Edit: actually not so silent - it's the latter part of this guideline from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
It's part of the contract we have with HN users - we ask them not to post this stuff in the threads, but in return we always look into cases that they report to us directly.
So they didn't really hack HN, they merely provided content HN likes and did at the right time. I wonder if they could hack it more by only providing divisive content that feeds on outrage. That'd bring comments and points but most likely no new clients or conversions.
Oh, and I have a good example of that ! The other days there was a submission about a font from intel designed for visually deficient programmers. I got curious and installed it then I started thinking about ligatures in code, googled a bit and read https://practicaltypography.com/ligatures-in-programming-fon...
I found the article interesting and decided to submit it but when pasting the title I thought "uh, with a title like that, there's going to be some strong reactions/opinions" and indeed the top comment thread is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35926574
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35927503
>> Can someone explain me why people post links to Wikipedia articles without any context?
> For the exact same reason people post links to other things, it's interesting. It's always been more "hacker" than "news" here.*
[1] It's branding/marketing/groupthink...
I wish more people produced content like the ones they've mentioned (about an interesting, current topic, with their own take).
Maybe we could send repost invites to put them in the second-chance pool! (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308)
There seems to be a cognitive bias where one's feeling of good faith decreases as the distance between someone else's opinion and one's own increases [1]. If so, then everyone has a "shill threshold": the amount of difference-of-opinion past which you will feel like the other person can't possibly be speaking honestly. When someone's posts exceed my shill threshold, I will feel that there must be some sinister reason why they're posting like that (they're a shill, they're an astroturfer, they're a foreign psy-op, you name it).
The important thing to realize is that this shill threshold is relative to the perceiver. It's the limit of your comfort zone, not a property of someone else's posts—no matter how objective the perception feels. It always feels objective—that's how we get phrases like "obviously a shill". (This also explains why people, even people who would agree with a statement like "this site is full of obvious shills", can never agree on exactly which posts are "obvious shills": it depends on your own views, and those differ.)
A forum like HN includes so many people, with such different views and backgrounds, that there is a constant stream of posts triggering somebody's shill threshold or other, purely because their views are sufficiently different. Thus the threads are guaranteed to fill up with accusations of abuse, even in the absence of any actual abuse.
[1] I bet it's nonlinear. Quadratic feels about right.
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At the same time, real manipulation and abuse also exist, so there are two distinct phenomena: there's Phenomenon A, the cognitive bias I just described, and then there's Phenomenon B: actual abuse, real shillage, astroturfing, etc. These are completely different from each other, despite how similar they feel. (The fact that they feel so similar is the cognitive bias.)
Phenomenon A generates overwhelmingly more comments than Phenomenon B—way more than 99%—and those comments are poison. They turn into flamewars, evoking worse from others (who feel unjustly accused and therefore within their rights to strike back even harder), and destroy what we're trying for in this community.
What's the solution? We can't allow Phenomenon A (imaginary perceptions of abuse) to destroy HN, and we also can't allow Phenomenon B (actual abuse, perceived or not) to destroy HN.
Our solution is to forbid users to accuse each other in the threads (because we know that such accusations are usually false and poison the forum), but to welcome reports of possible abuse through a different channel (hn@ycombinator.com). This takes care of both Phenomenon A (you can't post like that here!) and Phenomenon B (we investigate such reports and crack down on real abuse when we find it).
To fight actual abuse (Phenomenon B), we need evidence—something objective to go on (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ). It can't just be the feeling of "obviously a shill", which we know to be unreliable. And it can't just be people having vastly different views. Someone having a different opinion is not evidence of abuse, it's just evidence that the forum is big and diverse enough to include a wide range of opinions.
We need to find some trace of evidence in data that we can look at. Some data is public (e.g. comment histories), other data is not (e.g. voting histories and site access patterns). We have a lot of experience doing this and we're happy to look when people email us with their suspicions—partly because fighting abuse is one of our most important functions as site managers, and partly because we owe it to users in exchange for their (hopefully) not slinging such accusations in the threads.
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(There's also the question: what about real abuse that we can't find traces of in the data? Obviously there must be some of that and we don't know how much. I call this the Sufficiently Smart Manipulator problem. I've written about that in various places - e.g. >>27398725 , and more via https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., if anybody wants it.)
The tl;dr of the article is: provide value to the HN audience by highlighting articles of interest, possibly adding some extra commentary, and you'll get karma points. No gaming, no telling folks "vote for my post".
Kinda seems like the system is working!
From my perspective, I do post self-promotional links, but keep them to 5-10% of my posts (don't really keep track, that's more of a 'look at the last 30 posts and see if I have 2-3 self-posts'). Keep the self-promotional stuff quality, and you have to share other posts too. (I got a warning when I posted less than high-quality links and took it to heart. The mods are definitely watching.)
In fact, one of my joys is finding an interesting article from someone else and having it 'hit' on HN. It's such a gift to all the writers out there who are screaming into the void.
It doesn't always lead to something, but it sure is fun to have folks reach out and thank me for the HN spike. Plus the HN crowd gets exposed to the quality ideas.
As I said, the system is working.
Btw, could you please not create accounts for every few comments you post? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
You can just do marketing things that are perfectly aligned with the community.
That is a win win imho.
plug: If interested I went into how tailscale does it https://www.developermarkepear.com/blog/developer-marketing-...
Your name, alas, is not human-memorable. See also - https://xkcd.com/936/
(long sibling comment about this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851)
The mistake in your argument is to assume that accusing them will reduce their influence. Just the opposite is true: it will amplify their views and stiffen their errors, and they will push back twice as hard and twice as much. Maybe their argument quality won't spike, but their energy level will.
Worse, if you're right, accusing them will discredit the truth and reduce your influence. Undecided readers will look at the thread, see you being aggressive, and instinctively side with the other.
It also poisons the forum, because when people feel unjustly accused, they take it as license to lash back twice as hard. "But they started it" is a deeply felt, maybe even hard-wired, justification for escalation. (I bet there are primate experiments demonstrating this.)
Therefore, accusing people or denouncing them as "repeating the lies of $BigCo" (or $Party or $Country in political arguments) is just what you should not do—there's no upside, beyond the momentary feeling of relief that comes after blasting someone. If you want to correct errors and combat lies, you need to provide correct information and good arguments in a way that the other person is more likely to hear. As a bonus, that will help you persuade the silent audience too.
The effects of PR and propaganda in getting people to hold false views is enormous, but I don't think it's possible to separate out from other reasons why people hold false views in good faith. It's much too big, and those influences are raining down on all of us from all angles.
How to dissuade someone of false beliefs is a pragmatic question. If you tell them "you've been deluded by propaganda", it will only land as a personal attack. Better persuade them that they've been working with incorrect information, and let them draw their own conclusions about the propaganda side of things. The latter medicine cannot be spoon-fed into someone else's mouth—one has to take it oneself.
[1] (Your usage of the word shill is different from the dictionary definition (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shill) and the etymology (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=shill). Terminological differences make discussions slippery, but I'll respond to what I think you're saying.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35116604
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34882140
The other thing about some of those submissions is that they're a bit on the political side—not so much as to be off topic for HN (there's inevitably some political overlap [1]) but again, not the sort of quieter/curious story that we're looking to augment.
I think https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35319250 has more of those qualities though, so I've sent you a repost invite for it :)
[1] ;https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...