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Ask HN: Are there paid commenters on HN?

37 points by l8rlump 5y ago

How susceptible is HN to ideological meddling, eg by governments or “Big xyz”? If susceptible, what would be the signs, how could it be managed, would the HN API aid such meddling, and does it even matter?

DeathArrow 5y ago
I wonder if there is research to see if karma based moderation systems (HN, Reddit, Stack Overflow) actually solve the problems they are designed to solve.
geoffpado 5y ago
Presumably at least dang gets paid to comment here.
DeathArrow 5y ago
I see how manipulating opinion on social networks can yield a gain. But how would entity X profit from manipulating opinion on a small community of tech enthusiasts? Or maybe the recent resurgence of Javascript frameworks in Web, desktop and mobiles is a plot of Russians to slow the computing and software engineering for the westerners by manipulating online tech communities?
- echelon 5y ago
  > I see how manipulating opinion on social networks can yield a gain. But how would entity X profit from manipulating opinion on a small community of tech enthusiasts? Having your posts yelled at and downvoted can reduce your willingness to participate in discussion or debate. Especially when there's a stupid "karma" score that subconsciously gamifies our participation here. I'd be willing to bet that having one's opinions silenced online trains one to stop talking about the same topics offline as well. Like a sort of conditioning. And there are lots of powerful parties that want to silence certain opinions. Why on HN? Because of the abundance of smart, wealthy, influential, and well-connected people here. Change these people, and your social engineering ripples throughout society.
  - DeathArrow 5y ago
    If your opinion is going against the mainstream and against the heard mentality you will be silenced without someone having to pay a dime for it. You can care about it and avoid posting things that irks the herd or you can not care about it and voice it anyway. You can either derive reward by being socially accepted or by promoting your own views and opinions.
  - ampgt 5y ago
    One of the reasons I tend to lurk more than post. It’s disappointing to throw out an opinion and get attacked for it. I’m fine if you disagree (and I look forward to it) but it seems like some are conditioned to be offended by others opinions… or maybe paid? :)
minimaxir 5y ago
Unlike chronological internet forums where all opinions must be heard, it's very difficult to successfully astroturf an internet forum that self-polices with upvotes and downvotes. EDIT: In the case where someone says something against common perception, downvotes in particular deemphasize it (turning the comment gray on HN, collapsing it on Reddit) as this comment unintentionally demonstrates, thus why astroturfing in such forums successfully can be hard to do nowadays. The real astroturfers do Facebook/Twitter instead where content can't be downvoted.
- TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  Why do you think this is so?
- l8rlump 5y ago
  Is the voting system not susceptible to meddling?
  - minimaxir 5y ago
    Susceptible in theory, infeasible in practice for forums of a large enough size, as there are enough organic votes to counteract shenanigans. In the case of more low-key manipulation, on Hacker News in particular there's flagging which shuts down shenanigans more effectively if needed.
    - Ancapistani 5y ago
      I strongly suspect that flagging can also be gamed to selectively suppress topics. I don’t know if it’s happening, and don’t know if I would be enable to tell - by definition…
      - minimaxir 5y ago
        Flagged posts can be seen with showdead enabled. Additionally, posts that are incorrectly flagged can be vouched by another user (sometimes; the heuristics are unclear).
jdhendrickson 5y ago
There has been an obvious influx of paid accounts in my opinion. The quality of discourse has dropped. I often check an account and notice it was not active for a substantial period of time before a sudden change in tone is noticed. Seeing the same anti-vax talking points (for instance) spread from Reddit to here has been upsetting. The main difference I have noticed is the responses here are more sound technically, typically, call out the flaws more quickly, and are obviously not being influenced by the astro turfing. It's still tiresome, but here we are.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  Out of curiosity, who would pay people for pushing anti-vax talking points?
  - sturza 5y ago
    "They"
  - reilly3000 5y ago
    It’s a full time job for many people in Eastern Europe and other places. It’s something of a weapon of modern warfare, and really quite effective. A cohesive US response could have saved at least 500k lives. As a military power we’re somewhat undefeatable, so sewing division is an alternative. Who is paying the bills? I’ll leave that exercise for the reader.
  - gary_0 5y ago
    I'm pretty curious about the possible motives as well, but there is some evidence it was happening even before 2020: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anti-vax-movement-russian-trolls-fueled-anti-vaccination-debate-in-us-by-spreading-misinformation-twitter-study/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anti-vax-movement-russian-troll... (May 2019)
    - kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
      Interesting. Seems to rely on the "botometer" API, which I haven't heard good things about.
nowherebeen 5y ago
Any anonymous forum is subject to astroturfing. Given the outsize tech audience on this forum, it would be worth money for some companies to pay someone to suppress unfavourable posts.
Clubber 5y ago
I get downvotes for stuff that seems odd from an intellectual person trying to have a discussion. I don't know if it's a bot searching for keywords, or just someone with a grudge with several accounts or legit downvotes. I don't let it silence me though. I mean numbers (karma) are just 1s and 0s. Ideas and honest discussion are much more than that. Whatever happens speak your mind, you've earned it by existing. Don't get discouraged by downvotes. The future depends on it.
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  If people will interpret you comments as being on the wrong side of the most in vogue political ideology of the moment, you will get downvoted to the lowest deeps of Tartarus, may Hades have mercy of your account.
  - jamil7 5y ago
    There’s also some mob mentality at work, 1 or 2 downvotes will often invite more as soon as people see a greyed out comment.
    - DeathArrow 5y ago
      Herd psychology 101.
1_player 5y ago
Paid by whom? There are companies and employees on HN posting, commenting and promoting their business and services, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Is someone paying to get upvoted? Almost certainly, but I doubt it's worth a lot here where the sorting algorithm is much more opaque than Reddit. On Reddit getting to the top is just a numbers game. Also, even though there's far too much political posts on HN, they're the minority and I can't see a reason for some secret government agency to pay staff to change our views about the political world. Reddit is much more politicised, and it'd be naive not to assume every major government has a propaganda team of Reddit posters. (I'm using Reddit as another example of popularity-contest forum like HN is)
- arvindamirtaa 5y ago
  Considering how reddit filters down to twitter and instagram and other local social networks, followed by local tabloids and so on, it's entirely reasonable to assume that.
- ampgt 5y ago
  The political posts on here are amazing though. You get well thought out arguments from both sides. The only downside is the down voting/silencing of people’s opinions when the masses at HN don’t agree. The down vote feature should be disabled, let the responses/post chain do the judging.
  - 1_player 5y ago
    > The political posts on here are amazing though I haven't said they're bad. I just personally don't enjoy politics with my hacker news. Agreed on the downvotes, I could do without them.
csbartus 5y ago
I don't know, but I don't really read the comments here any more. A while ago the comments were the gold, now I can't really get them. In my subjective experience, contradictory comments (to the post) became the most popular. That doesn't make sense. You can't contradict always to anything. So HN became like any other new site: I'm skimming through the headlines in a minute, and done.
- cobertos 5y ago
  Have you found anywhere better? Or even anywhere that is just more enjoyable for you personally?
  - csbartus 5y ago
    Not really. Lobsters is nother HN-like site but with much less activity
lmeyerov 5y ago
I've seen what look like classic Russian+Chinese troll farm talking points & argument tactics. NLP can flag this, but without accompanying metadata for basic digital forensics, confidence is too hard for that vs a regular troll. If into this sort of analytics, we are always looking for data engineers and data scientists for Project Domino - see our DefCon AIV keynote for more info.
- lmeyerov 5y ago
  Hah negative votes on this, so to expand a bit: Most HN responses are thoughtful and reflect some background. Timezones vary, but are self-consistent. Similarly, different people gravitate to different topics. But when a reply is on a talking point associated with state misinfo and written in a misinfo/troll style (short, lies, unfalsifiable, red herring, pushes asymetric work to the other person, ...), I check to see if from an account mostly only making non-technical comments, time zone range, and other surprises. Unfortunately, no public way to do IP/browser-level correlation for account reuse and other common forensics. While such an account is unlikely to be a programmed bot, human troll farm employees are paid to do exactly this sort of campaign. NLP is great for catching funny behaviors and talking points, but without the forensic info, generally too hard to increase confidence. NLP on a message is like an alert, and NLP on the message history can tell you if someone acts like a troll, but metadata forensics are still typically needed to get proof points for saying it's a troll-farm-style troll. (Then again, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's enough of a duck for many community leaders to treat it like a duck.) If HN's trust and safety team prioritized this stuff, they should have the needed metadata already, and the forensic analytics patterns are pretty established nowadays - you don't need to pay FB's $1B/yr on it. I'm sure they do some of it already in addition to the human moderation. Project Domino is all about building open AI so others can do the same without the high budget.
DeathArrow 5y ago
Shameless self promotion: if you pay me $5 for short comments, $10 for medium comments and $50 on well thought comments I can comment on HN.
- joshxyz 5y ago
  10/10 would SaaS
  - DeathArrow 5y ago
    For 5 bucks you get an AI generated comment by our proudly engineered platform thiscommenterdoesnotexist.com
- Graffur 5y ago
  Is this a bannable offense?
  - kreetx 5y ago
    What if you, for pay, write your own opinion - that you otherwise wouldn't have bothered to write (due to lack of time, interest etc)?
elgernon 5y ago
can comment for you for a reasonable price. Preferably politically charged controversial subjects and ideological warfare, right wing bias only (leftists typically don’t have a sense of humor so it would be hard to sound authentic) 20% extra for inciting flamewars and annoying dang (he’s really doing an awesome job with all the vandals here)
DeathArrow 5y ago
Not sure if OP is looking for a job.
ekianjo 5y ago
The answer is obviously "yes, there are paid commenters on HN". The only real question is "how many", and "is that enough to render the discourse on HN worthless?". It's hard to quantify, but in my many years on HN I have not noticed a very noticeable change in the quality of discussions on topics that I follow closely.
Genego 5y ago
I'm fairly convinced there are. Often comment discussions for newer technical books pop up here on HN that get shilled for weeks like it's some legendary book that has been in print for decades. Then those discussions just die out until the next book makes the shill cycle (I guess?).
mandmandam 5y ago
How susceptible? Very. For gov examples, try starting a discussion about America's torture program, war crimes, or independent anti-war media. Your post will be flagged, and it won't get back up because such discussion 'goes against the guidelines which are actually rules'. The moderation will be praised by high karma accounts, who are quite happy with the status quo thank you very much. Check out any thread ever concerning Assange. Those comment sections are masterclasses in the derailment of productive conversation. Since pointing out obvious shills is against site rules, you're more like to be banned for pointing out meddling than for spreading outrageous smears. For "Big xyz", try writing a comment about GMOs, or agricultural pollution, monopolies, enviromental destruction, the not too distant horrors perpetrated by pharma co's, or any of a number of other third rail topics like unions or healthcare costs. 'Totally normal accounts' will slither out of the bushes and sealion your thread to death. Yes, it matters - a lot. "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." - Noam C
Graffur 5y ago
A thread came up a while back about the UK royal family. Any dissenting voice was quickly shut down.
iJohnDoe 5y ago
Maybe an example. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28589800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28589800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28584564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28584564

speedgoose 5y ago

I don't know, Reddit has a lot of artrosurf. You can buy up votes and down votes very easily and you regularly see suspicious votes on some content.

minimaxir 5y ago
Reddit posts can have very counterintuitive voting patterns, but that alone not evidence of astroturfing (coordinated brigading is a different issue). Which content did you have in mind?
- speedgoose 5y ago
  The most obvious ones I have seen are submissions that get silently deleted in minutes by the moderators, and that goes to hundreds of upvotes later on. That's usually brigading but also spam and dog whistle topics. Also some early vote manipulation on the new submission can have a lot of impact using very few accounts.
gary_0 5y ago
The most obvious ones are where meme t-shirts are posted to medium-sized niche subreddits and get mysteriously upvoted into the low hundreds, and then a sockpuppet asks OP for a link to buy it. Goodness knows what the more subtle bot accounts are up to. Eggs, bacon, and spam.
- minimaxir 5y ago
  That's not astroturfing/ideological manipulation, and it's not strictly evidence of voting manipulation either: people do legit like meme T-shirts and want to buy them (no, I am not in that category). Regardless, voting is just one check on bad behavior. The other one is moderation, and at least on the subreddits I visit, moderators are strict on financial self promotion, but it can still vary. Even on Hacker News comments there's people talking about "hey, I'm working on a startup." and someone asks "what startup?", and they reply "here it is." with a link. I've rarely seen those exchanges get downvoted.
  - gary_0 5y ago
    > it's not strictly evidence of voting manipulation Oh, it's very, very obvious, and Actual Human commenters all ask "what is this doing here?" And that style of message board spamming is decades old, so it's about as obvious to me as a flashing gif banner ad. > The other one is moderation True, once the mods wake up, the posts are always removed. But arguably the damage was already done, and like I said, if this many obvious manipulated posts slip through the cracks, we can make some statistical assumptions about the presence of more evolved predators.
  - Guffton 5y ago
    Without anyone watching the Watchmen it's very easy for mods to be financially rewarded for protecting blatant adverts in posts even if it goes against a sub's guidelines. Anyone that starts pointing this out gets shadowbanned or downvoted by the herd.

dang 5y ago

Internet users tend to interpret comments they don't like as "paid accounts", bots, shills, spies, astroturfers, foreign agents, brigaders, and sundry other sinister manipulators. This is one of the biggest psychological mechanisms on the internet, so commonplace that the site guidelines specifically ask people not to do it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. No doubt there's something hard-wired in us that makes us jump from displeasure to suspicion. That's not, of course, to say that abuse doesn't happen. It's simply to say that when considering abuse, we need to look for actual evidence. It's impossible to evaluate vague general claims. We need to see specific links. For example: > I often check an account and notice it was not active for a substantial period of time before a sudden change in tone is noticed. As the site guidelines ask, you should send us specific links so we can look into them. Such perceptions usually turn out toe be rife with assumptions and projections, but occasionally we find evidence of abuse, and when we do, we crack down hard on it. The vast majority of it that we've seen is small-scale commercial abuse, though—voting rings, commenting rings, and various types of spam. When it comes to disagreement on hot political/social topics, we all need to get used to the fact that society at large (indeed the world at large, since HN is a highly international site) is a lot more divided than we would like, and stop resorting to cartoonish Boris-and-Natasha explanations to explain away the unwanted facts that (a) a lot of people sincerely and strongly disagree, and (b) everyone has good reasons for their views, even when they're wrong or we feel they are. I wrote a long post about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398725. Note that all these arguments are limited to HN. Larger sites have different problems to deal with. Even if you assume that there are Sufficiently Smart Manipulators [1] planting carefully crafted comments in undetectable ways, the conclusion that leads to is pretty much the same as what the site guidelines call for anyway: we should respond to bad arguments and false claims by patiently and respectfully providing better arguments and true information. If a community can do that, then hostile pathogens aren't going to kill it—and if it can't do that, then it's going to self-destruct anyhow. In either case, hostile pathogens aren't a fundamental cause, and the solution is to focus on and strengthen our own responses. The only viable long-run answer to the Sufficiently Smart Manipulator is the Healthy-Enough Community. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=sufficiently%20smart%20manipulator%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...