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142 points mzs | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.454s | source
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JohnJamesRambo ◴[] No.19401632[source]
I’m not so sure Hacker News is free of the same group. Post an article critical of China sometime and watch the comments. People genuinely posting opposing viewpoints is fine and normal but there is something very uncanny valley about most of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

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dang ◴[] No.19401961[source]
I appreciate your concern for HN quality, but this kind of comment is the reason why we have a site guideline asking people not to insinuate astroturfing without evidence. If you think you're seeing abuse, the guidelines ask you to email hn@ycombinator.com with specific links so we can look at specific data. We always look. Occasionally we find it, and when we do, we crack down on it hard. But it's rare, unless you count users getting their friends to upvote their startup or whatever, which is a different phenomenon. And the cases we've seen have basically all been of corporate abuse, not nationalistic.

Overwhelmingly the most common case is people accusing others of posting in bad faith merely because the other's view is so far from their own that they can't conceive of them having it for legit reasons. This is a reflexive reaction—a feeling that we all need to recognize and stop ourselves from expressing in raw form. When people vent it into comments, the result is either war between the two sides, or, if one side outnumbers the other, an ugly mob dynamic in which a few people are ganged up on for being different. Those few either leave, or they become resentful and break the site guidelines badly themselves, as a way of lashing back against unfair treatment. All these outcomes poison the community.

Not to pick on you personally—it happens because of how human nature reacts to the weird conditions of the internet, which we're not wired for. It is hard for all of us to grasp how large and diverse the community is, and how divided it is on divisive topics. Nationalistic themes are some of the most divisive ones, and unfortunately are growing more common these days.

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

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1. afpx ◴[] No.19402129[source]
Dang, are you able to report statistics on how many accounts have been banned or considered suspicious? I don’t doubt that HN takes this issue very seriously. But, it would be useful to some of us to see how often astroturfing actually happens here (and from which countries it seems to come from).
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2. dang ◴[] No.19402408[source]
I don't have anything exact, but we've banned perhaps a dozen networks of accounts for corporate astroturfing over the years. Cases where the issue was nationalistic are much rarer. I recall only one, and it was years ago. (That of course is not to claim we aren't missing some.)

If we go by the data we actually see, the phenomenon itself is vanishingly rare. Why is there so much commentary then? I can think of two explanations: either the foreign spies are cleverer than we are, or there is something in how human nature meets the internet under current social conditions that is leading to mass projection. And of course it could be both—but how are any claims about the former falsifiable?