10 ms·

next week: hacker news is being manipulated by professional shills every day.

by equivocates 10y ago

askafriend 10y ago
By definition, Hacker News is a professional shill. It's an arm of YC and has special interests as a community.
- sametmax 10y ago
  All communites have, but people from YC usually don't seem to hide their intention in communication (or they are good at it and I didn't notice). The problem is when people are doing PR for an entity, while pretending they are sharing news, insights or data.
  - alva 10y ago
    I agree that "shilling" really comes down to intent and transparency. Are you presenting the information and disclosing (this can be implicit if connection is obvious) your interests? I don't think most have a problem with that, however the particular forum or board might not be suitable for it.
    - sametmax 10y ago
      Indeed. The line is not clear though. Some people present a new services with show HN and are acclaimed, others are rejected as advertisers. HN like underdogs, innovators and good-doers, but is less laxed with big companies, status quo and money lovers. So if the later can disguise as the formers, they can game the system.
  - fullshark 10y ago
    Everyone here pretty much has a professional stake in the topics discussed, and most people don't disclose that stake. People may be honest about their thinking but their analysis is certainly biased.
- logicallee 10y ago
  it just so happens that those interests are around supporting founders so they can build huge companies and disrupt major industries. (No joke.) Question: do threads that are critical of YC companies get buried just because they're YC companies? (For example if Uber had YC investment, which a cursory glance says it doesn't, would the criticism of it have been buried by mods here)? (I say this because there were a lot of critical stories about Uber recently, and in the past, too.)
  - dang 10y ago
    The answer to your question is "of course not". When stories are critical of YC or YC-funded companies, we moderate them less than we otherwise would. I've posted about this many times: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20moderate%20yc%20less https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20pg%20chair https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&date.... This isn't because YC doesn't care about HN's business value. It's because YC knows what HN's value consists of: the community's curiosity and trust. That's the global optimum, so that's what's in YC's interests. It would be foolish to optimize for anything else.
    - logicallee 10y ago
      Thanks, dang. Though you've posted about it a lot I hadn't run across those comments yet - thanks for the links.
- dang 10y ago
  Isn't part of the definition of shilling that it's undisclosed? In that case, no: HN's business concessions to YC (job ads, and more recently Launch HNs) are public. Beyond those, we don't moderate HN specifically to promote YC's interests, and in fact err on the side of not doing so. You should see how sharply I scold YC startups who haven't yet had this drilled sufficiently into them. The best way to make HN valuable for YC is to optimize its value for the community, which is gratifying intellectual curiosity—so that's what we spend our time thinking about. I wrote more about this here if anyone's interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13861971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13861971.
  - gist 10y ago
    > Isn't it part of that definition that the shillage is undisclosed? I will point out before as I did the other day that both you and PG (very ironically) didn't/don't identify who you are with respect to HN. I haven't checked the other partners I have noticed that some do identify as YC partners. Would also expect that any YC funded company might identify themselves as such so their comments or postings could be taken in context. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang I personally think it's fine the way it operates but in all fairness the disclosure could be more than it is.
    - dang 10y ago
      That's a different concern. HN's culture has always been informal and implicit. That has upsides and downsides, but it's the way HN is and I'm loth to mess with it. People invoke 'disclosure', 'transparency', etc. as if these were unmitigated benefits, but when you delve into a complex system like HN they turn out to be tradeoffs. On HN the culture is not to spell everything out. That doesn't have to do with hiding anything; the information is all out there. It has to do with respecting users' intelligence, liking minimalism, liking users to have to work just a little, and so on. The downside of this approach is not that it obscures business interests—just think how excited the community would be to hit on something like that were we ever so dumb as to hide it!—but that it makes things harder for newcomers.
frik 10y ago
Sadly it's true. Some companies game the HN ranking algo, and employ shills to divert the discussion of their product. At least two companies (that are infamous for such shady tactics anyway) do it actively regularly on HN. The first thing to prevent it, would be to change the HN ranking algo so that stories with more comments than votes are not automatically punished and forced many pages backwards from the frontpage. Add a report button to report users. Implement an admin interface to monitor certain users and ban them.
- whitepoplar 10y ago
  Please name these companies!
  - cowpig 10y ago
    this--plus evidence too if you can find it please!
  - randomname2 10y ago
    This probably refers to Uber and Peter Thiel and companies associated to him? If they're manipulating HN they're not very good at it. Lately I'm seeing smear pieces against them appear on the front page on almost a daily basis and the tone in these threads is overwhelmingly toxic rather than positive.
- wickawic 10y ago
  I could be wrong but I felt this happened on the Spotify thread that is currently on the front page. All the inital reaction was negative, about how the piece was a 'submarine,' etc. Now the top 5 comments are about Spotify's new killer feature and how happy the customers are...
  - dang 10y ago
    I took a look at the thread I think you're referring to, and both those comments and their upvotes are by established users with no signs of fakery that either we or our software could pick up on. What you observed is probably a different phenomenon: early comments in a thread often start off negative, and only later do other users show up to post positively—their motivation being to balance things out. Often the positive comments to get the most upvotes in the end, but the whole process takes a while to play out. If you've ever run across a thread where the top comment says, "I can't believe how negative this thread is!" and proceeds to make a positive case with great fervor, this dynamic is probably why.
sametmax 10y ago
Well, sometime you see a personality or a topic getting traction out of the blue. Any critic get quickly downvoted. No debate seems to take place. I noticed that with Bill Gates. Before 2015, nothing different. In 2017, business as usual. But in 2016, Reddit, HN, Imgur suddenly had a surge of Gate support : success stories, interviews, praising using comments... It's just a supposition of course, I have nothing to back it up. But it makes sense to me that the PR experts have learned now that it can be very efficient to target online communities instead of spamming mass media. If they can influence them, then the PR will develop itself in an organic way, feel more honest and natural, and the community will spread the message outside of itself, giving the impression it's genuine. The best communication is the one that doesn't look like it. Controlling the big medias has been the challenge of the last century, but the intellectuals grew defiant of them. They rely more and more on cross referencing various sources and debating with communities made of their peers or people experts in one niche. This is the logical next move. Although it seems harder to pull out, in the long run the cost/benefit ration seems better because it relies on a intimate feeling of trust we develop with the communities. I know I do: I always read the comments before the articles on HN, because I trust the community to give me a better insight on the matter than the article itself. It's often the case. People are brilliant here, having a lot of accumulated knowledge, offering pieces of analysis, missing information, stories and counter points or even just summary that are the real added value of the site. So if the community now hosts subtle communication experts, they will (and probably already have) influence my point of view.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- duncanawoods 10y ago
  > I noticed that with Bill Gates I suspect that one is probably just natural trend/popularity/fashion at work with the hive mind flocking in the same direction. Gates rebounded from the tech nadir to philanthropist, humanitarian and intelligent sayer of sensible things. A lot easier to like than when he had a foot on all our throats. Similar effect with GWB. He is rebounding from pariah status and people can't help but warm to the guy's personality now that his crimes are being overshadowed by much larger bogeymen.
awqrre 10y ago
Admins/mods on HN manipulate/modify a lot of the content created by users.
- grzm 10y ago
  Would you elaborate on this? What are your examples? Mods are known to update submission titles (in accordance with the guidelines), but I'm unaware of any other content changes they make.
  - awqrre 10y ago
    Some examples off the top of my head: 1. They detach comments from comment threads (to hide them?) 2. They boost some stories so that they remain on the home page for a longer time 3. They also remove some posts from the front page... (because they are duplicates, not "quality" content, etc...) I could probably come up with more examples, but I'm sure that you get the idea...
    - grzm 10y ago
      Thanks for clarifying. I read your comment as to mean mods updated the content of comments. All of the items you mention are actions the mods engage in in their role as moderators, which they themselves have described elsewhere.

next week: hacker news is being manipulated by professional shills every day.

askafriend 10y ago

By definition, Hacker News is a professional shill. It's an arm of YC and has special interests as a community.

sametmax 10y ago
All communites have, but people from YC usually don't seem to hide their intention in communication (or they are good at it and I didn't notice). The problem is when people are doing PR for an entity, while pretending they are sharing news, insights or data.
- alva 10y ago
  I agree that "shilling" really comes down to intent and transparency. Are you presenting the information and disclosing (this can be implicit if connection is obvious) your interests? I don't think most have a problem with that, however the particular forum or board might not be suitable for it.
  - sametmax 10y ago
    Indeed. The line is not clear though. Some people present a new services with show HN and are acclaimed, others are rejected as advertisers. HN like underdogs, innovators and good-doers, but is less laxed with big companies, status quo and money lovers. So if the later can disguise as the formers, they can game the system.
- fullshark 10y ago
  Everyone here pretty much has a professional stake in the topics discussed, and most people don't disclose that stake. People may be honest about their thinking but their analysis is certainly biased.
logicallee 10y ago
it just so happens that those interests are around supporting founders so they can build huge companies and disrupt major industries. (No joke.) Question: do threads that are critical of YC companies get buried just because they're YC companies? (For example if Uber had YC investment, which a cursory glance says it doesn't, would the criticism of it have been buried by mods here)? (I say this because there were a lot of critical stories about Uber recently, and in the past, too.)
- dang 10y ago
  The answer to your question is "of course not". When stories are critical of YC or YC-funded companies, we moderate them less than we otherwise would. I've posted about this many times: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20moderate%20yc%20less https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20pg%20chair https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&date.... This isn't because YC doesn't care about HN's business value. It's because YC knows what HN's value consists of: the community's curiosity and trust. That's the global optimum, so that's what's in YC's interests. It would be foolish to optimize for anything else.
  - logicallee 10y ago
    Thanks, dang. Though you've posted about it a lot I hadn't run across those comments yet - thanks for the links.
dang 10y ago
Isn't part of the definition of shilling that it's undisclosed? In that case, no: HN's business concessions to YC (job ads, and more recently Launch HNs) are public. Beyond those, we don't moderate HN specifically to promote YC's interests, and in fact err on the side of not doing so. You should see how sharply I scold YC startups who haven't yet had this drilled sufficiently into them. The best way to make HN valuable for YC is to optimize its value for the community, which is gratifying intellectual curiosity—so that's what we spend our time thinking about. I wrote more about this here if anyone's interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13861971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13861971.
- gist 10y ago
  > Isn't it part of that definition that the shillage is undisclosed? I will point out before as I did the other day that both you and PG (very ironically) didn't/don't identify who you are with respect to HN. I haven't checked the other partners I have noticed that some do identify as YC partners. Would also expect that any YC funded company might identify themselves as such so their comments or postings could be taken in context. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang I personally think it's fine the way it operates but in all fairness the disclosure could be more than it is.
  - dang 10y ago
    That's a different concern. HN's culture has always been informal and implicit. That has upsides and downsides, but it's the way HN is and I'm loth to mess with it. People invoke 'disclosure', 'transparency', etc. as if these were unmitigated benefits, but when you delve into a complex system like HN they turn out to be tradeoffs. On HN the culture is not to spell everything out. That doesn't have to do with hiding anything; the information is all out there. It has to do with respecting users' intelligence, liking minimalism, liking users to have to work just a little, and so on. The downside of this approach is not that it obscures business interests—just think how excited the community would be to hit on something like that were we ever so dumb as to hide it!—but that it makes things harder for newcomers.

frik 10y ago

Sadly it's true. Some companies game the HN ranking algo, and employ shills to divert the discussion of their product. At least two companies (that are infamous for such shady tactics anyway) do it actively regularly on HN. The first thing to prevent it, would be to change the HN ranking algo so that stories with more comments than votes are not automatically punished and forced many pages backwards from the frontpage. Add a report button to report users. Implement an admin interface to monitor certain users and ban them.

whitepoplar 10y ago
Please name these companies!
- cowpig 10y ago
  this--plus evidence too if you can find it please!
- randomname2 10y ago
  This probably refers to Uber and Peter Thiel and companies associated to him? If they're manipulating HN they're not very good at it. Lately I'm seeing smear pieces against them appear on the front page on almost a daily basis and the tone in these threads is overwhelmingly toxic rather than positive.
wickawic 10y ago
I could be wrong but I felt this happened on the Spotify thread that is currently on the front page. All the inital reaction was negative, about how the piece was a 'submarine,' etc. Now the top 5 comments are about Spotify's new killer feature and how happy the customers are...
- dang 10y ago
  I took a look at the thread I think you're referring to, and both those comments and their upvotes are by established users with no signs of fakery that either we or our software could pick up on. What you observed is probably a different phenomenon: early comments in a thread often start off negative, and only later do other users show up to post positively—their motivation being to balance things out. Often the positive comments to get the most upvotes in the end, but the whole process takes a while to play out. If you've ever run across a thread where the top comment says, "I can't believe how negative this thread is!" and proceeds to make a positive case with great fervor, this dynamic is probably why.

sametmax 10y ago

Well, sometime you see a personality or a topic getting traction out of the blue. Any critic get quickly downvoted. No debate seems to take place. I noticed that with Bill Gates. Before 2015, nothing different. In 2017, business as usual. But in 2016, Reddit, HN, Imgur suddenly had a surge of Gate support : success stories, interviews, praising using comments... It's just a supposition of course, I have nothing to back it up. But it makes sense to me that the PR experts have learned now that it can be very efficient to target online communities instead of spamming mass media. If they can influence them, then the PR will develop itself in an organic way, feel more honest and natural, and the community will spread the message outside of itself, giving the impression it's genuine. The best communication is the one that doesn't look like it. Controlling the big medias has been the challenge of the last century, but the intellectuals grew defiant of them. They rely more and more on cross referencing various sources and debating with communities made of their peers or people experts in one niche. This is the logical next move. Although it seems harder to pull out, in the long run the cost/benefit ration seems better because it relies on a intimate feeling of trust we develop with the communities. I know I do: I always read the comments before the articles on HN, because I trust the community to give me a better insight on the matter than the article itself. It's often the case. People are brilliant here, having a lot of accumulated knowledge, offering pieces of analysis, missing information, stories and counter points or even just summary that are the real added value of the site. So if the community now hosts subtle communication experts, they will (and probably already have) influence my point of view.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
duncanawoods 10y ago
> I noticed that with Bill Gates I suspect that one is probably just natural trend/popularity/fashion at work with the hive mind flocking in the same direction. Gates rebounded from the tech nadir to philanthropist, humanitarian and intelligent sayer of sensible things. A lot easier to like than when he had a foot on all our throats. Similar effect with GWB. He is rebounding from pariah status and people can't help but warm to the guy's personality now that his crimes are being overshadowed by much larger bogeymen.

awqrre 10y ago

Admins/mods on HN manipulate/modify a lot of the content created by users.

grzm 10y ago
Would you elaborate on this? What are your examples? Mods are known to update submission titles (in accordance with the guidelines), but I'm unaware of any other content changes they make.
- awqrre 10y ago
  Some examples off the top of my head: 1. They detach comments from comment threads (to hide them?) 2. They boost some stories so that they remain on the home page for a longer time 3. They also remove some posts from the front page... (because they are duplicates, not "quality" content, etc...) I could probably come up with more examples, but I'm sure that you get the idea...
  - grzm 10y ago
    Thanks for clarifying. I read your comment as to mean mods updated the content of comments. All of the items you mention are actions the mods engage in in their role as moderators, which they themselves have described elsewhere.