4 ms·

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 fo

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.
- Cryptonic 5y ago
  I think these are mostly political interests like "weakening the western economic" or "divide western liberal societies" and maybe a few richer people who had a bad experience with vaccs and think they do something good. Actually comment trolls cost near nothing when hired in India or russia. And they scale by infecting some other people with the same thought, who themselfes comment then in similar ways. Often "they" buy some celebrities that run out of money. In Germany for example this is near ridiculous. Just look at Michael Wendler.
  - kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
    Wendler was paid for his anti-vaxx stance? Is there a source for that?
calvinmorrison 5y ago
I do love the everyone who's antivax is a Russian troll talking point, since if it were true, I could delete Duolingo!
minimaxir 5y ago
Unfortunately, the antivaxx sentiments that occasionally pop up on HN recently aren't paid for.
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...

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.
Cryptonic 5y ago
I think these are mostly political interests like "weakening the western economic" or "divide western liberal societies" and maybe a few richer people who had a bad experience with vaccs and think they do something good. Actually comment trolls cost near nothing when hired in India or russia. And they scale by infecting some other people with the same thought, who themselfes comment then in similar ways. Often "they" buy some celebrities that run out of money. In Germany for example this is near ridiculous. Just look at Michael Wendler.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  Wendler was paid for his anti-vaxx stance? Is there a source for that?

calvinmorrison 5y ago

I do love the everyone who's antivax is a Russian troll talking point, since if it were true, I could delete Duolingo!

minimaxir 5y ago

Unfortunately, the antivaxx sentiments that occasionally pop up on HN recently aren't paid for.

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...