HN Explorer

Ask HN: Is Hacker News Being Astroturfed?

28 points by aboutruby ↗ HN
I saw a comment on Reddit that said recently astroturfers have started using a pattern that you can pretty much see everywhere.

> [top comment]

> > [generic question about what to use/buy?]

> > > [link to a paid product that is very loosely related to the original subject]

(Sometimes even the [top comment] is left out if the astroturfers have figured how to make that second comment the top comment)

And I think that comment chain typically becomes part of a sophisticated upvote ring.

30 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 66.1 ms ] thread
greenyoda
If I see something like that, I flag it. If both the question and the answer come from accounts with no history of stories or comments, it's almost certainly spam. (They're not always newly-created accounts. Some spammers seem to let their accounts sit around for a while before using them.)

Fortunately, I haven't seen too much of this on HN yet.

(To flag a comment, click on its time stamp [e.g., "10 minutes ago"] and you'll see a "flag" link at the top, next to the "parent" link. If enough people flag a comment, it will get killed.)

[dead] jedmeyers
I need a solid database with good support and low latency. What would you recommend?
j16sdiz
Just post your data here, and we will handle the rest.
aboutruby
Thanks, been using Hacker News for many years and didn't know that's how you flag comments.
cleanyourroom
What peanut butter would you make a sandwich with while report comments in this way?
ggm
I think its very likely any social-engagement web space which has a low barrier to entry winds up being astroturfed. All of them.

The question would be how high (at any given point in time) the barrier to entry has to be.

yummypaint
A similar thing sometimes happens in threads related to china
idlewords
So... can anyone suggest a good paid alternative to Hacker News that isn't being astroturfed?
personjerry
I don't think HN is being astroturfed just yet. They're pretty reactive and competent in their moderating, but https://lobste.rs/ is the best alternative that I've heard of (although I never actually use it because HN is just fine for me, and you can encounter some pretty established people on HN ;) ).
ohithereyou
Of course it is. YC is a business, not a charity.
minimaxir
There's a big difference between astroturfing and self-promotion. The latter tends to get correctly downvoted.
savingthrow
Self promotion within limits is fine for HN. See, for example, this valued contributor who posts links useful content they've created. Most of these appear to have been upvoted, not downvoted.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:minimaxir%20minimaxir&s...

[dead] aboutruby
Those are links to relevant blog posts, not to paid content/product. I highly suspect your account is a highjacked one (3 comments: 2 here, 1 4 years ago) made to defend the spammers.
[dead] savingthrow
I used this account to see how accurate you are.

Not very, as it turns out.

minimaxir
Rather in the context of the "link to a paid product" or a startup they own without disclosing it, as the OP was implying. I should have clarified.

For comments linking to my own blog/projects, I very intentionally a) disclose I've written it and b) try to only post it when it's extremely relevant to the topic at hand.

savingthrow
Sure, but Parent poster is linking to accounts who are also making the same disclosure. "Here's this product I ahve". And while I didn't look through the entire posting history of the linked accounts, the mentions don't seem too frequent.
dang
With questions like this, what we need most are links. Links. Links!

Otherwise there's nothing to look at and nothing to crack down on.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
aboutruby
I didn't want to point at specific examples to see if other people recognized the pattern but here is a few of them (actually could only recall one... I will flag when I see them, but not sure it will get recognized as it's a series of comments):

My top comment being highjacked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19410185

While you are here, this comment is just linking to a paid tutorial for no apparent reason other than self-promotion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416821

I can only recall those because they are linked to my history, I don't remember which thread the others were on.

I didn't look at their history and saw many more, it's just that yesterday I saw a new one on a front page post and though it got out of hand.

savingthrow
The first one is just someone asking for a product recommendation, and someone else giving a recommendation. Nothing about that looks like astroturfing.

The second one is from an account who doesn't push their tutorial in most comments. A search for [author:vram22 gumroad] shows no submissions for that domain, and a handful of comments.

It's fine for people on HN to push their product, so long as they don't do it too much and so long as they're clear that it is their product.

If you really think something is being shilled it's far better to email the mods to let them know than it is to start meta-threads.

aboutruby
The few times I emailed hn@ycombinator.com I didn't get any responses.

Anyway, I just wanted to see if others thought Hacker News was being astroturfed, I never said those are sure case of astroturfing.

For example this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19419362

Ok looks like it might be, but then I have to check the comment history to make sure this user is legitimate, which look like he is legitimate. So I guess I have to check the comment history of every user that makes a link to a paid product... sounds like a pain that could be automated.

Also, like for the commenters weirdly supporting China, I think the comment history is made in such a way to disguise the nature of the account (otherwise it would be too easy to figure it out, basic spam gets killed very quickly on HN thankfully)

(edit: Looking at your history, your account is 4 years old with two comments in this thread and one comment 4 years ago, may be a highjacked account)

dang
I only saw this now. I can't find any emails from the email address registered to your account. We're pretty meticulous about responding to everyone who contacts us with such concerns, so I'm wondering what could have been going on there.

The link you included here looks completely innocuous to me.

Your China comment here is close to nationalistic flamebait (not allowed on HN) and breaks the HN guideline against insinuating astroturfing without evidence (please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). The overwhelming majority of the time, such insinuation are baseless—and they do harm to this site and to commenters being unfairly accused. If anyone wants a clear example, look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358. This is why we have such guidelines.

Finally, attacking the person you're replying to like that by casting groundless aspersions on their posting history is a violation of HN's civility rule. People are welcome to post here at whatever rate they feel like. They're not incriminating themselves by doing so.

aboutruby
> We're pretty meticulous about responding to everyone who contacts us with such concerns, so I'm wondering what could have been going on there.

I'm talking about past experience with previous accounts.

> Please don't impute astroturfing or shillage. That degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about it, email us and we'll look at the data.

Ok, never saw this rule actually, thanks.

> Finally, attacking the person you're replying to like that by casting groundless aspersions on their posting history is a violation of HN's civility rule.

Yes, I never look at people's post history, not sure why I did. I also usually never reply to other people's comments and should be more strict about that.

dang
It's possible your emails went to spam and we missed it. That's not so likely though, especially since you say there were repeated cases. We look through the spam bin and try to fish out all the HN-related emails.

More likely, if you emailed us repeatedly and didn't get a response, is that your previous accounts were involved in some form of abuse and we didn't believe that the emails were in good faith. Either that or it was 5+ years ago, when pg was running HN and didn't have time to respond to emails like we do.

aboutruby
It was a while ago, I don’t create new accounts for ban-escaping but for privacy reasons.
NathanKP
I'm sure this happens to some extent, but based on my experience as an employee who interacts with people on social media as part of my role I also think you are underestimating how many people legitimately ask questions on Reddit / Hacker News / Twitter etc. I'm sure that there are some bad actors out there that post a question as well as the answer and that use an upvote ring to boost their comments for visibility, but there are also employees that just respond to legitimate comments that they see on the internet.

As part of my role for Amazon Web Services I frequently respond to comments on platforms like Reddit, Twitter, and Hacker News. When I see someone asking a question about an AWS service, saying something inaccurate about AWS, or who seems like they could legitimately benefit from some knowledge I can share with them then I'll post a reply. You can check through my comment history if you are interested, but here is a recent example of such an interaction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19282477

There are quite a few people out there like me who monitor relevant discussions and interact with people on social media websites as part of their job role. I would never "astroturf", not only because its unethical, but also because there is plenty of legitimate and relevant discussion that I can contribute to when needed without needing to resort to creating artificial questions.