Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027

All: HN has been seeing a dismaying increase in nationalistic flamewar. This is not allowed here. I know it feels important when you're caught up in the intensity of such feelings, but it is not interesting, which is what HN is for. Worse, it has the effect on interesting discussion that tank battles have on a city park.

If you don't have something thoughtful and substantive to say, please don't post until you do. Drop denunciatory rhetoric—it's tedious and evokes worse from others.

Remember that the community is divided on divisive topics and that the person disagreeing with you is probably not a spy, but just someone who disagrees with you.

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

This is a stub comment to collect replies in one place. That way we can collapse it and prevent too much offtopicness at the top of thread.

I know that it’s difficult for you to discuss anti-astroturfing methods without disclosing information that could make circumvention easier, but can you give us an idea of how much effort is put in to detecting this kind of activity on HN? You seem very confident that this doesn’t happen here; is that because you’re doing something to prevent it? We are, after all, talking about an entity that is known to use these tactics on pseudonymous forums at extraordinary scale.[1] With that in mind, writing off these concerns as merely “nationalistic” comes across as dismissive.

I guess the real question is: could you really detect well-executed astroturfing here, even if you tried very hard? I worry that authentic discourse on high-traffic pseudonymous forums is basically impossible if someone is determined to sew an opinion and has significant resources at their disposal.

[1] https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf

Thanks for asking the question and putting so much care into stating it.

I have no idea what kind of methods HN employs. I personally always check the posting history when I'm in doubt about the intentions of a poster. Most of the time, I find an extensive amount of fairly well considered comments on a variety of topics. That leads me to the conclusion that the account is 'genuine'.

To state it a bit more naively: if a Sybil attack would require the attacker to craft so many constructive comments in order to evade detection, it could actually have a net positive effect on the community as a whole.