How to hack Hacker News (and consistently hit the front page)

Re:How to hack Hacker News (and consistently hit the front p... by dang on Saturday May 13, 2023 @05:20PM (#35932851)

There's no such thing as "obviously a shill"—overwhelmingly the vast majority of such accusations evaporate instantly on investigation. It's basically just an internet blood sport to hurl those things at other commenters.

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.)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How to hack Hacker News (and consistently hit the front p... by youainti on Sunday May 14, 2023 @02:14AM (#35935736)

Thank you for that in depth reply. I learned something new by reading it. I guess I had never considered the community and norms aspect to reducing false positives in abuse detection.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How to hack Hacker News (and consistently hit the front p... by Paul-Craft on Sunday May 14, 2023 @03:43AM (#35936154)

Yeah, that was a really interesting comment. I think it would be kinda cool if dang or someone expanded it into more of a blog post on how HN is moderated, or maybe even best practices for community moderation in general.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How to hack Hacker News (and consistently hit the front p... by ouid on Monday May 15, 2023 @12:06PM (#35950459)

A shill is anyone who lends credibility to a con (or more modernly, PR) by claiming to believe it themselves. This can be witting or unwitting, but if what you're doing is repeating PR, even if its because you believe it, you're a shill.

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]