Re:A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign
by belorn on Saturday May 19, 2018 @06:52PM
(#17110156)
There is a bunch of networks that operate on the idea the the majority involved are good actors and the detection rate of the bad actors is statistical good enough.
Take the tor project. It is very easy for a exit node operator to be bad. If you wanted to you could go and compete on who make the most egregious changes to traffic before the tor project bans the node. If the wast majority of operates did this then the project would die. Similar, torrent sites and BitTorrent is easily poked at by bad actors that either insert malware or do other bad things to the network. It too only operates on the basis that the wast majority do not have the intention to bring it down.
Of course the same could be said by HN. If a wast majority of users ganged together to push a specific agenda then it would likely take a while before the moderators could intervene. The upvote/downvote and flag system operates on the concept that the majority of users operate as independent agents and do not intend to try bring HN down.
In the end however for all the weakness and dependency on the statistical good nature of people, sites like those tend to be resilient in the long run.
Take the tor project. It is very easy for a exit node operator to be bad. If you wanted to you could go and compete on who make the most egregious changes to traffic before the tor project bans the node. If the wast majority of operates did this then the project would die. Similar, torrent sites and BitTorrent is easily poked at by bad actors that either insert malware or do other bad things to the network. It too only operates on the basis that the wast majority do not have the intention to bring it down.
Of course the same could be said by HN. If a wast majority of users ganged together to push a specific agenda then it would likely take a while before the moderators could intervene. The upvote/downvote and flag system operates on the concept that the majority of users operate as independent agents and do not intend to try bring HN down.
In the end however for all the weakness and dependency on the statistical good nature of people, sites like those tend to be resilient in the long run.