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Vouched for and upvoted because I think it's important for readers here to see how much effort goes into creating posts that game the system. I think it's bett
by nkurz 3y ago
Vouched for and upvoted because I think it's important for readers here to see how much effort goes into creating posts that game the system. I think it's better for these strategies to be known than hidden. It will be interesting to see how tactics like this one evolve as ChatGPT use becomes more widespread.
There's a definite tension between the rule of not accusing other users of being shills and the reality that there are quite a few shills out there. I think it a still good rule, but not because it's never right. Rather, the rule is good because the false accusations do more harm than letting some shilling slip by.
- bombcar 3y agoThere’s a silent part of that rule: if you suspect a shill, gather the evidence and present it to dang via email.
- dang 3y agoYes please. Edit: actually not so silent - it's the latter part of this guideline from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data." It's part of the contract we have with HN users - we ask them not to post this stuff in the threads, but in return we always look into cases that they report to us directly.
- marketingLizard 3y agoHow long do shill posts last before they've been taken care of?
- burnished 3y agoJust out of curiosity, what sort of answer are you expecting? Your post reads as vaguely accusatory to me - like you're implying that messes are being left intentionally
- svnt 3y agoAccounting for their username they are either making a joke or trying to assess the potential performance of the strategy even if they get flagged.
- hamallama 3y agoShills don't care about their accounts, just that they spray their message around. Just curious if the silent system works fast enough. For my curiosity, by the way, my account was rate limited. Thanks Dang.
- Operyl 3y agoYour account was likely rate limited because you decided to make a new account here, and new accounts have severe limitations on rate of posting comments. You could have just as easily decided to use your existing account and would've been fine.
- dang 3y agoAs Operyl correctly said, your account was rate limited because new accounts are subject to rate limits. Btw, could you please not create accounts for every few comments you post? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=community%20identity%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoI never look at the name of the user posting a comment, just at the comment's content. Do people really remember names here? Just such as mine?)
- 3y ago
- revolvingocelot 3y agoTurn on showdead -- sometimes they last until the user/human-in-the-loop notices that they've been hellbanned.
- dang 3y agoI'm not sure I understand your question. Sometimes they get "taken care of" instantly by software. Sometimes it takes moderators minutes or hours to see them and "take care of" them. Other times we don't see it and an email from a user asks us to look into it, which we do. That can take a bit longer because there's an extra hop in the path.
- jsnell 3y agoRight, I'd say that this post has more value than any of the repetitive content marketing these folks churned out for a few years, since it hopefully makes some HN readers a bit more aware that they're being played. But the interesting question is: why did they write this article? Is it just that the jig is up, and their one weird trick no longer works as well as it did? Did they get asked to cut it out by the HN moderators? It seems plausible given how many recent submissions to this domain appear to be auto-dead. Do they just think HN readers will forget about this article, and upvote their next bit of content marketing anyway?
- muchtest 3y agoReminds me of the scene with the Mortgage Brokers in The Big Short - "They're not confessing, they're bragging"
- roenxi 3y ago> ...since it hopefully makes some HN readers a bit more aware that they're being played. How are they being played? There isn't any deception here. The plan Iron Brands touts is literally "submit interesting articles first". That is what people are trying to upvote.
- UncleEntity 3y agoSounds to me like they’re scraping the submission pool and “front running” with their “dog whistle detector” chatbot in order to get people to read their marketing paragraph tacked on to the end of the article. Providing liquidity to the news market as the quaints would say. If they were doing original research or scraping the web to bring stuff here, fine, good for them. If all they’re doing is repackaging already submitted articles in order to drive traffic to their website then, IDK?
- imgabe 3y agoIt doesn't sound like they're front-running. Fetch data from Hacker News API Set up Google Alerts for your query Fetch data from Google Alerts XML Enrich data and store in SQLite file with a cronjob Send alerts with other cronjob to Twist API or Telegram API I think the "Fetch data from Hacker News API" part is just to get keywords from popular submissions that they use to make Google Alerts for. Then when new stories about those keywords show up, they can write an article first.
- ouid 3y agothe rule against calling other people shills is the worst part of hackernews. Skepticism is important, and important to share. I have never been anything but grateful to read a comment pointing out that another comment was obviously a shill. Perhaps I have been embarrassed for not seeing the obvious truth, but always grateful.
- johnny22 3y agoI love that rule. I've gotten called a shill for microsoft many times when I've mentioned some of the cool aspects of their OS design, especially vs Linux. The thing is, I use linux almost exclusively, but for occasional cross platform testing in a vm. I really dislike being called a shill just for recognizing some neat ideas.
- twelve40 3y agoBut that's just a sign of the other person's low intelligence and laziness (launching into ad hominem instead of putting in the work to attempt to entertain your point of view). What's more tiring for me is coming up with incessant caveats that no, i don't have anything to do with this company, no, i don't agree with everything they do but they did one cool thing here, etc etc. Make one remark about e.g. Tesla's technology without those massive caveats and a bunch of people will show up and happily hijack your thread onto a bewildering and useless tangent...
- Kiro 3y agoI would bet 99% of the "obvious shills" are actually not shills at all.
- dang 3y agoYes. In fact, probably more than that. (long sibling comment about this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851)
- yuliyp 3y agoA comment attacking someone for being a shill is expressing skepticism in the most trivial way, and serves to throw a debate into a flamewar rather than actually discussing the flaws of their arguments.
- gumballindie 3y ago> It will be interesting to see how tactics like this one evolve as ChatGPT use becomes more widespread. I suspect there may already be openai shills around here. While not using chatgpt for spam they may still be promoting it like mad. Notice there are few alternatives shared and open source models are much less frequently mentioned.
- bumbledraven 3y agoThat’s because every model sucks for complicated tasks compared to GPT-4, and no one aside from OpenAI has a model more capable that GPT-3.5.
- gumballindie 3y agoAnd apple is the only laptop manufacturer and tesla the only electric car. The world out there is full of better options.
- dangwhy 3y ago> It will be interesting to see how tactics like this one evolve as ChatGPT use becomes more widespread. Do you think its possible for generated content to hit frontpage. I thought most of the stuff it generated is pretty prosaic. Also not sure if have an objection to chatgpt content hitting frontpage.
- idopmstuff 3y agoAssuming it does so by getting legitimately upvoted by us regular human HN readers, I don't see a problem with it.
- j45 3y agoWhen you do the work and understand it, is it a hack (short cut) or just learning to deliver what the HN audience and algorithm values?
- j45 3y agoTo be clear, the article was really good at outlining how to create high quality content.
- kuba_dmp 3y agoAlso you have companies that "game the system" by just creating great stuff that bring value to this community. Look at Tailscale for example. You can just do marketing things that are perfectly aligned with the community. That is a win win imho. plug: If interested I went into how tailscale does it https://www.developermarkepear.com/blog/developer-marketing-hacker-news https://www.developermarkepear.com/blog/developer-marketing-...