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Unlike chronological internet forums where all opinions must be heard, it's very difficult to successfully astroturf an internet forum that self-polices with up
by 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 agoWhy do you think this is so?
- l8rlump 5y agoIs the voting system not susceptible to meddling?
- minimaxir 5y agoSusceptible 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 agoI 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 agoFlagged posts can be seen with showdead enabled. Additionally, posts that are incorrectly flagged can be vouched by another user (sometimes; the heuristics are unclear).
- Clubber 5y agoIt seems fairly easy to automate given the person automating has control of a domain, which is trivial: 001@somedomain.com, 002@somedomain.com, etc.
- speedgoose 5y agoI 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 agoReddit 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 agoThe 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 agoThe 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 agoThat'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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rank0 5y agoStrong disagree. Look at Reddit.