How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.)