What are the chances that HN is getting astroturfed these days? Are mods strict about it?
I lots of relatively new accounts coming with what seems to me extreme, but altogether pop-culture acceptable opinions
What are the chances that HN is getting astroturfed these days? Are mods strict about it?
I lots of relatively new accounts coming with what seems to me extreme, but altogether pop-culture acceptable opinions
I think this is probably happening, but also there are just a ton of actual Zionists and Israelis in the tech industry. Unfortunately they visit this site regularly and police it against honest reporting about their crimes.
> Unfortunately they visit this site regularly and police it against honest reporting about their crimes.
I think that's called "disagreeing".
Today we call that misinformation. Which of course should be totally illegal and in no way protected by free speech.
Luckily you don’t get to regulate who can participate in public discourse
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100%. Especially on topics involving countries with vast online propaganda operations.
HN doesnt have any defense against it, and the userbase is small enough that it would be highly effective.
Which ones are the pop-culture acceptable opinions?
language question: what does astroturfed mean here? (i know that astroturf is artificial grass.)
It's when people (or bots) acting in bad faith make a lot of noise to make it seem like there is a strong support for some (usually bad) position. It' a play on the term "grassroots". Fake grassroots=astroturfing
I've seen lots of suspiciously new accounts hoping into these conversations. Saying questionable things.
What are the chances that HN is getting astroturfed these days?
Happens all day every day. There are many AI agents starting discussions and replying to comments. This is how The Crappening started on 4chan. Some of them are just future grifters. Some are training AI (I have replied to a few for fun). Some are propaganda bots. Those running the bots will reply with something equiv to Errrm Proof?? when called out. Without root I can not empirically prove it and the botters know that.
I predict about 2 years before the site will have more AI noise than real people. I have no idea what can be done about it aside from tracking the bots and reporting them via email to Daniel and I don't know what he could or would do. HN has always been very hands off which is mostly good but not for this scenario. If nothing is done it will just be bots grifting and AstroTurfing one another to the benefit of Google SEO and most of the humans would eventually go elsewhere with exception of some die-hards that refuse to recognize the situation.
Anonymous internet forums will very likely die out if inference gets another order of magnitude cheaper.
The only solutions are (1) private forums, (2) strict verification or maybe (3) some sort of "web of trust" thing, if someone manages to make it user friendly and not suck.
I agree and my bet is on private and semi-private (invite only) forums making a come back. It is so much easier nowadays with so many Ansible playbooks and Dockerfiles to automate things.
Maybe this comment is also AI.
Maybe this comment is also AI.
My nickname on here would at least suggest so. I think Grok is the closest option since they were working on making a snarky insulting version of their bot. Tame that down a bit and one could get the personality of Bender. [1]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPNGFC7-t68 [video][16s]
we need to start a paywalled private HN forum
we need to start a paywalled private HN forum
In my opinion it would be mostly a ghost town if it requires money for something that was free. It would probably have to be more like a n invite-only semi-private forum. An example would be lobsters. [1] Not sayin' that's perfect, just an example. One can always try it and see what comes of it.
[1] - https://lobste.rs/
With things like Openclaw it’s kind of trivial to game forums now. You just have to tell an agent to “post arguments for/against this perspective on this forum.” Give it a few talking points to include if you want to get specific and let it run. Specify the tone so it sounds realistic. It’s literally going to do everything else essentially forever or until you run out of tokens. Comments in a forum are dirt cheap so it’s also going to be very cheap.
Youd have to do a lot of work to make sure it's only a few short sentences, non-specific, and ultra-quippy though.
I mean I'm sure it can be done but if you ask an LLM to produce comment reply without more instruction it's going to write something a lot more thoughtful, respectful, and substantive than a forum user would.
It’s not that hard. You can literally say between 2-4 sentences.
You should point out the exact posts.
What? DEFINITELY astro turfed if you know what to look for.
At the very least by Chinese agents or useful idi*ts. The amount (or, alternatively, visibility) of Chinese apologists in this website is totally disproportionate)
Did you mean to say Israeli? Cause that's what it seems like to me. The level of misinformation is staggering.
Mods are explicitly rolling back the no-political advocacy guideline - Dan G has said he’s explicitly unflagging political content which is why HN is filled with left wing activism.
why would he be doing that?
I mean does it matter?
At this point, lines have been drawn. In conservative land, everything conservative is good, everything liberal is bad. So the only sane position to take is the complete opposite.
For example, if you see someone self proclaimed liberal being critical of liberals, that person is probably a conservative or its a conservative bot.
Seems like you’re describing political polarization. Just on one side though.. Why?
That's not totally true when it comes to Zionism though. Much of the left and the right are united against Zionism. It's the older center liberals and right that are united in being pro-Zionism.
Not sure why this is getting downvoted, it's simply a factual statement. It's also backed up by polling that came out yesterday: https://apnews.com/article/poll-gallup-americans-israel-pale...
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