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 [email protected] 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.
For my curiosity, by the way, my account was rate limited. Thanks Dang.
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...
Your name, alas, is not human-memorable. See also - https://xkcd.com/936/
But the interesting question is: why did they write this article?
Is it just that the jig is up, and their one weird trick no longer works as well as it did? Did they get asked to cut it out by the HN moderators? It seems plausible given how many recent submissions to this domain appear to be auto-dead. Do they just think HN readers will forget about this article, and upvote their next bit of content marketing anyway?
How are they being played? There isn't any deception here. The plan Iron Brands touts is literally "submit interesting articles first". That is what people are trying to upvote.
Providing liquidity to the news market as the quaints would say.
If they were doing original research or scraping the web to bring stuff here, fine, good for them. If all they’re doing is repackaging already submitted articles in order to drive traffic to their website then, IDK?
Fetch data from Hacker News API
Set up Google Alerts for your query
Fetch data from Google Alerts XML
Enrich data and store in SQLite file with a cronjob
Send alerts with other cronjob to Twist API or Telegram API
I'd guess because they're a part of the community and simply want to share their findings. I see no malice here. Having your work (whether writing or a new product) on the front page of HN for a couple hours is a great feeling and gives you a boost of motivation to continue your work.
They did mention the SEO benefits. Nevertheless, they are linking to a post on Indiehackers (not Simple Analytics website) which doesn't help them much in this scenario.
> Do they just think HN readers will forget about this article, and upvote their next bit of content marketing anyway?
As an HN reader, I come here more for comments than the articles themselves. If the article stirs an interesting debate on a topic that I'm interested in, I personally don't care if the authors used some "strategy" to get on the front page or not. Bad and uninteresting spammy content usually doesn't stay on the front page for long.
There seems to be a common cognitive bias where the sense of good faith decreases as the distance between someone else's opinion and one's own increases*. If so, then everyone has a "shill threshold": an amount of difference-of-opinion above which you will feel like the other person can't possibly be speaking honestly. When some other post exceeds 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 "shell threshold" is relative to the perceiver. It's the limit of your comfort zone, not an objective property of someone else's posts—no matter how objective it feels. It always feels objective—hence the phrase "obviously a shill".
Real manipulation and abuse also objectively exist. That is, there are two phenomena here: Phenomenon A is the cognitive bias I just described, and Phenomenon B is actual shillage, astroturfing, and what have you. The problem we face in operating this site is that Phenomenon A generates overwhelmingly more commentary than Phenomenon B. Way over 99%.
* (I bet it's nonlinear. Quadratic feels about right.)
In fact, a grifter prefers their shills to be defending them in good faith. The basic currency of a con is confidence. This is easier to wield if you don't have to pretend.
Unfortunately for moderation efforts, the test for whether or not someone is unwittingly repeating PR is not easy to moderate, or, by extension, automate the moderation of. But it is a problem of equal importance to the "bad faith" shills because the effect on the conversation is somewhere between identical and worse.
If theres no way to accuse someone of uncritically repeating the lies of, say, Apple, then you will select for people in your conversations who are unwittingly repeating the lies of Apple.
The thing is, I use linux almost exclusively, but for occasional cross platform testing in a vm.
I really dislike being called a shill just for recognizing some neat ideas.
What's more tiring for me is coming up with incessant caveats that no, i don't have anything to do with this company, no, i don't agree with everything they do but they did one cool thing here, etc etc. Make one remark about e.g. Tesla's technology without those massive caveats and a bunch of people will show up and happily hijack your thread onto a bewildering and useless tangent...
There is more that could be said here, but, really, if you take this as your default approach to analysing things you read on the internet, you'll be headed in a good direction the vast majority of the time. It's not a completely black and white thing; for instance one certainly should hold out a healthy level of skepticism if, say, the message and the speaker seem to be completely incongruous, but mostly, let ideas stand on their own.
(long sibling comment about this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851)
Exploiting possibilities and capabilities to see what can be faster, better and cheaper takes a certain degree of positive, resourceful unreasonableness that finds a way to find and connect the dots that matter.
Skepticism, cynicism and doubt worshippers who validate their beliefs by painting it on others are rarely hackers, or folks who chase the risk of creating interesting, useful or remarkable items if only momentarily.
Haters and talkers are usually busy doing nothing themselves so a culture on HN to build and share is so critically important.
If you can’t explore something with excitement knowing it mah not last and there may be a dead end, I think some of the ability to learn through passion and interest can be stifled around naysayers.
Fanboyism and chasing shiny objects has its caveats too.
Innovation just isn’t a purely logical pursuit or skill. It has creativity, emotion and other human skills that are critical to learn or miss out on at one’s own peril.
I suspect there may already be openai shills around here. While not using chatgpt for spam they may still be promoting it like mad. Notice there are few alternatives shared and open source models are much less frequently mentioned.
Do you think its possible for generated content to hit frontpage. I thought most of the stuff it generated is pretty prosaic. Also not sure if have an objection to chatgpt content hitting frontpage.
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-...
There's a definite tension between the rule of not accusing other users of being shills and the reality that there are quite a few shills out there. I think it a still good rule, but not because it's never right. Rather, the rule is good because the false accusations do more harm than letting some shilling slip by.