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if you are selling user accounts to a spammer, they want to buy accounts that have been "aged" - that is, they have some comment history and weren't created on
by notatoad 11mo ago
if you are selling user accounts to a spammer, they want to buy accounts that have been "aged" - that is, they have some comment history and weren't created on the same day they start spamming, so they're a bit less obvious.
but if that's what they're doing here, they aren't very good at it.
- AnimalMuppet 11mo agoIf the account is shadowbanned, it's not worth much to a spammer. Myself, I suspect that it's people trying to tune or test drive their own personal LLMs.
- binarymax 11mo agoHow does voting work with shadowbanned accounts? Selling upvotes on stories is the real game, nobody cares about comments.
- daveguy 11mo agoAdmins can turn off voting influence per user. I imagine shadowban comes with nonfunctional voting.
- yoyo250 11mo agoIt seems that newly registered accounts are currently shadowbanned by default. At least that's what I did. For example, when I send my first post, I find that I cannot see it on another device that is not logged in. It might not have been shut down Manually by the admins; HN has its own antispam system. In my opinion, these may automatically get you tagged and shadowbanned. - using a VPN - posting instead of comment immediately after registration - posts containing unusual links (like personal blogs)
- hammock 11mo agoWhat’s the going rate for an account on HN? Can’t imagine very much, no offense. There is no user-based algorithm or follower count here.
- ThrowawayR2 11mo agoYou can actually see use of aged accounts in action: the recent storm of non-English spam submissions that was dumped into /newest (discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45956847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45956847) come from a mixture of newly created accounts but also some that have been around for several years with zero activity.