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Thanks very much. If you have experience or expertise in this industry, would you be willing to disclose it?

walterbell 12y ago
HN is a very different place at 2am and 2pm. Take a look through the archives (hn.algolia.com), especially on controversial topics. In a different context, when security teams are defending against remote attackers, one can sometimes differentiate script kiddies from professionals by timezone of operation. Automated analysis is challenged by the fact that a single userid can be used by more than one person, and a single person can use more than one userid.
freshhawk 12y ago
I actually don't have any expertise in this industry, only familiarity. When I was young I worked in the "domain industry" (domain squatting and content farms) and you end up meeting really interesting people who work in the grey/black hat SEO/PR/Content/Affiliate Marketing industry. I've kept in touch with the technical guys I met because they are fun people to drink with and hear crazy stories, most friendly black hat people are, even if the actual industries are pretty awful. I do miss programming against an adversary rather than for friendly potential customers sometimes, I will admit. It's mostly like you'd expect. The vast majority of work is low skill inexpensive devs just brute forcing things and outrageously crappy PHP libs being bought and sold on forums. There are few startup types using the high skill approach, will actually think to read the relevant computer science papers. They seem to complain a lot that it's so easy that their skills are rarely cost effective, these sites have every incentive to not notice the manipulation, it makes every one of their metrics look better to advertisers and investors. The technical side is actually more of a support industry compared to the real side of writing and pushing stories to bloggers and news sites. Ryan Holiday's Trust Me I'm Lying book outlined how it works in general, although I can't say his specifics are true it's nothing I hadn't heard before. That recent New Yorker article "The Virologist" made me laugh pretty hard, those types are everywhere.

HN is a very different place at 2am and 2pm. Take a look through the archives (hn.algolia.com), especially on controversial topics. In a different context, when security teams are defending against remote attackers, one can sometimes differentiate script kiddies from professionals by timezone of operation. Automated analysis is challenged by the fact that a single userid can be used by more than one person, and a single person can use more than one userid.

freshhawk 12y ago

I actually don't have any expertise in this industry, only familiarity. When I was young I worked in the "domain industry" (domain squatting and content farms) and you end up meeting really interesting people who work in the grey/black hat SEO/PR/Content/Affiliate Marketing industry. I've kept in touch with the technical guys I met because they are fun people to drink with and hear crazy stories, most friendly black hat people are, even if the actual industries are pretty awful. I do miss programming against an adversary rather than for friendly potential customers sometimes, I will admit. It's mostly like you'd expect. The vast majority of work is low skill inexpensive devs just brute forcing things and outrageously crappy PHP libs being bought and sold on forums. There are few startup types using the high skill approach, will actually think to read the relevant computer science papers. They seem to complain a lot that it's so easy that their skills are rarely cost effective, these sites have every incentive to not notice the manipulation, it makes every one of their metrics look better to advertisers and investors. The technical side is actually more of a support industry compared to the real side of writing and pushing stories to bloggers and news sites. Ryan Holiday's Trust Me I'm Lying book outlined how it works in general, although I can't say his specifics are true it's nothing I hadn't heard before. That recent New Yorker article "The Virologist" made me laugh pretty hard, those types are everywhere.