barumi 6y ago
    > but that doesn’t mean your content automatically get prime spot placement That's not how it works. It might be a desirable goal, but that doesn't mean that the role of a content marketer is not to a) astroturf discusssions, b) generate content that's SEO-friendly even if they don't blow up. Customers already get their money's worth if you get your minions sparking causal low-key discussions about their product/service/PR talking point on random places in order to raise awareness and focus on topics in ways that serves your best interests.
nindalf 6y ago
HN hands out shadowbans like candy for people suspected of vote manipulation. I completely agree with this approach because it keeps the site clean. An interesting question to ask is if HN owes it to its users to be more transparent about responses like shadow banning and provide ways to appeal such responses. Most of would say no, the current approach is working for us and we should keep it going. But then I wonder why we’re ok with HN behaving like this but not large social media companies.
- fogetti 6y ago
  I wonder how can shadowban work at all to begin with. It only takes 10 seconds to open a public thread in an incognito window and confirm if voting, commenting, etc indeed happened as the commenter intended or was it only happening in a private echo chamber.
  - ratww 6y ago
    One way I fixed this in a small gamedev forum I help maintain was by letting users view shadowbanned comments created by the same IP. There's still the chance of the user using Tor/VPNs, but it's rarer. Shadowban is not perfect by all means, but it's still a good deterrent in my experience.
    - littlestymaar 6y ago
      IP-based recognition is annoying for people leaving in third world countries[1] though, because there little IPV4, they are many behind the same NAT. Also, with tethering it's really easy to circumvent, without needing a VPN. [1]: IIRC, the whole Laos only has a /32 subnet… yes you read it right: a single IPV4 address for end entire country. And many country only have a few /16.
      - ratww 6y ago
        Please read my message again. I'm not restricting anything and there's nothing to be circumvented, it's about letting unlogged/anonymous users view more stuff to deter detection of shadowbanning.
littlestymaar 6y ago
I don't know about astroturfing on HN, but I've seen enough patrolling here to be skeptical about any kind of “HN has strong defenses” claims.
- dang 6y ago
  What does 'patrolling' mean in this context?
  - littlestymaar 6y ago
    I thought it was a common term, but maybe it's just some reddit slang: I use it to mean one community “attacking” or “boosting“ a submission on a forum based on the community values, and not the worth of the said submission. In can have different levels of synchronizations: - no synchronization at all: conservatives (especially American ones) flagging socialist-sounding posts (often upvoted by Europeans when Americans are asleep), Gophers & C++ guys flagging Rust posts, etc. - loosely synchronized: some content is getting popular on /r/rust, or /r/python, some people there will connect to HN to upvote it here. - strongly synchronized: some influential Twitter handle posts a message about how “some shit went to the front page”, zealot followers come and flag the submission. Also works with specific subreddits (/r/programmingcirclejerk for instance, even though it's more aimed at comment posts than submission). It happens a lot, often enough to be noticeable. Sometimes it sort of regulates itself (like in the left-right battle between Europe & US, or between the Rust Evangelist Strike Force & Rust haters), but not always.
    - dang 6y ago
      Thank you, that's interesting! I think some of those things are going on. Other points I'm a little skeptical about—for example I don't believe that the left/right divide correlates as strongly with the US vs. Europe as you suggest. Many of the strongest leftist posts we see come from the U.S. and many of the strongest rightist posts come from Europe (to judge by IP geolocation). Your 'no synchronization' case is tribalism. That's certainly happening here, as probably in every large-enough group. Yes, it's a significant problem. But it's not the astroturfing/manipulation problem being discussed in this thread. If your skepticism about "strong defenses" was meant to include this case, that's too general. Your 'synchronized' cases would constitute abuse in HN's terms, and if you or anyone notice it happening in the future, we'd greatly appreciate being told about it at hn@ycombinator.com. Actually, if you can even point to cases where it happened in the past (e.g. "some content [was] getting popular on /r/rust, or /r/python, some people there [connected] to HN to upvote it here"), it would be interesting to look back and see whether we detected it and/or could do something differently. The one thing I'd caution is that it's extremely easy to convince oneself that these things are happening when they're not. Nearly everyone with strong views about this phenomenon is massively deceiving themselves about it—if you're only guided by what feels like it must be happening, there's far too much opportunity to just project things into the situation. People do this all the time, and it's a big problem—as I've said elsewhere in this thread, it's actually a bigger problem than the abuse and manipulation being complained about. The solution is to guard against that by always looking for some extraneous indication (i.e. evidence)—for example a thread on Reddit saying "let's upvote this on HN"—and to be agnostic in the cases where one doesn't have that.
ksec 6y ago
I think HN is one of those rare site I really wish they had ad or some donation button where I can paid. Dang is doing an exceptional job in holding things together. And despite a slight downward trend in terms discussion quality, HN is still by far the best tech and other "nerd" interest forum. And the community as a whole self police each other. The vibrant and large number of active users, compared to a SubReddit, Dev.to and other site makes astroturfing HN really really really hard. Anyone who have submitted anything on HN would know. Getting on the Front page isn't an easy task at all. And staying on front page is even harder. And Cunningham's law doesn't always work on HN. Sometimes the community just decide to ignore it. Lol

walrus01 6y ago

I think that anti-astroturf systems are definitely one of the things that should qualify to remain as proprietary data of the people who run the servers. Much the same as the best online payment processing anti-fraud services are an opaque black box that you feed some data into, and you get a result back. They don't tell you what's going on inside the black box. I would not be surprised at all if the top vendors for online payment processing fraud detection also offer services for anti-sockpuppet/anti-inauthentic user detection. Some of the methods going on in the back end to analyze the validity of a transaction will also apply. Considering the modern weaponization of social media to manipulate stocks, elections, protests and such, I would consider that sort of SaaS to be a growth market.

fogetti 6y ago
There is a problem though. In a physical setting you cannot do shadow banning. Now in the past 100% of public discussion happened in public spaces, but let's say that now this happens in 50% of the cases online. Let's also say that this grows considerably to something like 75%. The issue is that public discussion becomes increasingly easy to be censored.
- krageon 6y ago
  Censoring isn't bad in and of it's own, so it would help if you illustrated this with perhaps some undesirable examples of things happening today.

searchableguy 6y ago

How I initially joined HN: Made an account to point out an astroturf post I saw someone promoting elsewhere to upvote spam. I was just a passive consumer before.

paulcole 6y ago
Ha! I made an account here to astroturf. I wonder if I’m the one who inspired you to create your account?

bathtub365 6y ago

> which, sadly, is hard to discuss openly Why is this?

chrisweekly 6y ago
Because discussing the moderation system is strongly discouraged and leads to downvotes.
- tptacek 6y ago
  No, that's not it; it's because anti-abuse is a cat-and-mouse game, so while you can discuss it (in an appropriate setting like a junky meta thread you didn't start), you can't expect HN to be forthcoming with details, because those details lower costs for abusers, and maximizing costs is the whole ballgame. Kibitzing HN moderation itself is one of our oldest pastimes.
  - danimal88 6y ago
    Its funny because the most hardcore in open source and security would argue that good techniques don't rely on obfuscation and secrets because those cats can get out of the bag. Never purrsonally subscribed to those as I agree with the cat and mouse perspective. Information assymetry is effective.
    - tptacek 6y ago
      People in security who say that categorically are betraying ignorance, because there are several "hardcore" settings in software security where the same dynamic --- attacker/defender cost competition occurring by degrees --- plays out. Anti-ATO, content protection, botnets, anti-DDOS, hardware platform security, just to rattle a few off my head. The correct security objection is to obfuscation being deployed in settings where there are decisively effective controls that could be deployed instead: where it doesn't make sense to raise attacker costs by degrees, because those costs can be raised to intractable levels instead. I'd cite an example, but it would spawn a 500 comment thread about how Linux sysadmins manage their networks.

ebg13 6y ago

It would be a good idea to present stronger evidence before saying HN is _not_ astroturfable. Yada yada. Just pretend I flipped the rest of what you said around too.

marketingPro 6y ago

I've never thought HN was impartial. The fact that discussing astroturfing is against the rules was highly suspect. I consider this a highly censored website with particular objectives, but a decent userbase.

dang 6y ago
The rule is against insinuating astroturfing without evidence. The alternative is threads full of pointless insinuation about astroturfing—the favorite junk pastime of internet forums. HN doesn't have "particular objectives", it has one objective: to gratify intellectual curiosity, and that guideline is obviously integral to this. That doesn't make actual astroturfing ok. We spend many hours combating it and banning accounts and sites that do it, including the ones that Troy's reporting on here. There's just a huge difference between it-really-happening and pointless-toxic-speculation. The difference is evidence, and that's what we require. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- gingerlime 6y ago
  Just curious, but what constitutes evidence in this context? And how do you deal with the other side of "unfair" behaviour, e.g. excessive flagging or downvoting for legitimate posts or comments. As far as I'm aware there isn't any evidence required to downvote or flag.
  - evgen 6y ago
    'Fairness' has no relevance when it comes to a site's participants deciding among themselves what is and is not worth discussing. Perhaps those posts and commands that were flagged or downvoted were considered less legitimate than you might have suspected by the rest of the userbase. <insert xkcd 1357 here>
    - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
      IDK. Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Be kind. Please don't sneer Please don't post shallow dismissals But downvotes are sometimes used unkindly, dismissively and as a way to supress a different view (which may or may not be justified). You nuke me and say why, I'm happy - we can talk! I can learn something new! Downvoting factual posts silently is... frustrating. And ill mannered.

higerordermap 6y ago

HN / reddit / lobsters whatever programmer link aggregators may be astroturfed. But after a while you will learn to recognise the smell of astroturfing and even otherwise, they are refuted by commenters. More likely that there are fanboys that come with irrational arguments rather than astroturfing in these forums. The greater harm of these content marketing bullshit is it pollutes Google search results. If you search Google for some mainstream enough technical terms, all you get is shallow information, poorly written, posts on bullshit sites. I'd like someone to make a search engine for authentic programming related websites and blogs, even if hand aggregated. Instead of surfing through 5 pages of ZDNet, geeksforgeeks, DZone, thenewstack, quora etc.. highly SEO'd sites.

OrderlyTiamat 6y ago
I've been pleasantly surprised by content om DZone at least, though the others less so.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  It's a hit and miss site tbh. I was once told that one of my rambly blog posts had appeared on there without me knowing; it wasn't the best, but still. My blog post was on our 'company' blog, turns out the marketing department of another segment of it just took it and reposted it on dzone.

barumi 6y ago

> It would be a good idea to present stronger evidence before saying HN is astroturfable. What? You do realize anyone can create HN accounts to post any link and comment on any discussion, right? Even if you argue that there are magical ex post facto measures to tackle obvious and rampant abuse, you do understand that the system is indeed vulnerable to astroturfers right in its very design, don't you?

oefrha 6y ago
Anyone can create HN accounts to post any link and comment on any discussion, but certain accounts are dead on arrival, and votes from certain accounts don’t count, so you can pollute /new or discussions (especially for users with showdead on), but that doesn’t mean your content automatically get prime spot placement just by registering more accounts. Meanwhile, clickbaiting is much more effective than creating accounts.
- barumi 6y ago
  > but that doesn’t mean your content automatically get prime spot placement That's not how it works. It might be a desirable goal, but that doesn't mean that the role of a content marketer is not to a) astroturf discusssions, b) generate content that's SEO-friendly even if they don't blow up. Customers already get their money's worth if you get your minions sparking causal low-key discussions about their product/service/PR talking point on random places in order to raise awareness and focus on topics in ways that serves your best interests.

nindalf 6y ago

HN hands out shadowbans like candy for people suspected of vote manipulation. I completely agree with this approach because it keeps the site clean. An interesting question to ask is if HN owes it to its users to be more transparent about responses like shadow banning and provide ways to appeal such responses. Most of would say no, the current approach is working for us and we should keep it going. But then I wonder why we’re ok with HN behaving like this but not large social media companies.

fogetti 6y ago
I wonder how can shadowban work at all to begin with. It only takes 10 seconds to open a public thread in an incognito window and confirm if voting, commenting, etc indeed happened as the commenter intended or was it only happening in a private echo chamber.
- ratww 6y ago
  One way I fixed this in a small gamedev forum I help maintain was by letting users view shadowbanned comments created by the same IP. There's still the chance of the user using Tor/VPNs, but it's rarer. Shadowban is not perfect by all means, but it's still a good deterrent in my experience.
  - littlestymaar 6y ago
    IP-based recognition is annoying for people leaving in third world countries[1] though, because there little IPV4, they are many behind the same NAT. Also, with tethering it's really easy to circumvent, without needing a VPN. [1]: IIRC, the whole Laos only has a /32 subnet… yes you read it right: a single IPV4 address for end entire country. And many country only have a few /16.
    - ratww 6y ago
      Please read my message again. I'm not restricting anything and there's nothing to be circumvented, it's about letting unlogged/anonymous users view more stuff to deter detection of shadowbanning.

littlestymaar 6y ago

I don't know about astroturfing on HN, but I've seen enough patrolling here to be skeptical about any kind of “HN has strong defenses” claims.

dang 6y ago
What does 'patrolling' mean in this context?
- littlestymaar 6y ago
  I thought it was a common term, but maybe it's just some reddit slang: I use it to mean one community “attacking” or “boosting“ a submission on a forum based on the community values, and not the worth of the said submission. In can have different levels of synchronizations: - no synchronization at all: conservatives (especially American ones) flagging socialist-sounding posts (often upvoted by Europeans when Americans are asleep), Gophers & C++ guys flagging Rust posts, etc. - loosely synchronized: some content is getting popular on /r/rust, or /r/python, some people there will connect to HN to upvote it here. - strongly synchronized: some influential Twitter handle posts a message about how “some shit went to the front page”, zealot followers come and flag the submission. Also works with specific subreddits (/r/programmingcirclejerk for instance, even though it's more aimed at comment posts than submission). It happens a lot, often enough to be noticeable. Sometimes it sort of regulates itself (like in the left-right battle between Europe & US, or between the Rust Evangelist Strike Force & Rust haters), but not always.
  - dang 6y ago
    Thank you, that's interesting! I think some of those things are going on. Other points I'm a little skeptical about—for example I don't believe that the left/right divide correlates as strongly with the US vs. Europe as you suggest. Many of the strongest leftist posts we see come from the U.S. and many of the strongest rightist posts come from Europe (to judge by IP geolocation). Your 'no synchronization' case is tribalism. That's certainly happening here, as probably in every large-enough group. Yes, it's a significant problem. But it's not the astroturfing/manipulation problem being discussed in this thread. If your skepticism about "strong defenses" was meant to include this case, that's too general. Your 'synchronized' cases would constitute abuse in HN's terms, and if you or anyone notice it happening in the future, we'd greatly appreciate being told about it at hn@ycombinator.com. Actually, if you can even point to cases where it happened in the past (e.g. "some content [was] getting popular on /r/rust, or /r/python, some people there [connected] to HN to upvote it here"), it would be interesting to look back and see whether we detected it and/or could do something differently. The one thing I'd caution is that it's extremely easy to convince oneself that these things are happening when they're not. Nearly everyone with strong views about this phenomenon is massively deceiving themselves about it—if you're only guided by what feels like it must be happening, there's far too much opportunity to just project things into the situation. People do this all the time, and it's a big problem—as I've said elsewhere in this thread, it's actually a bigger problem than the abuse and manipulation being complained about. The solution is to guard against that by always looking for some extraneous indication (i.e. evidence)—for example a thread on Reddit saying "let's upvote this on HN"—and to be agnostic in the cases where one doesn't have that.

ksec 6y ago

I think HN is one of those rare site I really wish they had ad or some donation button where I can paid. Dang is doing an exceptional job in holding things together. And despite a slight downward trend in terms discussion quality, HN is still by far the best tech and other "nerd" interest forum. And the community as a whole self police each other. The vibrant and large number of active users, compared to a SubReddit, Dev.to and other site makes astroturfing HN really really really hard. Anyone who have submitted anything on HN would know. Getting on the Front page isn't an easy task at all. And staying on front page is even harder. And Cunningham's law doesn't always work on HN. Sometimes the community just decide to ignore it. Lol