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so the theory is that now there will be a lot of bots taking over HN and posting stuff that they want to rank up, destroying the value of the site? What's the d
by bryanrasmussen 3y ago
so the theory is that now there will be a lot of bots taking over HN and posting stuff that they want to rank up, destroying the value of the site? What's the defense there?
- matheusmoreira 3y agoProhibition of new user registrations.
- saiya-jin 3y agoIt doesn't have to be prohibition which over time would harm HN badly, just slower and delayed approach of earning good access. Or show age and karma of users commenting next to their nick, some scam patterns will become obvious.
- jcmp 3y agoBit afraid about that. Honestly it is suprising how spam free HN is, so maybe they have some good anti spam system in place. Also i think it would make sense to set all outside links to "nofollow" so google ingores them and therefore it is less interesting for SEO.
- MrBlueIncognito 3y agoThat would also eliminate any positive effect that HN has on Google search results.
- sebzim4500 3y agoI wonder if nofollow actually does anything nowadays. I feel like the rules that used to be enforced have been replaced with hacky 'AI' that have been hacked together by thousands of SWEs trying to improve some metric for their promotion packet.
- jcmp 3y agothe "google way" would be to use instead of "nofollow" "ugc" which stands for user generated content.[1] In the same document they state "We'll generally treat them as we did with nofollow before and not consider them for ranking purposes". However they lied often about their ranking signals ;) https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/09/evolving-nofollow-new-ways-to-identify https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/09/evolving-n...
- samtho 3y agoDid Google really say that? It makes sense to treat it as a different category of link. An organic back link from a blog or website is putting the weight of the website’s name/reputation behind it whilst UGC has users putting their name/reputation on it (as it relates to their relationship with the originating website). The latter is not worthless as the website ultimately allows it, it not as strong as a signal as an organic backlink.
- xp84 3y agoI’m not comfortable with any endorsement being inferred toward any link that is UGC, even from something the website tacitly “allows” by not deleting it. For the majority of websites there’s plenty of absolute trash lurking in all the Les travelled parts where nobody cares or nobody has seen it. But the bots will always see it.
- spacebacon 3y agoIt gets its fair share of spam but the platform is very effective at moderation. Show dead and scroll new for examples.
- TheAceOfHearts 3y agoThere's definitely a bit of influence / perception manipulation on HN. A few years back I heard a story that a tech company would monitor HN for certain keywords, and if their product or category was ever brought up or mentioned multiple developers would always show up to engage on the topic. This isn't quite spamming or cheating the system, but it's a very effective tactic for shifting public perception.
- bbor 3y agoOTOH that’s kinda the utopian version of open source - a public forum where you can engage with stakeholders on demand, as long as others find your critique/question interesting enough to upvote. God I love hacker news… their insanely outdated moderation tools are a shame, but I can’t lie, holding a big stick makes for a peaceful forum.
- tech234a 3y agoYou might be referring to GitLab: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/developer-relations/developer-advocacy/hacker-news/ https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/developer-rel... (hi to those from GitLab watching #hn-mentions on Slack)
- john_cogs 3y ago:waves:
- uoaei 3y agoIt's a curious division between "old internet" and "new internet" (those on the *chans may have parallel but slightly different terminology for this dichotomy) to see people use BBS-style vs IRC-style emotive expressions.
- tivert 3y ago> You might be referring to GitLab: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/developer-relations/developer-advocacy/hacker-news/ https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/developer-rel... That's really interesting that they'd disclose their strategy so publicly. On the one hand, I can't see it doing much harm. On the other hand, wouldn't it be somewhat self-defeating or even embarrassing to confess that you're doing that? One could probably reasonably assume that many companies have a social media strategy like that, but to have people know that's the strategy would probably drain away at least some of the goodwill provided by the posts.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agoTheres alot more undervocer product pumping than you would think
- xanderlewis 3y agoOnce you get enough karma (I can’t remember what the number is) you’ll be able to see dead submissions. If you look at new you’ll see that there are spam posts coming in every couple of minutes or so. They’re just very effectively detected, as you suspected.
- lolinder 3y agoIt's not a karma gate, it's gated behind the showdead setting in your profile, which everyone has access to.
- xanderlewis 3y agoAh — I stand corrected.
- wlesieutre 3y agoThe karma-gated part is being able to vouch dead comments
- jcmp 3y agoI hope the links are getting set to nofollow so there really isn’t any value anymore for the spammer checked: They are nofollow links
- whiterknight 3y agoYou dont recognize the spam because the bad ones are removed. Good marketing targets its audience, and influences people who are not associated to repeat its talking points.
- jasonjmcghee 3y agoPeople are starting to copy/paste from ChatGPT / equivalent. It's not spam, but it just says nothing and dilutes the conversation.
- fluidcruft 3y agoWouldn't the defense be to delist and starve/block the google crawlers? Gaming google rankings is a waste of time if it's not there.
- EarthLaunch 3y agoThe new way to build communities: SE-anti-O. Trying to rank as low as possible. Things will flip and sites will try to be uncrawlable to Google. I guess it's already happened with Discord.
- CableNinja 3y agoYou just gave me an idea for a fun project (like i need more projects!). I use openresty for my webserver, which has lua already built in. Might be fun to see if i can just hog up a crawler instance indefinitely by generating fake pages and links that just go back to make a new fake page and link and takes the crawler in circles that it thinks are unique
- pixl97 3y agoOver the past few weeks I've seen more crypto scam posts than ever. While they quickly become dead, I'm not sure if they are coming in a faster rate than in the past or what.
- dang 3y agoI've seen that too. Usually these things come in waves and once the spammers figure out it's not working, they go away. Then new spammers show up.
- factormeta 3y agoHN can always change their robot.txt and prevent google from crawling. Many of copy left friends do that to their blog and site to prevent google/bing from indexing them.
- xp84 3y agoJust so you know, that doesn’t stop Google from indexing you anymore. It only stops Googlebot from crawling. In other words it’s strictly a place to deny permission or set limits on a technical level. If you do this they will still have what they already crawled and if there are links to it on the Internet they will keep it in the index. If you don’t want something to be in Google on a policy level, you now have to add the noindex meta tag on every page.
- sitkack 3y agoThis is really counter productive towards furthering the cause.
- armchairhacker 3y agoInvite only. A site is spam-proof if it makes it hard enough to get an invitation. The relatively few spammers who slip through can be warned and/or banned. Unfortunately, we may not be invited.
- throw10920 3y agoThis is what Lobsters does, and it's pretty effective (although the site has other, much worse problems that outweigh that one feature).
- mlekoszek 3y agoWhat sort of problems would you say they have?
- throw10920 3y agoVotes are (to a greater extent than HN) used to indicate disagreement rather than low quality (which leads to more low quality comments); political content is allowed and encouraged (but only that which aligns with the beliefs of the moderators); many users have been banned without any transparency as to why; significant groupthink about technical topics (separate from the political content).
- illiac786 3y agoThat aligns well with their line of thought though, which is that there is a specific political view which is desired. They're basically building an echo chamber and it will starve on the long run because it will become so specific, the chance of a new user fitting in that community on day one will become lower and lower. Being open is hard, very hard, but it's the only long term strategy in my eyes. The rest is an illusion.
- hosteur 3y agoWhat are those problems?
- withinboredom 3y ago
- precompute 3y agoIt's already a thing. With showdead, you can see the corpses of tens of marketing posts at the bottom of a submission with a high score.
- calderknight 3y agoworldcoin integration
- j-a-a-p 3y agoCut off the infected limb and block the site to Google entirely. Or split HN in an active and archived branch with an upvote threshold, the latter is made accessible by Google.
- sitkack 3y agoWon’t that make everyone with a grandfathered account an AI Boomer? The value of selling HN alts just went way up!
- throwaway1492 3y agoI tried this several years ago on ebay, selling an hn account with down vote. It did not sell or get any bids at all.
- OrderlyTiamat 3y agoThere is already an excellent search site for hn [0], so if appearing in google turns out to cause problems, for many users nothing much will change. (I already use that one over google with "site:.." in the query- it's just a good search experience) [0] https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/
- xp84 3y agoI don’t think most are afraid that people who know to search HN will cause any problems by searching it, rather that with increased public visibility will become popular amongst the types of trolls, scammers, spammers, political wackos, etc that inhabit (insert your least favorite social media or link aggregator site). I have to admit I agree. I really like the benevolent dictatorship which does not allow that kind of BS, even from me. (The time dang gently reprimanded me for some kind of sarcastic attack, upon reflection, I decided that I liked this high standard, and resolved to do better.) I’d hate for it to change too.
- OrderlyTiamat 3y agoAgreed, I've had a similar experience. So I'd be fine with limited public visibility, and I think my experience won't even change if google loses access. However if it's done with robots.txt, does tha tmean algolias crawler will also lose access? That would be a shame, but even then it might be worth it on balance.
- renegat0x0 3y agoI really dig what HN is doing with karma, and stuff. I really like what lobsters did with invitation tree https://lobste.rs/about#invitations https://lobste.rs/about#invitations