6 ms·

What are the chances that HN is getting astroturfed these days? Are mods strict about it? I lots of relatively new accounts coming with what seems to me extrem

What are the chances that HN is getting astroturfed these days? Are mods strict about it? I lots of relatively new accounts coming with what seems to me extreme, but altogether pop-culture acceptable opinions

fsflover 7mo ago
You should point out the exact posts.
Bender 7mo ago
What are the chances that HN is getting astroturfed these days? Happens all day every day. There are many AI agents starting discussions and replying to comments. This is how The Crappening started on 4chan. Some of them are just future grifters. Some are training AI (I have replied to a few for fun). Some are propaganda bots. Those running the bots will reply with something equiv to Errrm Proof?? when called out. Without root I can not empirically prove it and the botters know that. I predict about 2 years before the site will have more AI noise than real people. I have no idea what can be done about it aside from tracking the bots and reporting them via email to Daniel and I don't know what he could or would do. HN has always been very hands off which is mostly good but not for this scenario. If nothing is done it will just be bots grifting and AstroTurfing one another to the benefit of Google SEO and most of the humans would eventually go elsewhere with exception of some die-hards that refuse to recognize the situation.
- worldsavior 7mo ago
  Maybe this comment is also AI.
  - Bender 7mo ago
    Maybe this comment is also AI. My nickname on here would at least suggest so. I think Grok is the closest option since they were working on making a snarky insulting version of their bot. Tame that down a bit and one could get the personality of Bender. [1] [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPNGFC7-t68 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPNGFC7-t68 [video][16s]
- nananana9 7mo ago
  Anonymous internet forums will very likely die out if inference gets another order of magnitude cheaper. The only solutions are (1) private forums, (2) strict verification or maybe (3) some sort of "web of trust" thing, if someone manages to make it user friendly and not suck.
  - Bender 7mo ago
    I agree and my bet is on private and semi-private (invite only) forums making a come back. It is so much easier nowadays with so many Ansible playbooks and Dockerfiles to automate things.
- danielparsons 7mo ago
  we need to start a paywalled private HN forum
  - Bender 7mo ago
    we need to start a paywalled private HN forum In my opinion it would be mostly a ghost town if it requires money for something that was free. It would probably have to be more like a n invite-only semi-private forum. An example would be lobsters. [1] Not sayin' that's perfect, just an example. One can always try it and see what comes of it. [1] - https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/
hightrix 7mo ago
100%. Especially on topics involving countries with vast online propaganda operations.
- agentifysh 7mo ago
  Not necessarily I see these green handles that just seem to pop up out of nowhere and they always have characteristically triggering/cynical tone to them, which usually triggers some type of reaction Could be that these are being farmed but at a state level it might be easier to outright purchase aged accounts
kilroy123 7mo ago
I've seen lots of suspiciously new accounts hoping into these conversations. Saying questionable things.
dyauspitr 7mo ago
With things like Openclaw it’s kind of trivial to game forums now. You just have to tell an agent to “post arguments for/against this perspective on this forum.” Give it a few talking points to include if you want to get specific and let it run. Specify the tone so it sounds realistic. It’s literally going to do everything else essentially forever or until you run out of tokens. Comments in a forum are dirt cheap so it’s also going to be very cheap.
- nonethewiser 7mo ago
  Youd have to do a lot of work to make sure it's only a few short sentences, non-specific, and ultra-quippy though. I mean I'm sure it can be done but if you ask an LLM to produce comment reply without more instruction it's going to write something a lot more thoughtful, respectful, and substantive than a forum user would.
  - dyauspitr 7mo ago
    It’s not that hard. You can literally say between 2-4 sentences.
ActorNightly 7mo ago
I mean does it matter? At this point, lines have been drawn. In conservative land, everything conservative is good, everything liberal is bad. So the only sane position to take is the complete opposite. For example, if you see someone self proclaimed liberal being critical of liberals, that person is probably a conservative or its a conservative bot.
- spaghetdefects 7mo ago
  That's not totally true when it comes to Zionism though. Much of the left and the right are united against Zionism. It's the older center liberals and right that are united in being pro-Zionism.
  - nailer 7mo ago
    Yes both the far left and far right believe that Jews aren’t allowed to live in their own homeland, because they are racist.
  - spaghetdefects 7mo ago
    Not sure why this is getting downvoted, it's simply a factual statement. It's also backed up by polling that came out yesterday: https://apnews.com/article/poll-gallup-americans-israel-palestinians-democrats-republicans-2614e22b0ddabe514424680b71e1802f https://apnews.com/article/poll-gallup-americans-israel-pale...
  - ActorNightly 7mo ago
    I dunno if you are a bot, but in case you are not, I hope you realize that Palestine stuff is basically controlled opposition. All the extreme left wing people that happen to be so pro Palestine are basically all sponsored by right wing to peddle propaganda and normalize stuff like Oct 7 so that the right can point to them and be like "look the liberals are crazy". Its a propaganda machine that works very well to target the very impressionable people out there. I mean, students are going to protests and destroying their futures by getting arrested to show support of Palestinians, who would absolutely stone them to death if they found out that any of them smoked weed, and even more so for the lbgtq students for simply being gay. So really, Israel vs Palestine shouldn't be an issue at all if you believe in actual change.
sosomoxie 7mo ago
[flagged]
- aaron695 7mo ago
  [dead]
- shykes 7mo ago
  > Unfortunately they visit this site regularly and police it against honest reporting about their crimes. I think that's called "disagreeing".
  - nonethewiser 7mo ago
    Today we call that misinformation. Which of course should be totally illegal and in no way protected by free speech.
    - almosthere 7mo ago
      [flagged]
      - nilslindemann 7mo ago
        You are misreading him there. Read the thread again.
      - tomhow 7mo ago
        > You are fucking nuts. WTF? You cannot comment like this on HN, no matter who you are replying to or what it's about. HN is only a place where people want to participate because others make the effort to raise the standards rather than drag them down. Please show a sincere intent to treat this community and its guidelines with respect if you want to keep participating here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - an0malous 7mo ago
    That would suggest they respond to claims with counter arguments, as opposed to what they really do which is flag everything they don’t want people to see
nonethewiser 7mo ago
HN doesnt have any defense against it, and the userbase is small enough that it would be highly effective.
nailer 7mo ago
[flagged]
- jjtheblunt 7mo ago
  why would he be doing that?
  - nailer 7mo ago
    [flagged]
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- tomhow 7mo ago
  If you are sincere about contributing positively to the healthy functioning of this site, you will include evidence when you make a claim like this. If "Dan G has said" something like this, you will be able to share a link to a comment in which he said it. It's one of the most basic heuristics of moderating HN that when people make such claims without including a link, it is at best a highly exaggerated claim. We turn off flags on politics-based articles when there is evidence of "significant new information". That's always been the case. The guidelines have never prohibited politics here; only the kind of repetitive day-to-day stories that make up most of the mainstream news. If there seems like more politics on HN these days it is because politics and tech have become much more intertwined in the past 5-10 years. We don't like it, but we're no more able than King Canute to hold back the tides. HN is a part of the tech industry and a part of broader society, and it's neither viable nor moral to act as if major international stories about such grave topics as war are not happening.
howdyhowdy123 7mo ago
[flagged]
- tovej 7mo ago
  Did you mean to say Israeli? Cause that's what it seems like to me. The level of misinformation is staggering.
jjtheblunt 7mo ago
language question: what does astroturfed mean here? (i know that astroturf is artificial grass.)
- locusofself 7mo ago
  It's when people (or bots) acting in bad faith make a lot of noise to make it seem like there is a strong support for some (usually bad) position. It' a play on the term "grassroots". Fake grassroots=astroturfing
  - jjtheblunt 7mo ago
    excellent explanation. thank you.
kgwxd 7mo ago
Which ones are the pop-culture acceptable opinions?
yadaeno 7mo ago
Take a look at the Iran subreddit.
jmward01 7mo ago
Your account, while 10 years old, only has comments from the past year. It is becoming very hard to tell what accounts are real and which are fake. Social proof of account activity pre-llm (usable) could be a very important thing in the future.
- rudhdb773b 7mo ago
  > Social proof of account activity pre-llm (usable) could be a very important thing in the future. It's already common practice to buy aged accounts with good reputations, so even that doesn't mean much.
- whearyou 7mo ago
  I think I have comments going back about 10 years no?
oefrha 7mo ago
I used to report quite a number of political/ideological-only accounts to mods through email. They're explicitly against the single purpose account rule. They usually got banned or at least warned. Over the past year or two I reported a number of accounts that are basically pro-Israel-only, they post a ton of comments to any Israel-related thread and either nothing else or very little of anything else. Mods refuse to ban or even warn them, apparently because emotions run high, there are too many of them and there's priority in punishing the most egregious content so relatively mild ones get a pass, and if mods are being accused of being-antisemitic and they ban a bunch of these they would reinforce the image, etc. These are from memory and not exact quotes. I don't buy it, and I've stopped reporting things to mods. (To be abundantly clear, anti-Israel-only accounts should 100% be banned too, but at least I haven't noticed as many as them. Any other kind of politics-only account should be purged too if the rules are to be believed.)
- whearyou 7mo ago
  So interesting I've mostly noticed the fishy seeming anti-Israel accounts, I think mostly because what they say gets up so upvoted
tomhow 7mo ago
A large proportion of the software that runs HN exists to detect inorganic activity. It's quite obvious to us when significant numbers of comments are made in support of a particular agenda by new accounts or old accounts without regular, normal participation on HN. Also, it's against the guidelines to allege or speculate about astroturfing (as is anything that is tangential to the primary topic), but we welcome emails (hn@ycombinator.com) from anyone who notices anything that seems suspect, and we're happy to investigate.

fsflover 7mo ago

You should point out the exact posts.

Bender 7mo ago

What are the chances that HN is getting astroturfed these days? Happens all day every day. There are many AI agents starting discussions and replying to comments. This is how The Crappening started on 4chan. Some of them are just future grifters. Some are training AI (I have replied to a few for fun). Some are propaganda bots. Those running the bots will reply with something equiv to Errrm Proof?? when called out. Without root I can not empirically prove it and the botters know that. I predict about 2 years before the site will have more AI noise than real people. I have no idea what can be done about it aside from tracking the bots and reporting them via email to Daniel and I don't know what he could or would do. HN has always been very hands off which is mostly good but not for this scenario. If nothing is done it will just be bots grifting and AstroTurfing one another to the benefit of Google SEO and most of the humans would eventually go elsewhere with exception of some die-hards that refuse to recognize the situation.

worldsavior 7mo ago
Maybe this comment is also AI.
- Bender 7mo ago
  Maybe this comment is also AI. My nickname on here would at least suggest so. I think Grok is the closest option since they were working on making a snarky insulting version of their bot. Tame that down a bit and one could get the personality of Bender. [1] [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPNGFC7-t68 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPNGFC7-t68 [video][16s]
nananana9 7mo ago
Anonymous internet forums will very likely die out if inference gets another order of magnitude cheaper. The only solutions are (1) private forums, (2) strict verification or maybe (3) some sort of "web of trust" thing, if someone manages to make it user friendly and not suck.
- Bender 7mo ago
  I agree and my bet is on private and semi-private (invite only) forums making a come back. It is so much easier nowadays with so many Ansible playbooks and Dockerfiles to automate things.
danielparsons 7mo ago
we need to start a paywalled private HN forum
- Bender 7mo ago
  we need to start a paywalled private HN forum In my opinion it would be mostly a ghost town if it requires money for something that was free. It would probably have to be more like a n invite-only semi-private forum. An example would be lobsters. [1] Not sayin' that's perfect, just an example. One can always try it and see what comes of it. [1] - https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/

hightrix 7mo ago

100%. Especially on topics involving countries with vast online propaganda operations.

agentifysh 7mo ago
Not necessarily I see these green handles that just seem to pop up out of nowhere and they always have characteristically triggering/cynical tone to them, which usually triggers some type of reaction Could be that these are being farmed but at a state level it might be easier to outright purchase aged accounts

kilroy123 7mo ago

I've seen lots of suspiciously new accounts hoping into these conversations. Saying questionable things.

dyauspitr 7mo ago

With things like Openclaw it’s kind of trivial to game forums now. You just have to tell an agent to “post arguments for/against this perspective on this forum.” Give it a few talking points to include if you want to get specific and let it run. Specify the tone so it sounds realistic. It’s literally going to do everything else essentially forever or until you run out of tokens. Comments in a forum are dirt cheap so it’s also going to be very cheap.

nonethewiser 7mo ago
Youd have to do a lot of work to make sure it's only a few short sentences, non-specific, and ultra-quippy though. I mean I'm sure it can be done but if you ask an LLM to produce comment reply without more instruction it's going to write something a lot more thoughtful, respectful, and substantive than a forum user would.
- dyauspitr 7mo ago
  It’s not that hard. You can literally say between 2-4 sentences.

ActorNightly 7mo ago

I mean does it matter? At this point, lines have been drawn. In conservative land, everything conservative is good, everything liberal is bad. So the only sane position to take is the complete opposite. For example, if you see someone self proclaimed liberal being critical of liberals, that person is probably a conservative or its a conservative bot.

spaghetdefects 7mo ago
That's not totally true when it comes to Zionism though. Much of the left and the right are united against Zionism. It's the older center liberals and right that are united in being pro-Zionism.
- nailer 7mo ago
  Yes both the far left and far right believe that Jews aren’t allowed to live in their own homeland, because they are racist.
- spaghetdefects 7mo ago
  Not sure why this is getting downvoted, it's simply a factual statement. It's also backed up by polling that came out yesterday: https://apnews.com/article/poll-gallup-americans-israel-palestinians-democrats-republicans-2614e22b0ddabe514424680b71e1802f https://apnews.com/article/poll-gallup-americans-israel-pale...
- ActorNightly 7mo ago
  I dunno if you are a bot, but in case you are not, I hope you realize that Palestine stuff is basically controlled opposition. All the extreme left wing people that happen to be so pro Palestine are basically all sponsored by right wing to peddle propaganda and normalize stuff like Oct 7 so that the right can point to them and be like "look the liberals are crazy". Its a propaganda machine that works very well to target the very impressionable people out there. I mean, students are going to protests and destroying their futures by getting arrested to show support of Palestinians, who would absolutely stone them to death if they found out that any of them smoked weed, and even more so for the lbgtq students for simply being gay. So really, Israel vs Palestine shouldn't be an issue at all if you believe in actual change.

sosomoxie 7mo ago

[flagged]

aaron695 7mo ago
[dead]
shykes 7mo ago
> Unfortunately they visit this site regularly and police it against honest reporting about their crimes. I think that's called "disagreeing".
- nonethewiser 7mo ago
  Today we call that misinformation. Which of course should be totally illegal and in no way protected by free speech.
  - almosthere 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    - nilslindemann 7mo ago
      You are misreading him there. Read the thread again.
    - tomhow 7mo ago
      > You are fucking nuts. WTF? You cannot comment like this on HN, no matter who you are replying to or what it's about. HN is only a place where people want to participate because others make the effort to raise the standards rather than drag them down. Please show a sincere intent to treat this community and its guidelines with respect if you want to keep participating here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- an0malous 7mo ago
  That would suggest they respond to claims with counter arguments, as opposed to what they really do which is flag everything they don’t want people to see

nonethewiser 7mo ago

HN doesnt have any defense against it, and the userbase is small enough that it would be highly effective.

nailer 7mo ago

[flagged]

jjtheblunt 7mo ago
why would he be doing that?
- nailer 7mo ago
  [flagged]
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
tomhow 7mo ago
If you are sincere about contributing positively to the healthy functioning of this site, you will include evidence when you make a claim like this. If "Dan G has said" something like this, you will be able to share a link to a comment in which he said it. It's one of the most basic heuristics of moderating HN that when people make such claims without including a link, it is at best a highly exaggerated claim. We turn off flags on politics-based articles when there is evidence of "significant new information". That's always been the case. The guidelines have never prohibited politics here; only the kind of repetitive day-to-day stories that make up most of the mainstream news. If there seems like more politics on HN these days it is because politics and tech have become much more intertwined in the past 5-10 years. We don't like it, but we're no more able than King Canute to hold back the tides. HN is a part of the tech industry and a part of broader society, and it's neither viable nor moral to act as if major international stories about such grave topics as war are not happening.

howdyhowdy123 7mo ago

[flagged]

tovej 7mo ago
Did you mean to say Israeli? Cause that's what it seems like to me. The level of misinformation is staggering.

jjtheblunt 7mo ago

language question: what does astroturfed mean here? (i know that astroturf is artificial grass.)

locusofself 7mo ago
It's when people (or bots) acting in bad faith make a lot of noise to make it seem like there is a strong support for some (usually bad) position. It' a play on the term "grassroots". Fake grassroots=astroturfing
- jjtheblunt 7mo ago
  excellent explanation. thank you.

kgwxd 7mo ago

Which ones are the pop-culture acceptable opinions?

yadaeno 7mo ago

Take a look at the Iran subreddit.

jmward01 7mo ago

Your account, while 10 years old, only has comments from the past year. It is becoming very hard to tell what accounts are real and which are fake. Social proof of account activity pre-llm (usable) could be a very important thing in the future.

rudhdb773b 7mo ago
> Social proof of account activity pre-llm (usable) could be a very important thing in the future. It's already common practice to buy aged accounts with good reputations, so even that doesn't mean much.
whearyou 7mo ago
I think I have comments going back about 10 years no?

oefrha 7mo ago

I used to report quite a number of political/ideological-only accounts to mods through email. They're explicitly against the single purpose account rule. They usually got banned or at least warned. Over the past year or two I reported a number of accounts that are basically pro-Israel-only, they post a ton of comments to any Israel-related thread and either nothing else or very little of anything else. Mods refuse to ban or even warn them, apparently because emotions run high, there are too many of them and there's priority in punishing the most egregious content so relatively mild ones get a pass, and if mods are being accused of being-antisemitic and they ban a bunch of these they would reinforce the image, etc. These are from memory and not exact quotes. I don't buy it, and I've stopped reporting things to mods. (To be abundantly clear, anti-Israel-only accounts should 100% be banned too, but at least I haven't noticed as many as them. Any other kind of politics-only account should be purged too if the rules are to be believed.)

whearyou 7mo ago
So interesting I've mostly noticed the fishy seeming anti-Israel accounts, I think mostly because what they say gets up so upvoted

tomhow 7mo ago

A large proportion of the software that runs HN exists to detect inorganic activity. It's quite obvious to us when significant numbers of comments are made in support of a particular agenda by new accounts or old accounts without regular, normal participation on HN. Also, it's against the guidelines to allege or speculate about astroturfing (as is anything that is tangential to the primary topic), but we welcome emails (hn@ycombinator.com) from anyone who notices anything that seems suspect, and we're happy to investigate.