4 ms·

Personally I think this is a really funny post. Kinda surprised how many comments seem to be taking it seriously.

• ag56 6y ago
  After laughing and upvoting this brilliant satire, coming to the comments was like a second meta-joke.
  • Brian_K_White 6y ago
    I always contended the funniest part of Landover Baptist was the guest book.
  • pjc50 6y ago
    HN really doesn't have a sense of humor. Or rather, a joke can get some up voters if tailored to the wry geek sense of humor, but any post which contains humor or subtext or sarcasm will absolutely get an outraged reply from somebody who has taken it literally.
• gzer0 6y ago
  Well, now everyone can see the massive network of "bot" accounts that HN has. It's a growing trend on posts; you'll see them interacting with each other; they like to work in nodes to boost the comment count and therefore somehow increase the chances of making front page. Even if they don't hit front page, the comment itself adds to the longer term plan of these accounts. I don't doubt for a second that someone has, or is currently manipulating a lot of the traffic and comments for certain posts. This is easily established via networks of rotating residentials; or better yet, real humans in Ukraine [1]: something that cannot be defeated unless you start nodal map chaining. High likelihood that these troll farm/serious commenters algos are not equipped to deal with such complexities such as human satire yet, which is a reasonable conclusion as to why there are so many "serious" posts [1] https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/inside-a-ukrainian-troll-farm https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/inside-a-ukrainian-t... [2] https://snap.stanford.edu/data/ego-Twitter.html https://snap.stanford.edu/data/ego-Twitter.html
  • leafmeal 6y ago
    This comment would be really funny if it was a joke.. but I just can't tell what's real anymore.
    • gzer0 6y ago
      [redacted]
      • dang 6y ago
        That's an example of a ring that was trying (rather hamfistedly) to manipulate HN, which was caught by our systems and neutralized long before the thread you're linking to ever happened. As I said at the time, if anyone can find an example of a story from those accounts making the HN front page, I'd like to hear about it at hn@ycombinator.com; examples of cases we missed are hugely helpful in plugging holes. But certainly the vast majority of their efforts went nowhere. People try every day to plant stuff on HN's front page, and every day our anti-abuse systems catch such efforts and apply different types of counter-action depending on the case. I'm not saying no one gets away with it (obviously we can't know that) but I can say for sure that anyone getting away with it would have to be way smarter than that group. In case anyone's interested, it happens that I've been working for the last few weeks on a new type of anti-abuse system, which is designed to more tightly enforce this site guideline: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.". https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        • gzer0 6y ago
          Thank you for all you do and the thorough explanations.
          • dang 6y ago
            Appreciated! You didn't have to redact your comments and I'm sorry if my replies were more testy than they should have been.
• tibbon 6y ago
  I feel inspired. I've told my investors if I can get to 10% of their MRR, we'll be dollarnares. It's really exciting.