3 ms·

I may be wrong, but I’ve felt for a while that there are some pretty strong vote rings avoiding the HN systems. There’s always a lot of strong downvotes or upvo

I may be wrong, but I’ve felt for a while that there are some pretty strong vote rings avoiding the HN systems. There’s always a lot of strong downvotes or upvotes for specific subjects, but not that many voices in comments to go with them.

wayoutthere 5y ago
Agreed; though I always assumed it was the touch of the HN editorial voice.
burnished 5y ago
You could also just be doing real-time sentiment analysis of the readers of hackernews right? I wonder how you'd prove or disprove this. I know I get a similar feeling lately about Reddit, that some topics seem to be machine generated due to pretty surprising typos (not the existence of them, but the kinds, and not the kinds you get used to from ESL students).
whimsicalism 5y ago
> there are some pretty strong vote rings avoiding the HN systems. Something I've noticed spending time online is that people tend to really over-estimate when this is actually happening. These accusations seem to have accelerated a lot since the 2016 election and related claims around astroturfing. Regardless, your comment is against HN rules.
- crazydoggers 5y ago
  Why should it be against the rules to openly discuss these issues in a thoughtful manner? That kind of silence would only encourage proliferation of the rings since no one is allowed to talk about it. It’s one thing to just randomly spout accusations, but if a number of users are seeing consistent problems, I think people and mods would want to know. Anyway, see my other reply to dang. If you search on Twitter you’ll see rando accounts posting weird formated links to HN articles, and things auto posting to HN, etc etc. I avoid Facebook alltogether, but I can only imagine there’s more of the same. > These accusations seem to have accelerated a lot since the 2016 election and related claims around astroturfing. Don’t we know for a fact that social media sites have been and are targets of influence campaigns? ie. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook-troll-farms-report-us-2020-election/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook... https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/08/facebook-bans-media-consultancy-running-troll-farm-pro-trump-youth-group/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/08/faceboo... Since 2016 these issues have rightly had more light shined on them. It’s better that people at least discuss openly that social media is being targeted and gamed for money than have us all stick our heads in the sand.
dang 5y ago
These perceptions can be very unreliable so it would be good to ask us to look at specific links. If voting rings are getting around HN's anti-abuse systems, that would be a huge problem and would instantly become our top priority.
- crazydoggers 5y ago
  I think if you look into Twitter for a couple minutes you’ll see… Here’s foone complaining about it: https://mobile.twitter.com/foone/status/1440375176604966924 https://mobile.twitter.com/foone/status/1440375176604966924
  - dang 5y ago
    That tweet has nothing to do with voting rings. People clearly upvote those submissions because they're interesting, and the threads [1] have usually been quite high-quality once we pull the weeds of people perennially complaining about the Twitter format. If you want to hunt for voting rings on HN I can tell you with confidence that those are not the right place. If there are other links I'd be happy to take a look. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=twitter.com%2Ffoone%20comments%3E10&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
    - crazydoggers 5y ago
      I’m not referring to foone’s post getting in Twitter. I’m referring to his post later on: “There are endless Twitter bots which do exactly the same thing; scrape all the HN links and cross-post them to Twitter” Here’s a single account example I found… and I’ve seen more like it before. https://twitter.com/park_junbeom/status/1447511436666675203 https://twitter.com/park_junbeom/status/1447511436666675203 You’ll notice that, that account also has numerous random links to products, probably farming traffic to those as well. In the ad business this is a strategy to foster network effect traffic signals. And then there’s karma. I don’t have direct evidence because I don’t have the time to investigate, but this quote rings true to me, and I’m sure other here: “hacker news is a nexus of karma farming bot activity” Here’s an example of what I’m referring too. In this case it’s not a bot, but a human run vote system: https://www.appsally.com/products/hacker-news-karma/ https://www.appsally.com/products/hacker-news-karma/ I’ve been in the advertising space for a long time. It’s very hard to combat this type of stuff. There are basically sweat shops in places like India devoted to these things, and it took google years to rid its ad system of it, and they threw enormous money and AI at the problem. So when you say with 100% certainty it’s not happening, but you have many serious users complaining, it feels like an issue. I truly think that social media companies are not really aware of the depth of what they are fighting. Here’s a report from Oxford university: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-01-13-social-media-manipulation-political-actors-industrial-scale-problem-oxford-report https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-01-13-social-media-manipulati...

wayoutthere 5y ago

Agreed; though I always assumed it was the touch of the HN editorial voice.

burnished 5y ago

You could also just be doing real-time sentiment analysis of the readers of hackernews right? I wonder how you'd prove or disprove this. I know I get a similar feeling lately about Reddit, that some topics seem to be machine generated due to pretty surprising typos (not the existence of them, but the kinds, and not the kinds you get used to from ESL students).

whimsicalism 5y ago

> there are some pretty strong vote rings avoiding the HN systems. Something I've noticed spending time online is that people tend to really over-estimate when this is actually happening. These accusations seem to have accelerated a lot since the 2016 election and related claims around astroturfing. Regardless, your comment is against HN rules.

crazydoggers 5y ago
Why should it be against the rules to openly discuss these issues in a thoughtful manner? That kind of silence would only encourage proliferation of the rings since no one is allowed to talk about it. It’s one thing to just randomly spout accusations, but if a number of users are seeing consistent problems, I think people and mods would want to know. Anyway, see my other reply to dang. If you search on Twitter you’ll see rando accounts posting weird formated links to HN articles, and things auto posting to HN, etc etc. I avoid Facebook alltogether, but I can only imagine there’s more of the same. > These accusations seem to have accelerated a lot since the 2016 election and related claims around astroturfing. Don’t we know for a fact that social media sites have been and are targets of influence campaigns? ie. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook-troll-farms-report-us-2020-election/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook... https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/08/facebook-bans-media-consultancy-running-troll-farm-pro-trump-youth-group/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/08/faceboo... Since 2016 these issues have rightly had more light shined on them. It’s better that people at least discuss openly that social media is being targeted and gamed for money than have us all stick our heads in the sand.

dang 5y ago

These perceptions can be very unreliable so it would be good to ask us to look at specific links. If voting rings are getting around HN's anti-abuse systems, that would be a huge problem and would instantly become our top priority.

crazydoggers 5y ago
I think if you look into Twitter for a couple minutes you’ll see… Here’s foone complaining about it: https://mobile.twitter.com/foone/status/1440375176604966924 https://mobile.twitter.com/foone/status/1440375176604966924
- dang 5y ago
  That tweet has nothing to do with voting rings. People clearly upvote those submissions because they're interesting, and the threads [1] have usually been quite high-quality once we pull the weeds of people perennially complaining about the Twitter format. If you want to hunt for voting rings on HN I can tell you with confidence that those are not the right place. If there are other links I'd be happy to take a look. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=twitter.com%2Ffoone%20comments%3E10&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
  - crazydoggers 5y ago
    I’m not referring to foone’s post getting in Twitter. I’m referring to his post later on: “There are endless Twitter bots which do exactly the same thing; scrape all the HN links and cross-post them to Twitter” Here’s a single account example I found… and I’ve seen more like it before. https://twitter.com/park_junbeom/status/1447511436666675203 https://twitter.com/park_junbeom/status/1447511436666675203 You’ll notice that, that account also has numerous random links to products, probably farming traffic to those as well. In the ad business this is a strategy to foster network effect traffic signals. And then there’s karma. I don’t have direct evidence because I don’t have the time to investigate, but this quote rings true to me, and I’m sure other here: “hacker news is a nexus of karma farming bot activity” Here’s an example of what I’m referring too. In this case it’s not a bot, but a human run vote system: https://www.appsally.com/products/hacker-news-karma/ https://www.appsally.com/products/hacker-news-karma/ I’ve been in the advertising space for a long time. It’s very hard to combat this type of stuff. There are basically sweat shops in places like India devoted to these things, and it took google years to rid its ad system of it, and they threw enormous money and AI at the problem. So when you say with 100% certainty it’s not happening, but you have many serious users complaining, it feels like an issue. I truly think that social media companies are not really aware of the depth of what they are fighting. Here’s a report from Oxford university: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-01-13-social-media-manipulation-political-actors-industrial-scale-problem-oxford-report https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-01-13-social-media-manipulati...