I lots of relatively new accounts coming with what seems to me extreme, but altogether pop-culture acceptable opinions
Also, it's against the guidelines to allege or speculate about astroturfing (as is anything that is tangential to the primary topic), but we welcome emails (hn@ycombinator.com) from anyone who notices anything that seems suspect, and we're happy to investigate.
Over the past year or two I reported a number of accounts that are basically pro-Israel-only, they post a ton of comments to any Israel-related thread and either nothing else or very little of anything else. Mods refuse to ban or even warn them, apparently because emotions run high, there are too many of them and there's priority in punishing the most egregious content so relatively mild ones get a pass, and if mods are being accused of being-antisemitic and they ban a bunch of these they would reinforce the image, etc. These are from memory and not exact quotes.
I don't buy it, and I've stopped reporting things to mods. (To be abundantly clear, anti-Israel-only accounts should 100% be banned too, but at least I haven't noticed as many as them. Any other kind of politics-only account should be purged too if the rules are to be believed.)
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, 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.
People on both sides of any topic are welcome to participate here and express their points of view, as long as they respect the guidelines. If you see users who "police it against honest reporting about their crimes", you should email us to point it out, as the guidelines ask.
Making sweeping claims like this without including any links so we can know what you're talking about serves only to poison HN.
I think that's called "disagreeing".
What I'm trying to say is that this is an intentional part of their strategy. They know what they're doing.
They probably have a small detachment assigned to every popular-ish website. For the long tail, they have bot farms.
This has felt like a super postmodern interaction
Could be that these are being farmed but at a state level it might be easier to outright purchase aged accounts
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.
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.
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.
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]
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/
It's already common practice to buy aged accounts with good reputations, so even that doesn't mean much.
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.
So if you are a democrat, and you want to make change, you need to behave exactly like conservatives do. Elections are decided by vibes, he who can attract the biggest social following through whatever means, wins.
Its a propaganda machine that works very well to target the very impressionable people out there. I mean, students are going to protests and destroying their futures by getting arrested to show support of Palestinians, who would absolutely stone them to death if they found out that any of them smoked weed, and even more so for the lbgtq students for simply being gay.
So really, Israel vs Palestine shouldn't be an issue at all if you believe in actual change.
