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I’m shocked when I come across people who think that sockpuppeting doesn’t happen on social media including HN. I wish there were laws that required large soci

by Teever 10mo ago

I’m shocked when I come across people who think that sockpuppeting doesn’t happen on social media including HN. I wish there were laws that required large social media sites to publish data to their end users that indicate the severity of the problem.

lispisok 10mo ago
HN is so prime to sockpuppet on because of its fairly low comment rate but high concentration of users who can make technology decisions at companies.
- notahacker 10mo ago
  Sure, but I suspect also harder because it's full of contrarians that will point out at least five better ways of solving the problem and people that upon being greeted with anything that looks like disguised marketing copy will spontaneously combust. And if you do manage to sneak a URL into a discussion without anyone thinking it's marketing, the next four comments will be about whether the design of the landing page is unsuited for people with 2400 pixel wide monitors or people with noscript enabled (Also it's the kind of website where you absolutely can get good responses from "Show HN: A thing you might want to use and here's how much profit I'm making from it already" until a bunch of green usernames say nice things about it)
  - immibis 10mo ago
    But also easier because those comments quickly become dead.
  - uoaei 10mo ago
    Contrarianism is an effective sockpuppet tactic, then, in order to buy legitimacy and trust in the marketplace of ideas.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- throw-12-16 10mo ago
  Its a goldmine for social engineering, has come in handy personally a few times.
throw-12-16 10mo ago
I got downvoted like mad for suggesting that HN is a marketing outlet for YC. The people who frequent this forum think they are immune to astroturfing because they all work in ad tech.
- immibis 10mo ago
  Same here. I pointed out HN is the marketing arm of a capitalist investment fund and got flagged to oblivion.
pclmulqdq 10mo ago
HN gets a lot less sockpuppeting/astroturfing than reddit or twitter, as far as I can tell. There is some of it, but if it gets too big dang et al seem to generally put a stop to it.
DrScientist 10mo ago
Spam, astroturfing, sockpuppetry are just some of the costs of anonymity, as it removes accountability. It's also the flip side of people feeling free to say what they want under the cover of (pseudo) anonymity. I wonder if one solution is to partition the web into places where anonymity isn't possible, and places where it is.
- vintermann 10mo ago
  It should be possible to use plain old cryptography to prove 1. I am one of the named, publicly accountable people registered as participating in this thing, and the same as posted under this pseudonym yesterday 2. Provided I'm reasonably careful, you can't tell which one is me unless n of m participants agree to unmask me. 3. I can only post under one name at a time. I can change pseudonym, but then my old one is marked as abandoned, so I can't trivially fake conversations with myself.
  - DrScientist 10mo ago
    How do you implement point 3? Doesn't that then require a centralised ( or a hierarchy of centralized ) authority to manage point 3? Who would that be? ( each country issuing it's own citizens IDs? ) If the solution requires you to keep a private key private ( to prove who you are ) - how is the average person going to do that? How are you going to build in your cryptography into all those different systems? All you need is one link between that pseudonym and some identifying info - like IP address or a payment - and it's all gone, and you've already built a perfect system for government tracking. So even if you have built all that successfully I'd still suggest the world would split into sites that would use it and sites that wouldn't.
    - vintermann 9mo ago
      > How do you implement point 3? > Doesn't that then require a centralised ( or a hierarchy of centralized ) authority to manage point 3? I'm not sure. I think it might be possible. Lots of wild things are possible with cryptographic primitives. Even if a centralized authority is necessary for coordination (which seems inevitable anyway, the forum has to be hosted somewhere), if the authority could blind itself about who was who, that would be valuable. Yes, any system which gives users the option to hard-ID themselves - which I think is a desirable feature, and probably necessary to prevent spam/sabotage - needs to piggyback on something existing, like a government ID scheme of some sort. > If the solution requires you to keep a private key private ( to prove who you are ) - how is the average person going to do that? Same way they keep their cryptographic keys secret today, their software does it for them with very little conscious effort. And yes, people can get hacked etc. I'm not proposing something that would solve all problems once and for all, just something that would be useful. > All you need is one link between that pseudonym and some identifying info - like IP address or a payment - and it's all gone, Yes, people would have to still be careful to not ID themselves accidentally. But worst case, we're back to more or less the kind of forum we're in right now with respect to identifiability (and probably still better when it comes to astroturfing). > So even if you have built all that successfully I'd still suggest the world would split into sites that would use it and sites that wouldn't. That's OK. I imagine lots of different "forums" or "chatrooms" with the feature that you know the list of participants, but you don't know which nym is which particpant.

by Teever 10mo ago

lispisok 10mo ago

HN is so prime to sockpuppet on because of its fairly low comment rate but high concentration of users who can make technology decisions at companies.

notahacker 10mo ago
Sure, but I suspect also harder because it's full of contrarians that will point out at least five better ways of solving the problem and people that upon being greeted with anything that looks like disguised marketing copy will spontaneously combust. And if you do manage to sneak a URL into a discussion without anyone thinking it's marketing, the next four comments will be about whether the design of the landing page is unsuited for people with 2400 pixel wide monitors or people with noscript enabled (Also it's the kind of website where you absolutely can get good responses from "Show HN: A thing you might want to use and here's how much profit I'm making from it already" until a bunch of green usernames say nice things about it)
- immibis 10mo ago
  But also easier because those comments quickly become dead.
- uoaei 10mo ago
  Contrarianism is an effective sockpuppet tactic, then, in order to buy legitimacy and trust in the marketplace of ideas.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
throw-12-16 10mo ago
Its a goldmine for social engineering, has come in handy personally a few times.

throw-12-16 10mo ago

I got downvoted like mad for suggesting that HN is a marketing outlet for YC. The people who frequent this forum think they are immune to astroturfing because they all work in ad tech.

immibis 10mo ago
Same here. I pointed out HN is the marketing arm of a capitalist investment fund and got flagged to oblivion.

pclmulqdq 10mo ago

HN gets a lot less sockpuppeting/astroturfing than reddit or twitter, as far as I can tell. There is some of it, but if it gets too big dang et al seem to generally put a stop to it.

DrScientist 10mo ago

Spam, astroturfing, sockpuppetry are just some of the costs of anonymity, as it removes accountability. It's also the flip side of people feeling free to say what they want under the cover of (pseudo) anonymity. I wonder if one solution is to partition the web into places where anonymity isn't possible, and places where it is.

vintermann 10mo ago
It should be possible to use plain old cryptography to prove 1. I am one of the named, publicly accountable people registered as participating in this thing, and the same as posted under this pseudonym yesterday 2. Provided I'm reasonably careful, you can't tell which one is me unless n of m participants agree to unmask me. 3. I can only post under one name at a time. I can change pseudonym, but then my old one is marked as abandoned, so I can't trivially fake conversations with myself.
- DrScientist 10mo ago
  How do you implement point 3? Doesn't that then require a centralised ( or a hierarchy of centralized ) authority to manage point 3? Who would that be? ( each country issuing it's own citizens IDs? ) If the solution requires you to keep a private key private ( to prove who you are ) - how is the average person going to do that? How are you going to build in your cryptography into all those different systems? All you need is one link between that pseudonym and some identifying info - like IP address or a payment - and it's all gone, and you've already built a perfect system for government tracking. So even if you have built all that successfully I'd still suggest the world would split into sites that would use it and sites that wouldn't.
  - vintermann 9mo ago
    > How do you implement point 3? > Doesn't that then require a centralised ( or a hierarchy of centralized ) authority to manage point 3? I'm not sure. I think it might be possible. Lots of wild things are possible with cryptographic primitives. Even if a centralized authority is necessary for coordination (which seems inevitable anyway, the forum has to be hosted somewhere), if the authority could blind itself about who was who, that would be valuable. Yes, any system which gives users the option to hard-ID themselves - which I think is a desirable feature, and probably necessary to prevent spam/sabotage - needs to piggyback on something existing, like a government ID scheme of some sort. > If the solution requires you to keep a private key private ( to prove who you are ) - how is the average person going to do that? Same way they keep their cryptographic keys secret today, their software does it for them with very little conscious effort. And yes, people can get hacked etc. I'm not proposing something that would solve all problems once and for all, just something that would be useful. > All you need is one link between that pseudonym and some identifying info - like IP address or a payment - and it's all gone, Yes, people would have to still be careful to not ID themselves accidentally. But worst case, we're back to more or less the kind of forum we're in right now with respect to identifiability (and probably still better when it comes to astroturfing). > So even if you have built all that successfully I'd still suggest the world would split into sites that would use it and sites that wouldn't. That's OK. I imagine lots of different "forums" or "chatrooms" with the feature that you know the list of participants, but you don't know which nym is which particpant.