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I hope you don't think that a campaigner with as much experience as David Plouffe is going to neglect to hire a social media firm to handle Reddit and HN storie
by jellicle 12y ago
I hope you don't think that a campaigner with as much experience as David Plouffe is going to neglect to hire a social media firm to handle Reddit and HN stories about Uber.
This is what (a small part of) Uber's venture capital is going towards: hiring people to downvote and bury critical posts. It would almost be negligent not to do so, at this point in the internet's development.
- plinkplonk 12y agoThat is an interesting idea. As long as HN's code has the ability to detect such co ordinated flag kills and alert the mods, all good (imo). Just to be clear, I have no position on whether HN should or should not discuss such stories (I can see arguments for either side, and lots of grey areas). I'd be personally fine with a 'tech only' focus (say). My question was about why these stories were getting killed moments after submission, since many discussions have happened about women in tech, diversity, company business model unethicalities etc, without triggering flag kills.
- jsprogrammer 12y agoHN should discuss whatever it discusses.
- freshhawk 12y agoI might be misreading your response but just to reiterate: Asking if Uber has a reputation management firm to handle stuff like this is like asking if they have tax lawyers. And a professional, expensive firm would certainly have enough clean accounts to do this undetectably if that was even necessary (no idea what detection ability HN has). In my opinion that's the most plausible answer to why, but it's not the only one.
- MCRed 12y agoHN and Reddit's ranking systems are based on the assumption that the people voting are the ones who are actual genuine readers of the site. And thus for a company to organize a campaign of down votes (which seems the only way to exercise control over such social media) would, I assume, be a violation of the ToS. Violating the ToS is a violation of the right to access-- specifically, it is "unlawful access", and while I doubt you could get a prosecutor to press charges, it feels to me that this crosses the line.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- mercurial 12y agoYou make it sound like it's perfectly legitimate, while from my point of view, it's indistinguishable from astroturfing.