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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/14403751766049669

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...
  - dang 5y ago
    Where did you hear 100% certainty? what I said was if people have specific links they should share them so we can investigate. What's needed is concrete evidence. Your first and third links don't seem to me to have any specific relevance to HN. Your second link certainly does (thank you!) - on the other hand I can tell you that in other cases when people have used such spam outfits to buy upvotes on HN, the result is that their accounts and sites have gotten banned here. I'd never claim that there's no abuse happening on HN that we don't know about. That would be absurd! We don't know what we don't know. All I can tell you is that we put a high priority on catching it, and we do catch a lot. Also, I can tell you that many people come up with all sorts of fanciful imaginations and grand, but substanceless, claims about this—that's an internet pastime. Whether or not they're serious users I'll leave to you, but the prevalance of imagination in this area is why we need concrete evidence to go on. When we get it, we take it seriously and act on it.
    - crazydoggers 5y ago
      Thanks for the response. That first link is a Twitter bot account. There’s a bunch of them under different names. You’ll notice the #HackerNews hashtag, and all the links are HN posted articles. Again, the same bots also seem to double duty product traffic spam. The third link’s relevance is that there is a very large body of evidence from respected institutions that social media is targeted by influence campaigns. I don’t know why anyone would think that the campaigns are targeting Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, but not HN. From that article “The platforms removed more than 317,000 accounts and pages from ‘cyber troops’ actors between January 2019 and November 2020.” Perhaps you guys don’t believe these studies? They aren’t always obvious things, that’s the whole point. For instance with Facebook foreign governments were pushing not just obvious political misinformation but trying to marginalize groups by making them seem less rational in online topics. Perhaps you might want to survey the HN community. I honestly believe that it’s become more toxic and divided, and it’s becoming clear to anyone paying attention that social media is being manipulated by large well funded groups. Again, not sure if your in a position to do anything about it. But maybe do some hard research in the area. It’s not “fanciful imagination” when there are studies from respected outlets. Here’s a starting point I’ve used for my own research: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C44&q=social+media+manipulation&oq=social+media+man https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C44&q=soc... From one of these studies.. “Specifically, this study examines a collection of tweets relating to a much-publicized fan dispute over the Star Wars franchise film Episode VII: The Last Jedi. This study finds evidence of deliberate, organized political influence measures disguised as fan arguments. The likely objective of these measures is increasing media coverage of the fandom conflict, thereby adding to and further propagating a narrative of widespread discord and dysfunction in American society” And from another. “Despite being outnumbered by several orders of magnitude, just a few thousands of bots generated spikes of conversations around real-world political events in all comparable with the volume of activity of humans. We discover that bots also exacerbate the consumption of content produced by users with their same political views, worsening the issue of political echo chambers. ”

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...
- dang 5y ago
  Where did you hear 100% certainty? what I said was if people have specific links they should share them so we can investigate. What's needed is concrete evidence. Your first and third links don't seem to me to have any specific relevance to HN. Your second link certainly does (thank you!) - on the other hand I can tell you that in other cases when people have used such spam outfits to buy upvotes on HN, the result is that their accounts and sites have gotten banned here. I'd never claim that there's no abuse happening on HN that we don't know about. That would be absurd! We don't know what we don't know. All I can tell you is that we put a high priority on catching it, and we do catch a lot. Also, I can tell you that many people come up with all sorts of fanciful imaginations and grand, but substanceless, claims about this—that's an internet pastime. Whether or not they're serious users I'll leave to you, but the prevalance of imagination in this area is why we need concrete evidence to go on. When we get it, we take it seriously and act on it.
  - crazydoggers 5y ago
    Thanks for the response. That first link is a Twitter bot account. There’s a bunch of them under different names. You’ll notice the #HackerNews hashtag, and all the links are HN posted articles. Again, the same bots also seem to double duty product traffic spam. The third link’s relevance is that there is a very large body of evidence from respected institutions that social media is targeted by influence campaigns. I don’t know why anyone would think that the campaigns are targeting Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, but not HN. From that article “The platforms removed more than 317,000 accounts and pages from ‘cyber troops’ actors between January 2019 and November 2020.” Perhaps you guys don’t believe these studies? They aren’t always obvious things, that’s the whole point. For instance with Facebook foreign governments were pushing not just obvious political misinformation but trying to marginalize groups by making them seem less rational in online topics. Perhaps you might want to survey the HN community. I honestly believe that it’s become more toxic and divided, and it’s becoming clear to anyone paying attention that social media is being manipulated by large well funded groups. Again, not sure if your in a position to do anything about it. But maybe do some hard research in the area. It’s not “fanciful imagination” when there are studies from respected outlets. Here’s a starting point I’ve used for my own research: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C44&q=social+media+manipulation&oq=social+media+man https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C44&q=soc... From one of these studies.. “Specifically, this study examines a collection of tweets relating to a much-publicized fan dispute over the Star Wars franchise film Episode VII: The Last Jedi. This study finds evidence of deliberate, organized political influence measures disguised as fan arguments. The likely objective of these measures is increasing media coverage of the fandom conflict, thereby adding to and further propagating a narrative of widespread discord and dysfunction in American society” And from another. “Despite being outnumbered by several orders of magnitude, just a few thousands of bots generated spikes of conversations around real-world political events in all comparable with the volume of activity of humans. We discover that bots also exacerbate the consumption of content produced by users with their same political views, worsening the issue of political echo chambers. ”