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Your claim that Nodejitsu "created an army of sockpuppets to vote up their posts" is outrageous. Let me enumerate the issue here: 1. Your moderators are simply

Your claim that Nodejitsu "created an army of sockpuppets to vote up their posts" is outrageous. Let me enumerate the issue here: 1. Your moderators are simply unable (or unwilling) to distinguish "sockpuppets" from a legitimate community of developers (that is the node.js community). Yes, when we post something to HN we send out the link via Twitter and IM to colleagues in the node.js community who may potentially upvote it. This is natural "word of mouth". We have never used bots, or any kind of malicious automation to ensure posts reach the front-page. 2. There is no transparency for bans, nor is the ban every communicated to the owner of the HN account. If you think an account is unfairly trying to manipulate the voting system; you have to contact them. Anything less is blatantly ambiguous and unacceptable. 3. Given the silent nature of bans on HN, we have no choice but to move onto a new HN account and continue to submit legitimate posts using legitimate word of mouth dissemination. Perhaps you view this as "sockpuppets," but what other choice do we have? 4. In the particular case of Nodejitsu, this behavior is even more unacceptable. We are a platform-as-a-service where any user can create a publicly available application on a subdomain of nodejitsu.com. How can you ban the entire *.nodejitsu.com domain when we are not responsible for malicious actions (real or perceived) taken by a given user? This is not an admission that any such behavior has taken place; I'm sure that your claim is addressed in [1]-[3]. In the copyright world, site owners are protected by malicious actions of users through DMCA safe-harbor. In such senarios, the owner of the site will be contacted and the malicious behavior (real or perceived) can be addressed and/or removed. By silently banning posts and not communicating with members of the HN community about what you perceive as malicious behavior you are doing yourself a serious detriment. This has (and continues to) raise questions about the legitimacy of the content on HN as just a shill for YCombinator. If you'd like to speak with me personally you can email charlie@nodejitsu.com Charlie Robbins Founder and CEO Nodejitsu Inc.

tptacek 15y ago
You could have just emailed him and asked. You seem to be having difficulty with the concept that what you know not to be sockpuppetry would, to the part-time admins of this site, seem like sockpuppetry. HN makes banning mistakes with some regularity. Get over it or go somewhere else. It's ungracious to spit venom ("unacceptable", "blatantly ambiguous and unacceptable", "HN as just a shill for YCombinator") at the site admins, all of whom have better things to do than resolve individual disputes like this. I'm as cynical as anyone about YC, 'pg, and the valley culture, but I can see when someone's doing me a favor. Like, every f'ing day for one thousand four hundred fifty two days. I too would run a site like HN differently, but that is irrelevant, because I didn't build a site like HN and so my opinion doesn't matter.
__david__ 15y ago
I like silent bans. They seem like the appropriate response to real spam. If you give spammers a clear indication that they are blocked then they can immediately start trying a different attack. By removing that indicator then the spammers even know they need to start trying something new. It makes the whole process muddy for them and generally slows down the whole spam "cold war arms race". It does suck more to be hit with a false positive since you might not notice it right away. But I think overall the system is good. It speaks to my inner passive aggressive. :-)
- jQueryIsAwesome 15y ago
  They are not a good way to stop spammers, the bot can easily make a comment and check if its there when it is not logged in. But it is a good way to annoy HN users when they get banned.
  - stock_toaster 15y ago
    I agree. I liken it to "security through obscurity". I imagine it would be quite upsetting to be posting as a reasonable community member, and suddenly discover through some external means that my account had been silently black-holed, without being notified that my behavior was violating some of the community norms before-hand. But perhaps such measures are needed to defend against the non-bot trolls and other belligerent individuals, and only implemented after numerous attempts at corrective feedback have failed.
    - luser001 15y ago
      "only implemented after numerous attempts at corrective feedback have failed." That's not how it works. You say something that offends some random moderator, and he/she can trivially silent-ban you. No comment under your comment saying you will be banned etc.
      - stock_toaster 15y ago
        That is indeed unfortunate then. :( Thanks for the clarification.
FreakLegion 15y ago
As to your 1.: Let's assume you're being honest and it isn't sock puppetry. It's still basically astroturfing, and I, at least, don't want to see that here. If entire communities are allowed to flock to Hacker News to upvote the latest post about their pet platform, the site will become nothing more than a cheap marketing tool. So, PSA: Please don't strip-mine this community's goodwill for your own or your company's benefit. As to your 2.: You're entirely correct.
- jarek 15y ago
  "If entire communities are allowed to flock to Hacker News to upvote the latest post about their pet platform, the site will become nothing more than a cheap marketing tool." Because there's been none of that happening for the past year...
- luser001 15y ago
  What? You don't think articles are being systematically upvoted by groups of people? Sorry, I am a realist and it definitely seems like they're being upvoted. HN is now the tech news site for insiders. It's not some obscure backwater.
- viraptor 15y ago
  I guess you missed the month of erlang posts that were posted because community was asked to post and upvote them?... How is that different exactly?
- FreakLegion 15y ago
  What an odd series of replies. Surely you all realize that: 1) Whether astroturfing does happen has no bearing on whether it should happen, and 2) Examples of people astroturfing are an argument for having the rule, not an argument against it. Right? Bueller?
bootload 15y ago
"... Given the silent nature of bans on HN, we have no choice but to move onto a new HN account and continue to submit legitimate posts using legitimate word of mouth dissemination. ... This has (and continues to) raise questions about the legitimacy of the content on HN as just a shill for YCombinator." Charlie the above scenario should have triggered alarm bells. I always thought of HN as both an experiment for Arc & free publicity for YC. What's the controversy?
pg 15y ago
I didn't realize users' stuff was hosted on subdomains. Ok, I'll unban nodejitsu.com. We don't ban sites lightly. We only do it when people make repeated, deliberate efforts to bypass lighter weight protections. Human mods can't watch every upvote 24x7, so if a site seems really determined to hack their way onto the frontpage, the only thing we can do is ban the domain. I'm happy to unban nodejitsu.com if you promise to stop trying to game HN. In your case I recommend the following standard for what counts as gaming HN: if you're not sure, don't.
- indexzero 15y ago
  Thanks.
- iamelgringo 15y ago
  Problem is, Paul. that YC companies do this exact same behavior on a regular basis. I've gotten emails from founders to ask for word of mouth upvotes on specific blog posts, etc.. There is an unofficial "Upvote YC company articles" rule among YC founders. So, that's why YC company news tends to dominate HN. And, why so many amazing non-YC companies tend to not get profiled here. It creates a echo chamber, which I think is detrimental to the entire startup ecosystem. It also gives an incorrect assumption to a segment of geeks that YC companies dominate startup the startup scene in Silicon Valley. In reality, YC companies are a very small percentage of the $20B of Venture Capital that is invested in Silicon Valley every year.
  - pg 15y ago
    No they don't. The software doesn't distinguish between posts about YC companies and other posts. The algorithm for which votes to count, the threshold for a voting ring, and the penalty applied if one is detected, is the same for every post on HN. HN has in fact been less and less focused on YC cos as time has passed. The initial core of users were YC founders, and anything to do with YC was interesting to them. But over time that group has been diluted by large numbers of new arrivals. A lot of people now think of "Y Combinator" as a news site rather than an investment firm, which was certainly not the case a few years ago.
scott_s 15y ago
If you think an account is unfairly trying to manipulate the voting system; you have to contact them. Anything less is blatantly ambiguous and unacceptable. I completely disagree that it's unacceptable. I prefer it that way. It makes it harder to game the system, and I think that keeps the quality here better. The current system is biased towards the community as a whole. You want it biased towards the organizations that benefit from visibility. I don't see any reason to swap those biases. Personally, I find it marginally acceptable to tweet a HN submission instead of the blog post itself. Tweeting the HN submission is an implicit "Hey guys, please vote this up for us!" to everyone who follows you.
edwardhotchkiss 15y ago
Wait, does gaming mean a thriving community of hackers spreading faster than gossip? Ahh, caught. Detective Graham ... To the zzZZZZzz

tptacek 15y ago

You could have just emailed him and asked. You seem to be having difficulty with the concept that what you know not to be sockpuppetry would, to the part-time admins of this site, seem like sockpuppetry. HN makes banning mistakes with some regularity. Get over it or go somewhere else. It's ungracious to spit venom ("unacceptable", "blatantly ambiguous and unacceptable", "HN as just a shill for YCombinator") at the site admins, all of whom have better things to do than resolve individual disputes like this. I'm as cynical as anyone about YC, 'pg, and the valley culture, but I can see when someone's doing me a favor. Like, every f'ing day for one thousand four hundred fifty two days. I too would run a site like HN differently, but that is irrelevant, because I didn't build a site like HN and so my opinion doesn't matter.

__david__ 15y ago

I like silent bans. They seem like the appropriate response to real spam. If you give spammers a clear indication that they are blocked then they can immediately start trying a different attack. By removing that indicator then the spammers even know they need to start trying something new. It makes the whole process muddy for them and generally slows down the whole spam "cold war arms race". It does suck more to be hit with a false positive since you might not notice it right away. But I think overall the system is good. It speaks to my inner passive aggressive. :-)

jQueryIsAwesome 15y ago
They are not a good way to stop spammers, the bot can easily make a comment and check if its there when it is not logged in. But it is a good way to annoy HN users when they get banned.
- stock_toaster 15y ago
  I agree. I liken it to "security through obscurity". I imagine it would be quite upsetting to be posting as a reasonable community member, and suddenly discover through some external means that my account had been silently black-holed, without being notified that my behavior was violating some of the community norms before-hand. But perhaps such measures are needed to defend against the non-bot trolls and other belligerent individuals, and only implemented after numerous attempts at corrective feedback have failed.
  - luser001 15y ago
    "only implemented after numerous attempts at corrective feedback have failed." That's not how it works. You say something that offends some random moderator, and he/she can trivially silent-ban you. No comment under your comment saying you will be banned etc.
    - stock_toaster 15y ago
      That is indeed unfortunate then. :( Thanks for the clarification.

FreakLegion 15y ago

As to your 1.: Let's assume you're being honest and it isn't sock puppetry. It's still basically astroturfing, and I, at least, don't want to see that here. If entire communities are allowed to flock to Hacker News to upvote the latest post about their pet platform, the site will become nothing more than a cheap marketing tool. So, PSA: Please don't strip-mine this community's goodwill for your own or your company's benefit. As to your 2.: You're entirely correct.

jarek 15y ago
"If entire communities are allowed to flock to Hacker News to upvote the latest post about their pet platform, the site will become nothing more than a cheap marketing tool." Because there's been none of that happening for the past year...
luser001 15y ago
What? You don't think articles are being systematically upvoted by groups of people? Sorry, I am a realist and it definitely seems like they're being upvoted. HN is now the tech news site for insiders. It's not some obscure backwater.
viraptor 15y ago
I guess you missed the month of erlang posts that were posted because community was asked to post and upvote them?... How is that different exactly?
FreakLegion 15y ago
What an odd series of replies. Surely you all realize that: 1) Whether astroturfing does happen has no bearing on whether it should happen, and 2) Examples of people astroturfing are an argument for having the rule, not an argument against it. Right? Bueller?

bootload 15y ago

"... Given the silent nature of bans on HN, we have no choice but to move onto a new HN account and continue to submit legitimate posts using legitimate word of mouth dissemination. ... This has (and continues to) raise questions about the legitimacy of the content on HN as just a shill for YCombinator." Charlie the above scenario should have triggered alarm bells. I always thought of HN as both an experiment for Arc & free publicity for YC. What's the controversy?

pg 15y ago

I didn't realize users' stuff was hosted on subdomains. Ok, I'll unban nodejitsu.com. We don't ban sites lightly. We only do it when people make repeated, deliberate efforts to bypass lighter weight protections. Human mods can't watch every upvote 24x7, so if a site seems really determined to hack their way onto the frontpage, the only thing we can do is ban the domain. I'm happy to unban nodejitsu.com if you promise to stop trying to game HN. In your case I recommend the following standard for what counts as gaming HN: if you're not sure, don't.

indexzero 15y ago
Thanks.
iamelgringo 15y ago
Problem is, Paul. that YC companies do this exact same behavior on a regular basis. I've gotten emails from founders to ask for word of mouth upvotes on specific blog posts, etc.. There is an unofficial "Upvote YC company articles" rule among YC founders. So, that's why YC company news tends to dominate HN. And, why so many amazing non-YC companies tend to not get profiled here. It creates a echo chamber, which I think is detrimental to the entire startup ecosystem. It also gives an incorrect assumption to a segment of geeks that YC companies dominate startup the startup scene in Silicon Valley. In reality, YC companies are a very small percentage of the $20B of Venture Capital that is invested in Silicon Valley every year.
- pg 15y ago
  No they don't. The software doesn't distinguish between posts about YC companies and other posts. The algorithm for which votes to count, the threshold for a voting ring, and the penalty applied if one is detected, is the same for every post on HN. HN has in fact been less and less focused on YC cos as time has passed. The initial core of users were YC founders, and anything to do with YC was interesting to them. But over time that group has been diluted by large numbers of new arrivals. A lot of people now think of "Y Combinator" as a news site rather than an investment firm, which was certainly not the case a few years ago.

scott_s 15y ago

If you think an account is unfairly trying to manipulate the voting system; you have to contact them. Anything less is blatantly ambiguous and unacceptable. I completely disagree that it's unacceptable. I prefer it that way. It makes it harder to game the system, and I think that keeps the quality here better. The current system is biased towards the community as a whole. You want it biased towards the organizations that benefit from visibility. I don't see any reason to swap those biases. Personally, I find it marginally acceptable to tweet a HN submission instead of the blog post itself. Tweeting the HN submission is an implicit "Hey guys, please vote this up for us!" to everyone who follows you.

edwardhotchkiss 15y ago

Wait, does gaming mean a thriving community of hackers spreading faster than gossip? Ahh, caught. Detective Graham ... To the zzZZZZzz