8 ms·
Tell Hacker News: Throwaway accounts
The user KrisZolar seems to have a vast amount of throwaway, spam accounts, which are upvoting one another and cluttering up this thread in particular: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=359551.
Those users are: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ScottHanson, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=SkylerNovak, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=RobertHenderson, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Huxley78, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Nerdlinger, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Dino, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=AVC, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Haggen, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=KeshRivya, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=KimStarr, and http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=HugotheMongoose.
I wanted to be absolutely certain of this before making the accusation. I'm dead certain of these names, for the following reasons:
1) They follow similar patterns. Either they are very old, inactive user names, or they are extremely new. They all make small comments in other threads that, while not contributing anything useful, are upvoted slightly - to the point where they can upvote other account names.
2) Each one has a similar, one-sided look at Ayn Rand. They all react with very immediate hostility and none of them stop to make decent arguments.
3) Every single one gets incredibly hostile towards people who claim that the article KrisZolar submitted is a poorly-written article. (That article, for the record, took a similar approach to debunking Rand.)
4) They respond to one another's comments, always in the affirmative. When discussing with other people, they each respond in turn, rarely starting a long back-and-forth discussion, and their comments are all upvoted similarly to their original comments: up one or two points in thin trickles, after they've been downvoted. This despite a lack of content.
5) Several of them have deleted their posts after being responded to.
6) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360063 is a comment thread in which Nerdlinger, who has not been a part of the ongoing thread, responds in the defensive as if he has been here for a while.
7) Similarities in the way that they speak and the way in which they use grammar.
8) If you open each of these accounts at once, you see a pattern in their posts: each posts one or two at a time, in a cycle, never simultaneously. There are gaps between their posts in which none of them speak whatsoever.
I flagged their posts, but I don't know exactly how to approach this case. I've never seen something like it on Hacker News. Hopefully this is the right protocol.
- rms 18y agoemail pg...
- unalone 18y agoI wrote to pg@ycombinator.com. Hopefully that's the correct address.
- kirubakaran 18y agoIt is. (btw, impressive effort)
- 13ren 18y agoI hope he has a good spam filter... I know pg pioneered bayesian spam-filtering, but I wonder how well it copes with publicly known email address? I tend to assume Gmail has the best spam filtering (with their massive database of email), but I still get about 7 per day that it's not sure of, and my account name isn't very publicized.
- rms 18y agoDo you click the report spam button?
- 13ren 18y agoThe 7 per day that it's not sure of are already in the spam folder. On the rare occasion one gets to my inbox, yes I click the report spam button.
- rms 18y agoSo it works... your spam goes to the spam folder.
- 13ren 18y agoYes, it does. I'm a bit confused though - I wasn't in question about that. Let me clarify: I was wondering if pg's bayesian filter works so well that publishing his email address won't cause a bump in spam for him - since he seems to hide it (as I do mine). I was using Gmail as one example of bayesian filtering. Mainly, I was gently suggesting it's better to not publish anyone's address here where it will get harvested. BTW: When I think about it though, Gmail didn't work as well for me in the past.. but I don't know the cause of the improvement: it could be because I've been a lot more careful since then; or because Gmail has improved in general; or it's learnt for me specifically. I think a big factor is my old uni accounts stopped being diverted to it, and they used to catch a heap of spam. That's probably it.
- tlrobinson 18y agoI'm pretty sure pg said there's some anti-sockpuppet provisions in news.yc. I believe upvoting between sockpuppets is ignored. But I agree, this seems suspicious.
- jwilliams 18y agoYeah there is - I've come across this (innocently, naturally) before. Not sure of the exact algorithm.
- spazmaster 18y agoyou must have spent _hours_ investigating this guy. wow.
- unalone 18y agoThey all posted on the thread. I was in a 3-hour lab class, and happened to notice when they all commented after me. After that, it only took about 20 minutes to check their posting times and write this up. The guy was really not subtle about it.
- daveambrose 18y agoGood for unalone though and I agree with his assessment. It's quite impressive to see this level of commitment to HN. Well done.
- kajecounterhack 18y agoImpressive to see this level of commitment? Perhaps. But this "level of commitment" can be extraordinarily unhealthy. I enabled the procrastination feature and I find myself hitting "override" every day. sigh
- unalone 18y agoWait! Procrastination feature? What's this? I try to take things in shifts. Some days I don't check Hacker News at all: I work on writing and design. But I usually don't write unless I'm absolutely in the mood, and so this is a perfect outlet: it's a great place for me to refine my thoughts, and to talk to people that disagree with me about things. It helps me keep an open mind. And once in a while, I read something here that provokes me to write something new. (I wrote one of my current favorite poems after clicking a link on Reddit, for instance.)
- delano 18y agoIn your profile, set noprocrast to yes. maxvisit is the number of minutes you can browse HN per session. minaway is the amount of time you'll have to find something else to do.
- matt1 18y agoAwesome work, thank you for helping keep YC great.
- zasz 18y agoWow, thanks for all the effort. Also, kudos for being cautious, and a good guy, about it.
- jsdalton 18y agohey unalone, i take it THIS is the site you were referring to on reddit earlier today ;)
- unalone 18y agoYessir. I didn't exactly know this would be happening when I mentioned it, though.
- tdavis 18y agoAlgorithms + "Smart People Police" make me feel safer. Nice one, unalone!
- pg 18y agoYou're right, except there are even more accounts. I killed them all. I don't know what made the guy go on a trolling rampage after all this time, but it's stopped now. You should just send me an email when you suspect things like this; I can verify it a lot faster.
- unalone 18y agoI wasn't entirely sure what your email address was, to be honest. I guessed when I wrote that one.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- bayareaguy 18y agoDo you have an automated system to verify an account is being used for this sort of astroturfing? If so I'm sure many of the folks here would be interested in it. I think a service that helped forums identify astroturfers could even be the basis for a YC company. I would imagine simply grouping accounts by their ip address, creation time and set of articles they comment on should easily catch the unsophisticated guys.
- dant 18y agoWouldn't it be a good idea to silently hide the posts from everyone except the troll. Now he (or she) has been public outed he'll probably try again with a new set of accounts.
- cedsav 18y agoI like the idea, although if he/she has several accounts, it won't be long before he/she notices the trick.
- unalone 18y agoThe thing is, Hacker News has too small an audience to make gaming very worthwhile. I think that clamping down once is good enough to send the message across. I'd hope so, anyway, since it takes a lot of effort to get to the point where you can vote things up and down.
- huhtenberg 18y ago> I've never seen something like it on Hacker News You may want to try and deduce the list of puppets used by Michael Arington (of TechCrunch blog). Something tells me it's going to be more impressive than this one.
- SwellJoe 18y agoTechCrunch doesn't need puppets. It has its fans. I'm not a big TC reader, but I like all the people I've met who work at TechCrunch. They're all genuinely nice folks (though Arrington has the troll gene, so sometimes he goes overboard and picks on someone smaller than him, which is rude and in poor form...but I don't mind when he picks on Google or Yahoo or MS or anyone who's accepted more than a few million in funding).
- unalone 18y agoAgreed. Arrington has a huge media empire. Perhaps he trolled and spammed back when that all started (though I'm nowhere near certain of that, either), but now he's got nothing to benefit.
- blasdel 18y agoYou don't need sockpuppets when you have sycophants!
- avinashv 18y agoI hate to repeat what's been said already, but I think this is a different case: I applaud the effort of users like you who are preventing HN from becoming a cesspool, but this is beyond the average call of the good samaritan. Bravo. I am going to start paying much more attention to the comments here to try to weed out this kind of nonsense; sadly, I did not notice this guy at all. Thank you. I have to ask: how much research went into this?
- unalone 18y agoAw, shucks. Thanks a ton. Not that much, surprisingly. The guy really wasn't very subtle with it. I've messed with spoof accounts in my past - I used to have an unpopular forum and I thought it would help raise user activity - and there are a lot of things that can clue you off. In this case, his accounts weren't saying rational things. I dissed the article, and one person would tell me I was being irrational, I'd respond: another person would call me an asshole and a third person would agree and call me a jerkwad. And it all seemed focused around the one thread (I'm a big fan of Rand and Gladwell, and really liked the discussion). All I did was scroll through and look for the anti-Rand people who only had a few points of karma. Once you have the names, it was just a matter of looking at their comments. In this thread, I said to look at the time between posts: it was a lot easier than that, because I was in class and could just refresh once every fifteen minutes. One name did the talking each cycle, and each time I'd get downvoted one and his names would all get upvoted one. This was bizarre, though. He was incredibly aggressive about the post, and extremely blatant. On this site, that stood out a lot: usually, people who insult other people get instantly downvoted. That happened to me a lot when I first joined. Here, a bunch of people were doing that and getting upvoted. I just hope this site never becomes diluted enough that something like that fails to stand out.
- davidw 18y agoThe meta-question that concerns me is: are those kinds of articles attracting the sort of people that get involved in that kind of crap? That's one of the reasons I am very wary of them.
- 18y ago
- DanielBMarkham 18y agoKudos for the work! Like DavidW, I'm interested in the meta-issues involved here: how many more fakers are out there? Are we attracting this kind of activity in some way? If we can block spam with code, can we block this activity with code?
- Dilpil 18y agoHave you considered a career as a private detective?
- boundlessdreamz 18y agoAnother spam account. http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sanjeevbhiru1 http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sanjeevbhiru1
- dhughes 18y agoLooks like solid evidence to me, good work.
- mhartl 18y agoI recently had a comment mildly critical of Ayn Rand mysteriously downmodded. Maybe this is why.
- unalone 18y agoNo. That was me, unfortunately. I downvoted before I checked your user name, which was a big mistake. I was going to go back and reply, but I completely forgot. Sorry about that: I'll respond to you right now.
- lionhearted 18y agoI love Hacker News. I started one of the big fights when I wrote that the guy made a flawed analogy. I leave HN for the day, come back, and all hell has broken loose with trolling and fake accounts... and then I see the guy's been wiped off the board. Awesome - thanks PG, and Unalone.
- jonas_b 18y agoHaha, I just had a look the original post you were referring to and this conversation struck me as particularly funny: unalone: Them, and AVC, and HugotheMongoose, and KimStarr, and Huxley78. It's baffling. I've never seen something like that happen before. Nerdlinger: So what? I signed up to post. unalone: I didn't mention your name, so entering right now is only slightly suspicious. :-)