How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page

Vouched for and upvoted because I think it's important for readers here to see how much effort goes into creating posts that game the system. I think it's better for these strategies to be known than hidden. It will be interesting to see how tactics like this one evolve as ChatGPT use becomes more widespread.

There's a definite tension between the rule of not accusing other users of being shills and the reality that there are quite a few shills out there. I think it a still good rule, but not because it's never right. Rather, the rule is good because the false accusations do more harm than letting some shilling slip by.

There’s a silent part of that rule: if you suspect a shill, gather the evidence and present it to dang via email.

Right, I'd say that this post has more value than any of the repetitive content marketing these folks churned out for a few years, since it hopefully makes some HN readers a bit more aware that they're being played.

But the interesting question is: why did they write this article?

Is it just that the jig is up, and their one weird trick no longer works as well as it did? Did they get asked to cut it out by the HN moderators? It seems plausible given how many recent submissions to this domain appear to be auto-dead. Do they just think HN readers will forget about this article, and upvote their next bit of content marketing anyway?

Reminds me of the scene with the Mortgage Brokers in The Big Short - "They're not confessing, they're bragging"

Yes please.

Edit: actually not so silent - it's the latter part of this guideline from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, 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."

It's part of the contract we have with HN users - we ask them not to post this stuff in the threads, but in return we always look into cases that they report to us directly.

the rule against calling other people shills is the worst part of hackernews. Skepticism is important, and important to share. I have never been anything but grateful to read a comment pointing out that another comment was obviously a shill. Perhaps I have been embarrassed for not seeing the obvious truth, but always grateful.

I love that rule. I've gotten called a shill for microsoft many times when I've mentioned some of the cool aspects of their OS design, especially vs Linux.

The thing is, I use linux almost exclusively, but for occasional cross platform testing in a vm.

I really dislike being called a shill just for recognizing some neat ideas.

I would bet 99% of the "obvious shills" are actually not shills at all.

A comment attacking someone for being a shill is expressing skepticism in the most trivial way, and serves to throw a debate into a flamewar rather than actually discussing the flaws of their arguments.

There's no such thing as "obviously a shill"—I can tell you from 10+ years of experience that the vast majority of such accusations crumble instantly on investigation. Commenters are far too quick to hurl them at other commenters.

There seems to be a cognitive bias where one's feeling of good faith decreases as the distance between someone else's opinion and one's own increases [1]. If so, then everyone has a "shill threshold": an amount of difference-of-opinion past which you will feel like the other person can't possibly be speaking honestly. When someone's posts exceed 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 "shill 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 the perception feels. It always feels objective—that's how we get phrases like "obviously a shill".

A forum like HN includes so many people, with such different views and backgrounds, that there is a constant stream of posts triggering somebody's "shill threshold" or other, purely because their views are sufficiently different. Thus the threads are guaranteed to fill up with accusations of abuse, even in the absence of any actual abuse.

[1] I bet it's nonlinear. Quadratic feels about right.

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But real manipulation and abuse also objectively exist, so there are two distinct phenomena: there's Phenomenon A, the cognitive bias I just described, and then there's Phenomenon B: actual abuse, real shillage, astroturfing, etc. These are completely different from each other, despite how similar they feel. (The fact that they feel so similar is the cognitive bias.)

Phenomenon A generates overwhelmingly more comments than Phenomenon B—way more than 99%—and those comments are poison. They turn into flamewars, evoking worse from others (who feel unjustly accused and therefore within their rights to strike back even harder), and destroy everything we're trying for in the community.

What's the solution? We can't allow Phenomenon A (imaginary perceptions of abuse) to destroy HN, and we also can't allow Phenomenon B (actual abuse, perceived or not) to destroy HN.

Our solution is to forbid users to accuse each other in the threads (because we know that such accusations are usually false and poison the forum), but to welcome reports of possible abuse through a different channel (hn@ycombinator.com). This takes care of both Phenomenon A (you can't post like that here!) and Phenomenon B (we investigate such reports and crack down on real abuse when we find it).

To fight actual abuse (Phenomenon B), we need evidence—something objective to go on (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ). It can't just be the feeling of "obviously a shill", which we know to be unreliable. And it can't just be people having vastly different views. Someone having a different opinion is not evidence of abuse, it's just evidence that the forum is big and diverse enough to include a wide range of opinions.

We need to find some trace of evidence in data that we can look at. Some data is public (e.g. comment histories), other data is not (e.g. voting histories and site access patterns). We have a lot of experience doing this and we're happy to look when people email us with their suspicions—partly because fighting abuse is one of our most important functions as site managers, and partly because we owe it to users in exchange for (hopefully) not slinging such accusations in the threads.

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(There's also the question: what about real abuse that we can't find traces of in the data? Obviously there must be some of that and we don't know how much. I call this the Sufficiently Smart Manipulator problem. I've written about that in various places - e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398725, and more via https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., if anybody wants it.)

How long do shill posts last before they've been taken care of?

> It will be interesting to see how tactics like this one evolve as ChatGPT use becomes more widespread.

I suspect there may already be openai shills around here. While not using chatgpt for spam they may still be promoting it like mad. Notice there are few alternatives shared and open source models are much less frequently mentioned.

Just out of curiosity, what sort of answer are you expecting? Your post reads as vaguely accusatory to me - like you're implying that messes are being left intentionally

> ...since it hopefully makes some HN readers a bit more aware that they're being played.

How are they being played? There isn't any deception here. The plan Iron Brands touts is literally "submit interesting articles first". That is what people are trying to upvote.

Accounting for their username they are either making a joke or trying to assess the potential performance of the strategy even if they get flagged.

Shills don't care about their accounts, just that they spray their message around. Just curious if the silent system works fast enough.

For my curiosity, by the way, my account was rate limited. Thanks Dang.

Innovation can only exist in a mindset of possibility.

Exploiting possibilities and capabilities to see what can be faster, better and cheaper takes a certain degree of positive, resourceful unreasonableness that finds a way to find and connect the dots that matter.

Skepticism, cynicism and doubt worshippers who validate their beliefs by painting it on others are rarely hackers, or folks who chase the risk of creating interesting, useful or remarkable items if only momentarily.

Haters and talkers are usually busy doing nothing themselves so a culture on HN to build and share is so critically important.

If you can’t explore something with excitement knowing it mah not last and there may be a dead end, I think some of the ability to learn through passion and interest can be stifled around naysayers.

Fanboyism and chasing shiny objects has its caveats too.

Innovation just isn’t a purely logical pursuit or skill. It has creativity, emotion and other human skills that are critical to learn or miss out on at one’s own peril.

Turn on showdead -- sometimes they last until the user/human-in-the-loop notices that they've been hellbanned.

> It will be interesting to see how tactics like this one evolve as ChatGPT use becomes more widespread.

Do you think its possible for generated content to hit frontpage. I thought most of the stuff it generated is pretty prosaic. Also not sure if have an objection to chatgpt content hitting frontpage.

Your account was likely rate limited because you decided to make a new account here, and new accounts have severe limitations on rate of posting comments. You could have just as easily decided to use your existing account and would've been fine.

Assuming it does so by getting legitimately upvoted by us regular human HN readers, I don't see a problem with it.

As Operyl correctly said, your account was rate limited because new accounts are subject to rate limits.

Btw, could you please not create accounts for every few comments you post? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

I'm not sure I understand your question. Sometimes they get "taken care of" instantly by software. Sometimes it takes moderators minutes or hours to see them and "take care of" them. Other times we don't see it and an email from a user asks us to look into it, which we do. That can take a bit longer because there's an extra hop in the path.

Sounds to me like they’re scraping the submission pool and “front running” with their “dog whistle detector” chatbot in order to get people to read their marketing paragraph tacked on to the end of the article.

Providing liquidity to the news market as the quaints would say.

If they were doing original research or scraping the web to bring stuff here, fine, good for them. If all they’re doing is repackaging already submitted articles in order to drive traffic to their website then, IDK?

Ah, I see, could you try asking in a more neutral fashion in the future? I've noticed the last couple years that a lot of potentially interesting or valid criticism sabotages itself with weak implications of conspiracy followed by accusations of persecution.

It doesn't sound like they're front-running.

    Fetch data from Hacker News API
    Set up Google Alerts for your query
    Fetch data from Google Alerts XML
    Enrich data and store in SQLite file with a cronjob
    Send alerts with other cronjob to Twist API or Telegram API

I think the "Fetch data from Hacker News API" part is just to get keywords from popular submissions that they use to make Google Alerts for. Then when new stories about those keywords show up, they can write an article first.

When you do the work and understand it, is it a hack (short cut) or just learning to deliver what the HN audience and algorithm values?

To be clear, the article was really good at outlining how to create high quality content.

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.

Also you have companies that "game the system" by just creating great stuff that bring value to this community. Look at Tailscale for example.

You can just do marketing things that are perfectly aligned with the community.

That is a win win imho.

plug: If interested I went into how tailscale does it https://www.developermarkepear.com/blog/developer-marketing-...

That’s because every model sucks for complicated tasks compared to GPT-4, and no one aside from OpenAI has a model more capable that GPT-3.5.

I wouldn't even say it rises to the level of "expressing skepticism" per se. It's just literal ad hominem. Ad hominem is a logical fallacy precisely because a good argument is a good argument regardless of who is presenting it, and likewise a bad argument is bad on its own merits.

There is more that could be said here, but, really, if you take this as your default approach to analysing things you read on the internet, you'll be headed in a good direction the vast majority of the time. It's not a completely black and white thing; for instance one certainly should hold out a healthy level of skepticism if, say, the message and the speaker seem to be completely incongruous, but mostly, let ideas stand on their own.

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.

I never look at the name of the user posting a comment, just at the comment's content. Do people really remember names here? Just such as mine?)

But that's just a sign of the other person's low intelligence and laziness (launching into ad hominem instead of putting in the work to attempt to entertain your point of view).

What's more tiring for me is coming up with incessant caveats that no, i don't have anything to do with this company, no, i don't agree with everything they do but they did one cool thing here, etc etc. Make one remark about e.g. Tesla's technology without those massive caveats and a bunch of people will show up and happily hijack your thread onto a bewildering and useless tangent...

> But the interesting question is: why did they write this article?

I'd guess because they're a part of the community and simply want to share their findings. I see no malice here. Having your work (whether writing or a new product) on the front page of HN for a couple hours is a great feeling and gives you a boost of motivation to continue your work.

They did mention the SEO benefits. Nevertheless, they are linking to a post on Indiehackers (not Simple Analytics website) which doesn't help them much in this scenario.

> Do they just think HN readers will forget about this article, and upvote their next bit of content marketing anyway?

As an HN reader, I come here more for comments than the articles themselves. If the article stirs an interesting debate on a topic that I'm interested in, I personally don't care if the authors used some "strategy" to get on the front page or not. Bad and uninteresting spammy content usually doesn't stay on the front page for long.

Yep. And have posted a couple of times suggesting mild enhancements for those of us that do. I believe there are plug-in or extension type reader thingymabobs that help with that too.

Your name, alas, is not human-memorable. See also - https://xkcd.com/936/

Us tin foil hatters would say manipulators realize that it is given that they need a good argument; the trick is that there are infinite competing good arguments they just need to get in front of.

And apple is the only laptop manufacturer and tesla the only electric car. The world out there is full of better options.

Yes. In fact, probably more than that.

(long sibling comment about this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851)

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.

I agree that people who hold false beliefs in good faith are as big a problem—far bigger, actually—than deliberate shills [1].

The mistake in your argument is to assume that accusing them will reduce their influence. Just the opposite is true: it will amplify their views and stiffen their errors, and they will push back twice as hard and twice as much. Maybe their argument quality won't spike, but their energy level will.

Worse, if you're right, accusing them will discredit the truth and reduce your influence. Undecided readers will look at the thread, see you being aggressive, and instinctively side with the other.

It also poisons the forum, because when people feel unjustly accused, they take it as license to lash back twice as hard. "But they started it" is a deeply felt, maybe even hard-wired, justification for escalation. (I bet there are primate experiments demonstrating this.)

Therefore, accusing people or denouncing them as "repeating the lies of $BigCo" (or $Party or $Country in political arguments) is just what you should not do—there's no upside, beyond the momentary feeling of relief that comes after blasting someone. If you want to correct errors and combat lies, you need to provide correct information and good arguments in a way that the other person is more likely to hear. As a bonus, that will help you persuade the silent audience too.

The effects of PR and propaganda in getting people to hold false views is enormous, but I don't think it's possible to separate out from other reasons why people hold false views in good faith. It's much too big, and those influences are raining down on all of us from all angles.

How to dissuade someone of false beliefs is a pragmatic question. If you tell them "you've been deluded by propaganda", it will only land as a personal attack. Better persuade them that they've been working with incorrect information, and let them draw their own conclusions about the propaganda side of things. The latter medicine cannot be spoon-fed into someone else's mouth—one has to take it oneself.

[1] (Your usage of the word shill is different from the dictionary definition (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shill) and the etymology (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=shill). Terminological differences make discussions slippery, but I'll respond to what I think you're saying.)