How susceptible is HN to ideological meddling, eg by governments or “Big xyz”? If susceptible, what would be the signs, how could it be managed, would the HN API aid such meddling, and does it even matter?
Paid by whom? There are companies and employees on HN posting, commenting and promoting their business and services, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.<p>Is someone paying to get upvoted? Almost certainly, but I doubt it's worth a lot here where the sorting algorithm is much more opaque than Reddit. On Reddit getting to the top is just a numbers game.<p>Also, even though there's far too much political posts on HN, they're the minority and I can't see a reason for some secret government agency to pay staff to change our views about the political world. Reddit is much more politicised, and it'd be naive not to assume every major government has a propaganda team of Reddit posters.<p>(I'm using Reddit as another example of popularity-contest forum like HN is)
Any anonymous forum is subject to astroturfing. Given the outsize tech audience on this forum, it would be worth money for some companies to pay someone to suppress unfavourable posts.
The answer is obviously "yes, there are paid commenters on HN".<p>The only real question is "how many", and "is that enough to render the discourse on HN worthless?".<p>It's hard to quantify, but in my many years on HN I have not noticed a very noticeable change in the quality of discussions on topics that I follow closely.
I get downvotes for stuff that seems odd from an intellectual person trying to have a discussion. I don't know if it's a bot searching for keywords, or just someone with a grudge with several accounts or legit downvotes. I don't let it silence me though. I mean numbers (karma) are just 1s and 0s. Ideas and honest discussion are much more than that.<p>Whatever happens speak your mind, you've earned it by existing. Don't get discouraged by downvotes. The future depends on it.
How susceptible? Very.<p>For gov examples, try starting a discussion about America's torture program, war crimes, or independent anti-war media. Your post will be flagged, and it won't get back up because such discussion 'goes against the guidelines which are actually rules'. The moderation will be praised by high karma accounts, who are quite happy with the status quo thank you very much.<p>Check out any thread ever concerning Assange. Those comment sections are masterclasses in the derailment of productive conversation. Since pointing out obvious shills is against site rules, you're more like to be banned for pointing out meddling than for spreading outrageous smears.<p>For "Big xyz", try writing a comment about GMOs, or agricultural pollution, monopolies, enviromental destruction, the not too distant horrors perpetrated by pharma co's, or any of a number of other third rail topics like unions or healthcare costs. 'Totally normal accounts' will slither out of the bushes and sealion your thread to death.<p>Yes, it matters - a lot. "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." - Noam C
I see how manipulating opinion on social networks can yield a gain. But how would entity X profit from manipulating opinion on a small community of tech enthusiasts?<p>Or maybe the recent resurgence of Javascript frameworks in Web, desktop and mobiles is a plot of Russians to slow the computing and software engineering for the westerners by manipulating online tech communities?
There has been an obvious influx of paid accounts in my opinion. The quality of discourse has dropped.<p>I often check an account and notice it was not active for a substantial period of time before a sudden change in tone is noticed.<p>Seeing the same anti-vax talking points (for instance) spread from Reddit to here has been upsetting. The main difference I have noticed is the responses here are more sound technically, typically, call out the flaws more quickly, and are obviously not being influenced by the astro turfing. It's still tiresome, but here we are.
I don't know, but I don't really read the comments here any more.<p>A while ago the comments were the gold, now I can't really get them. In my subjective experience, contradictory comments (to the post) became the most popular. That doesn't make sense. You can't contradict always to anything.<p>So HN became like any other new site: I'm skimming through the headlines in a minute, and done.
I'm fairly convinced there are. Often comment discussions for newer technical books pop up here on HN that get shilled for weeks like it's some legendary book that has been in print for decades. Then those discussions just die out until the next book makes the shill cycle (I guess?).
I wonder if there is research to see if karma based moderation systems (HN, Reddit, Stack Overflow) actually solve the problems they are designed to solve.
I've seen what look like classic Russian+Chinese troll farm talking points & argument tactics. NLP can flag this, but without accompanying metadata for basic digital forensics, confidence is too hard for that vs a regular troll.<p>If into this sort of analytics, we are always looking for data engineers and data scientists for Project Domino - see our DefCon AIV keynote for more info.
Unlike chronological internet forums where all opinions must be heard, it's very difficult to successfully astroturf an internet forum that self-polices with upvotes and downvotes.<p>EDIT: In the case where someone says something against common perception, downvotes in particular deemphasize it (turning the comment gray on HN, collapsing it on Reddit) as this comment unintentionally demonstrates, thus why astroturfing in such forums successfully can be hard to do nowadays. The real astroturfers do Facebook/Twitter instead where content can't be downvoted.