HACKER Q&A
📣 DrNuke

Is Hacker News being manipulated by rogue users?


Again, as in the last two or three months, the dynamics of posts and comments getting on the frontpage and being flagged or downvoted in swarms, seem just artificial. What’s happening? Are we having live concerted trolling or social hacking at work, or the attitude of regular users is just going down without return? Merry Christmas, one way or the other.

  👤 dang Accepted Answer ✓
"Seem just artificial" is so vulnerable to pre-existing assumptions and perceptions that it doesn't even count as an observation. If you're worried about abuse, please follow the site guidelines and send specific links to hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate (we always do).

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We put a ton of effort into counteracting abuse and manipulation on HN. Obviously we don't know if we're catching it all, but we catch some. What's also true, though, is that users imagine all kinds of sinister things based on no evidence or data. Disentangling these two problems—real abuse and imaginary abuse phantasms—is not so easy.

Don't forget that randomness always looks like patterns intermittently, and if you live in a world filled with astroturfers and spies, you're likely to interpret those patterns in a sinister direction.

👤 hans1729
Theres always been some level of astroturfing going on here, which seems pretty much unavoidable. HN has a very unique and in more than one way influential audience, so it's a relevant platform for lots of groups who want to push their agenda and whatnot.

But what exactly are your observations? Two trends I observed this year: for a while, every other post was a link to the nytimes, and now we've seen M1-related threads on the frontpage every day (?) since the day of the announcement (I may be over-dramatizing here). Other than that, business as usual?