I've said this in another thread here, but Twitter is borderline unusable because of this. I have 5,000+ blocked accounts by now (not exaggerating), and the first few screenfuls of replies are still bots upon bots upon bots. All well-behaved $8-paying netizens, of course.
That's fascinating to me, I've never blocked a single account on Twitter and see very few bots. The most annoying thing about twitter for me are the folks monetising the platform, that keep posting rage-bait to game the algorithm! But note I also generally only use the "for you" tab.
You sure about that?
https://youtu.be/WEc5WjufSps?t=193
Dr. Egon Cholakian sends its regards. That is to say, the bots are getting good. LLMs made this technologically easy a few years ago, it would take a couple years to develop and deploy a sophisticated bot network like this (not for you or I, but for an org with real money behind it that timeline is correct) and now we are seeing them start to appear. The video I linked is proof that bots already deployed in the wild can take 40 minutes of dedicated effort from a capable suspicious person to identify with high conviction. Maybe it would have taken you 10, I'm not hear to argue that, but I am here to argue that it is starting to take real effort to identify the best bots and this is the worst they will ever be.
I don't care how smart, capable, or suspicious you are, within 3 years it will not be economical for you to curate your list of non-bot contacts on the basis of content (as opposed to identity).
Well on my "for you" page, I also follow a pretty niche audience of tech people, which helps :P They're a little easier to verify since they generally also have blogs, or websites, or github accounts, or youtube videos, etc that help verify they're not bots.
I also think people create bots for some purpose -- instability, political divisiveness, financial gain, etc. And I'm kind of inherently not using twitter for any of that. I don't think I could find an account on my twitter thread that mentions the word "liberal", "trump", "conservative", or any of that if I tried! I agree that's a muuuuch more likely place to find bots. What sort of bots do you notice the most in your twitter?
Yeah I suppose if you are already vetting based on identity from outside the network that probably does scale. Most people aren't as careful about this as you are, though, so it'll still be a problem and it will have to get much worse before it gets better.
I'm not on twitter. I left when the tidal wave of right-wing spam started to outweigh the entertainment value of seeing Yann LeCun dunk on Elon Musk.
Using the “for you” tab is the only way to use twitter these days. Their suggest algo is complete garbage. I spent a couple days trying various ways to train it and still I got was complete garbage, so I accepted reality that twitter doesn’t really have an algo for the feed, just a firehouse of crazy people and engagement trolls
You mean the "following" tab, right?
> Using the “for you” tab is the only way to use twitter these days
The first 20 posts of my "for you" tab is Elon Musk, then it goes on to show me more useful content. I am wondering if following him or blocking him will make any difference.
If you only use the “following” tab twitter is fine, if you try to use the “for you” tab then you are expecting too much of someone who posts known nazis and says “hmmm…” or “interesting…”
Why bother if you have to spend that much time curating a good feed?
Unfortunately it's still the main "shortform" social network here for local stuff. Not enough in my country moved to Mastodon or Bluesky. (Referenced HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41586643)
And no, it's definitely not worth it if you're joining/new enough. Anyone who asks me about Twitter I immediately tell them to not bother and that I'm just "stuck" there. My Following feed and most of the algorithmic feed is fine, it's just the replies & interaction that took a huge hit.
I'm curious what kind of engagement people who aren't prolific posters are seeing on Twitter these days. Before I left I noticed that engagement went off a cliff to near zero immediately following the aggressive algorithm changes with blue check spam being promoted, but remained normal on my other social channels. It didn't seem like there were any normal people talking with each other on Twitter.
It's down there, below the bluecheck promotion. Or in (non-English) circles where the LLM bots haven't proliferated yet, which are also (mostly) why I stuck around.
I tried using an extension that filters out blue checks and it’s still about 90% garbage from troll accounts who can’t afford $8. The only way is to just follow those who you enjoy, although you’ll likely have to find them outside of twitter, because their useful posts are drowning in a sea of trash
Zero. I post the same things to Mastodon, Threads, BlueSky, and other places and get plenty of engagement.
However - because I don't pay for a "blue checkmark", that's my best guess as to why I get zero engagement.
That's fine - I have always treated Twitter as a "post-only", "fire & forget" medium.
I haven't used Twitter in ages, but what happened to Musk's paywall idea? That might actually deter bots and real users, so it seems like a win-win for everyone to stop using it.
Otherwise, I doubt spammers/scammers are really paying $8/mo for a verified account. How are they getting them then?
Great, so instead of selling me overpriced intimate shaving accessories the bots will be trying to convince me that Europe will freeze without Russian natural gas.
There is no twitter, only X.
Seriously. The same people that deadname X would be up in arms about deadnaming other things.
I have a year old lurker account on X. I've never made a single comment with it. But 35 attractive women are now following me. Zero men, zero unattractive women. I doubt that it is the result of the animal magnetism of my likes.
It's a microcosm of the whole darned web.
I blocked a bunch of those accounts and the number of rando hot girls trying to get me to follow them dropped really quickly. You may give that a try. Maybe they have some very rough algo that does attempt to stop those follow varieties that you block a lot of
probably the rando hot girls are all run by the same big bot farms, or bot farms sell suckers lists so if you are a sucker for one rando hot girl bot the others soon find out.
I feel like looking at this sort of behavior would make it really easy to spot bot accounts. I have the same thing happening on my account.
I wonder the same about HN. Has anyone done this kind of analysis? Me good LLM
HN remains good primarily because of the moderators. Thanks Dang!
The mods certainly do a great job of keeping things running smoothly here, but I wouldn't say it's _primarily_ because of them.
I think it's primarily due to the self-moderation of the community itself, who flag and downvote posts, follow the community guidelines, and are still overall relatively civil compared to other places.
That said, any community can be overrun by an Eternal September event, at which point no moderation or community guidelines can save it. Some veteran members would argue that it's already happened here. I would say we've just been lucky so far that it hasn't. The brutalist UI likely plays a part in that. :)
I think it has happened actually. Early on HN was almost purely entrepreneurial although through a tech POV. These days, it’s much more general or broadly tech related. The discussion I gather is most people here are tech employees and not necessarily entrepreneurs.
It’s obviously has not gone to hell like the bot ridden examples, but it’s drastically different IMO.
The bots aren't completely dominating here yet, because the price/benefit isn't really there yet.
Twitter is a source of news for some journalists of varying quality, which gives them a motivation to influence.
On HN, who are you going to convince and what for?
The only thing that would come to mind would be to convince venture capital to invest in your upstart, but you'd have to keep it up while convincing the owners of the platform that you're not faking it - which is gonna be extra hard as they have all usage data available, making it significantly harder to fly under the radar.
Honestly, I just don't see the cost/benefit of spamming HN to change until it gets a lot cheaper so that mentally ill ppl get it into their head that they want to "win" a discussion by drowning out everything else
> On HN, who are you going to convince and what for?
There are plenty of things bots would be useful for here, just as they are on any discussion forum. Mainly, whenever someone wants to steer the discussion away from or towards a certain topic. This could be useful to protect against bad PR, to silence or censor certain topics from the outside by muddying up the discussion, or to influence the general mindset of the community. Many people trust comments that seem to come from an expert, so pretending to be one, or hijacking the account of one, gets your point across much more easily.
I wouldn't be so sure that bots aren't already dominating here. It's just that it's frowned upon to discuss such things in the comments section, and we don't really have a way of verifying it in any case.
>On HN, who are you going to convince and what for?
Eh, following individuals and giving them targeted attacks may well be worth it. There are plenty of tech purchasing managers here that are responsible for hundreds of thousands/millions in product buys. If you can follow their accounts and catch posts where they are interested in some particular technology it's possible you could bid out a reply to it and give a favorable 'native review' for some particular product.
Agreed. There's some Dang good work being done here. Hope he gets rewarded well for it.
Wait you mean absolute freedom of speech, countering bad speech with more good speech doesn't work?
Real question for those convinced HN is awash in HN bots: What actual value do you believe there is, other than curiosity, that is driving people to build the HN spam bots you think you're seeing?
Karma doesn't help your posts rank higher.
There is no concept of "friends" or "network."
Karma doesn't bring any other value to your account.
My personal read is it's just a small steady influx of clueless folks coming over from Reddit and thinking what works there will work here, but I'm interested in your thoughts.
Hype. HN is _the_ platform to create hype among the early adopter, super-spreader/tech exec kind of people and because of that has an absolutely massive indirect reach.
Just look how often PR reps appear here to reply to accusations - they wouldn't bother at all if this was just some random platform like reddit.
I'm not convinced HN is awash in bots, but there are certainly some inauthentic accounts here.
What if you want to change public opinion about $evilcorp or $evilleader or $evilpolicy? You could explain to people who love contrarian narratives how $evilcorp, $evilleader and $evilpolicy are actually not as bad as mainstreamers believe, and how their competitors and alternatives are actually more evil than most people understand.
HN is an inexpensive and mostly frictionless way to run an inception campaign on people who are generally better connected and respected than the typical blue check on X.
Their objective probably isn't to accumulate karma because karma is mostly worthless.
They really only need enough karma to flag posts contrary to their interests. Even if the flagged posts aren't flagged to death, it doesn't take much to downrank them off the front page.
I've hardly seen here any proselytizers from Oracle, Salesforce, IBM and they are dong just fine. Ditto for Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Facebook - they used to be represented more here, but their exodus hardly made any difference.
Gartner has more influence on tech than Hacker News.
maybe 10 years ago, but this is not the case today.
Social media accounts with high engagement, and a long life, have monetary value. This is true of most social media platforms.
HN generally does a good job of minimizing the value of accounts, thus discouraging these kinds of games, but I imagine it still happens.
In theory you could Show HN and have your bots upvote it... that would indeed be good marketing.
Vote-rings are trivial to detect though, automated or manual. I'd be surprised if HN hasn't figured out ways against it during the time it's been online.
> What actual value do you believe there is, other than curiosity, that is driving people to build the HN spam bots you think you're seeing?
Testing.
And as siblings say, karma is more valuable than you might think. If you can herd a bunch of karma via botting, you can then [maybe] use that karma to influence all sorts of things.
> If you can herd a bunch of karma via botting, you can then [maybe] use that karma to influence all sorts of things.
How? Karma on HN is not like Karma elsewhere. The idea of [maybe] monetizing HN Karma reads like the old southpark underpants gnome meme[0].
[0]https://imgflip.com/memetemplate/49245705/Underpants-Gnomes
Karma is a number that can go up. Numbers going up is a supernormal stimulus for humans.
They should get rid of the number and change it to be only "low" or "high".
Get rid of karma + get rid of ranking comments at all. Just render them in a tree-format with oldest/newest first, everyone has equal footing :)
To promote political views and startups and scams, and other things that benefit the bot operators.
This is a small but highly influential forum and absolutely is gamed. Game theory dictates it will be.
If you turn on show dead, you'll see that some accounts just post spam or weird BS that ends up instantly dead. I think Evon LaTrail is gone now, but for years posted one or more links to his/her/their YouTube videos about personal sanitation and abortion per day.
There is a stream of clueless folks, but there are also hardcore psychos like LaTrail. The Svelte magazine spammer fits in this category.
In the seven years I've been on HN, it has gone through different phases, each with a noticeable change in the quality of the comments.
One big shift came at the beginning of COVID, when everyone went work-from home. Another came when Elon Musk bought X. There have been one or two other events I've noticed, but those are the ones I can recall now. For a short while, many of the comments were from low-grade Russian and Chinese trolls, but almost all of those are long gone. I don't know if it was a technical change at HN, or a strategy change externally.
I don't know if it's internal or external or just fed by internet trends, but while it is resistant, HN is certainly not immune from the ills affecting the rest of the internet.
16 year HN vet here.
This place has both changed a _lot_ and also very little, depending on which axis you want to analyze. One thing that has been pretty consistent, however, is the rather minimal amount of trolls/bots. There are some surges from time to time, but they really don't last that long.
How are you so sure these users are actually bots? Just because someone disagrees with you about Russia or China doesn't mean that's evidence of a bot, no matter how stupid their opinion is.
How are you so sure these users are actually bots?
I stated nothing about bots. Re-read what I wrote.
Hackernews isn’t the place to bring that up regardless of your opinion. So out of context political posts should be viewed with at least some scrutiny.
That's true, but maybe there should be a meta section of the site where these topics can be openly discussed?
While I appreciate dang's perspective[1], and agree that most of these are baseless accusations, I also think that it's inevitable that a site with seemingly zero bot-mitigation techniques, where accounts and comments can be easily automated, doesn't have some or, I would wager _a lot_, of bot activity.
I would definitely appreciate some transparency here. E.g. are there any automated or manual bot detection and prevention techniques in place? If so, can these accounts and their comments be flagged as such?
This I agree with, off-topic is off-topic and should be removed/flagged. But I'm guessing we're not talking about simple rule/guidelines-breaking here.
>How are you so sure these users are actually bots? Just because someone disagrees with you about Russia or China doesn't mean that's evidence of a bot, no matter how stupid their opinion is.
If the account is new and promoting Ruzzian narrative by denying the reality I can be 99% sure it is a paid person copy pasting arguments from a KGB manual, 1% is a home sovieticus with some free time.
> If the account is new and promoting Ruzzian narrative by denying the reality I can be 99% sure it is a paid person copy pasting arguments from a KGB manual, 1% is a home sovieticus with some free time.
I'm not as certain as you about that. Last time the US had a presidential election, it seems like almost half the country is either absolutely bananas and out of their mind, or half the country are robots.
But reality turns out to be less exciting in reality. People are just dumb, and spew whatever propaganda they happen to come across "at the right time". Same is true for Russians as it is for Americans.
I don't know about anyone else, but to me a lot of bot traffic is very obvious. I don't have the expertise to be able to describe the feeling that low quality bot text gives me, but it sticks out like a sore thumb. It's too verbose, not specific enough to the discussion, and so on.
I'm sure there are real pros who sneak automated propaganda in front of my eyes with my notice, but then again I probably just think they are human trolls.
> but it sticks out like a sore thumb
Could you give some examples of HN comments that "sticks out like a sore thumb"?
> It's too verbose, not specific enough to the discussion, and so on.
That to me just sounds like the average person who feels deeply about something, but isn't used to productive arguments/debates. I come across this frequently on HN, Twitter and everywhere else, including real life where I know for a fact the person I'm speaking to is not a robot (I'm 99% sure at least).
sorry, I didn't mean to give the impression that I was talking about HN comments specifically. I was talking about spotting bot content out on the open Internet.
as for verbosity, I don't mean simply using a lot of text, but rather using a lot of superfluous words sentences.
people tend not to write in comments the way they would in an article.
Anyone who’s spent any amount of time in this space can spot them pretty quickly/easily. They tend to stick to certain scripts and themes and almost never deviate.
In my experience, that's not true. Rather, people are much too quick to jump to the conclusion that so-and-so is a bot (or a troll, a shill, a foreign agent, etc.), when the other's views are outside the range of what feels normal to them.
I've written a lot of about this dynamic because it's so fundamental. Here are some of the longer posts (mini essays really):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39158911 (Jan 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851 (May 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398725 (June 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 (May 2020)
Since HN has many users with different backgrounds from all over the world, it has a lot of user pairs (A, B) where A's views don't seem normal to B and vice versa. This is why we have the following rule, which has held up well over the years:
"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." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Hey, I would appreciate if you could address some of my questions here[1].
I do think it's unrealistic to believe that there is absolutely zero bot activity, so at least some of those accusations might be true.
In my research and experience, it is. I’m making no comment about bots/shills on this site, either, I’m responding to the plausibility of the original comment.
> I’m making no comment about bots/shills on this site, either, I’m responding to the plausibility of the original comment.
The original comment:
> I wonder the same about HN. Has anyone done this kind of analysis? Me good LLM
Slightly disingenuous to argue from the standpoint of "I'm talking about the whole internet" when this thread is specifically about HN. But whatever floats your boat.
How is that different from humans? Humans have themes/areas they care more about, and are more likely to discuss with others. It's not hard to imagine there are Russians/Chinese people caring deeply about their country, just like there are Americans who care deeply about US.
A human aggressively taking a particular line and a bot doing so may be equivalent; do we need to differentiate there?
If the comment is off-topic/breaking the guidelines/rules, it should be removed, full stop.
The difference is that the bots comment should be removed regardless if the particular comment is breaking the rules or not, as HN specifically is a forum for humans. The humans comment, granted it doesn't break the rules, shouldn't, no matter how shitty their opinion/view is.
C’mon. When you have an account that is less than a year old and has 542 posts, 541 of which are repeating very specific kremlin narratives verbatim, it isn’t difficult to make a guess. Is your contention that they are actually difficult to spot, or that they don’t exist at all? because both of those views are hilariously false.
I feel like you're speaking about specific accounts here, since it's so obvious and exact. Care to share the HN accounts you're thinking about here?
My contention is that people jump to "It's just a bot" when they parrot obvious government propaganda they disagree with, when the average person is as likely to parrot obvious propaganda without involving computers at all.
People are just generally stupid by themselves, and reducing it to "Robots be robotting" doesn't feel very helpful when there is an actual problem to address.
No, I'm not. And I don't/won't post any specific accounts. I'm speaking more generally - and no one is jumping to anything here, you're projecting an argument that absolutely no one is making. The original claim was that russian/chinese bots were on this platform and left. I've only been here about 1.5 years, so I don't know the validity of that claim, but I have a fair amount of experience and research in the last ten years or so on the topic of foreign misinformation campaigns on the web, so it sounds like a very valid claim, given how proliferate these campaigns were across the entire web.
It isn't an entirely new concept or unknown, and that isn't what is happening here. You're making a lot of weird assumptions, especially given the fact that the US government wrote several hundred pages about this exact topic years ago.
> and no one is jumping to anything here, you're projecting an argument that absolutely no one is making
You literally claimed "when you have accounts with these stats, and they say these specific things, it isn't difficult to guess..." which ends with "that they're bots" I'm guessing. Read around in this very submission for more examples of people doing "the jump".
I'm not saying there isn't any "foreign misinformation campaigns on the web", so not sure who is projecting here.
Ten years ago those accounts existed, too. Back then we called them "people."
Not at all - ten years ago russian misinformation campaigns on twitter and meta platforms were alive and well. There was an entire several hundred page report about it, even.
HN has mechanisms to detect upvotes and comments that seem to be promoting a product or coordinated in some other way. I'm not sure what they do behind the scenes or how effective it is but it's something. Also other readers downvote bot spam. Obvious bot/LLM-generated comments seem to be "dead" quite often, as are posts that are clearly just content/ad farm links or product promotions or way off-topic.
This is pretty much progress on dead internet theory. The only thing I think that can stop this and ensure genuine interaction is with strong, trusted identity that has consequences if abused/misused.
This trusted identity should be something governments need to implement. So far big tech companies still haven't fixed it and I question if it is in their interests to fix it. For example, what happens if Google cracks down hard on this and suddenly 60-80% of YouTube traffic (or even ad-traffic) evaporates because it was done by bots? It would wipe out their revenue.
> It would wipe out their revenue.
Disagree. YouTube's revenue comes from large advertisers who can measure real impact of ads. If you wiped out all of the bots, the actual user actions ("sign up" / "buy") would remain about the same. Advertisers will happily pay the same amount of money to get 20% of the traffic and 100% of the sales. In fact, they'd likely pay more because then they could reduce investment in detecting bots.
Bots don't generate revenue, and the marketplace is somewhat efficient.
> In fact, they'd likely pay more because then they could reduce investment in detecting bots.
A lot more. Preventing bots from eating up your entire digital advertising budget takes a lot of time and money.
Yes... but maybe also no. Well measured advertising budgets are definitely part of the game. But so are poorly measured campaigns. Type B often cargo cult A. It's far from a perfect market.
In any case, Adwords is at this point a very established product... very much an incumbent. Disruption generally, does not play to their favor by default.
> This trusted identity should be something governments need to implement.
Granting the premise for argument's sake, why should governments do this? Why can't private companies do it?
That said, I've long thought that the U.S. Postal Service (and similarly outside the U.S.) is the perfect entity for providing useful user certificates and attribute certificates (to get some anonymity, at least relative to peers, if not relative to the government).
The USPS has:
- lots of brick and mortar locations
- staffed with human beings
- who are trained and able to validate
various forms of identity documents
for passport applications
Now back to the premise. I want for anonymity to be possible to some degree. Perhaps AI bots make it impossible, or perhaps anonymous commenters have to be segregated / marked as anonymous so as to help everyone who wants to filter out bots.
This still breaks some parts of the internet, where you wouldn't want to associate your identity with your thoughts or image
Think attribute certificates.
I think on the same lines. Digital identity is the hardest problem we’ve been procrastinating in solving since forever, because it has the most controversial trade offs, which no two persons can agree on. Despite the well known risks, it’s something only a State can do.
There was a great post on HN about this problem, about a year ago.
Think this was it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37092319
Interesting paper and exploration of the "pick two" nature of the problem.
I think that's also part of Facebook's strategy of being as open with llama as possible – they can carve out the niche as the "okay if we're going to dive head first into the dead internet timeline, advertisers will be comforted by the fact that we're a big contributor to the conversation on the harms of AI – by openly providing models for study."
You would assume that Advertising companies with quality ad space would be able to show higher click through rates and higher impression to purchase rates -- overall cost per conversion -- by removing bots that won't have a business outcome from the top of the funnel.
But attribution is hard, so showing larger numbers of impressions looks more impressive.
I've been thinking about how AI will affect ad-supported "content" platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, porn sites, etc. My prediction is that as AI-generated content improves in quality, or at least believability, they will not prohibit AI-generated content, they will embrace it whole-heartedly. Maybe not at first. But definitely gradually and definitely eventually.
We know that these sites' growth and stability depends on attracting human eyeballs to their property and KEEPING them there. Today, that manifests as algorithms that analyze each person's individual behavior and level of engagement and uses that data to tweak that user's experience to keep them latched (some might say addicted, via dopamine) to their app on the user's device for as long as possible.
Dating sites have already had this down to a science for a long time. There, bots are just part of the business model and have been for two decades. It's really easy: you promise users that you will match them with real people, but instead show them only bots and ads. The bots are programmed to interact with the users realistically over the site and say/do everything short of actually letting two real people meet up. Because whenever a dating site successfully matches up real people, they lose customers.
I hope I'm wrong, but I feel that social content sites will head down the same path. The sites will determine that users who enjoy watching Reels of women in swimsuits jump on trampolines can simply generate as many as they need, and tweak the parameters of the generated video based on the user's (perceived) preferences: age, size, swimsuit color, height of bounce, etc. But will still provide JUST enough variety to keep the user from getting bored enough to go somewhere else.
It won't just be passive content that is generated, all those political flamewars and outrage threads (the meat and potatoes of social media) could VERY well ALREADY be LLM-generated for the sole purpose of inciting people to reply. Imagine happily scrolling along and then reading the most ill-informed, brain-dead comment you've ever seen. You know well enough that they're just an idiot and you'll never change their mind, but you feel driven to reply anyway, so that you can at LEAST point out to OTHERS that this line of thinking is dangerous, then maybe you can save a soul. Or whatever. So you click Reply but before you can type in your comment, you first have to watch a 13-second ad for a European car.
But of course the comment was never real, but you, the car, and your money definitely are.
What do governments need to implement? They already give you a passport which can be used as a digital ID.
Services need the ability to obtain an identifier that:
- Belongs to exactly one real person.
- That a person cannot own more than one of.
- That is unique per-service.
- That cannot be tied to a real-world identity.
- That can be used by the person to optionally disclose attributes like whether they are an adult or not.
Services generally don’t care about knowing your exact identity but being able to ban a person and not have them simply register a new account, and being able to stop people from registering thousands of accounts would go a long way towards wiping out inauthentic and abusive behaviour.
I think DID is one effort to solve this problem, but I haven’t looked into it enough to know whether it’s any good:
Agreed that offering an identifier like this would be ideal. We should be fighting for this. But in the meantime, using a passport ticks most of the boxes in your list.
I’m currently working on a social network that utilises passports to ensure account uniqueness. I’m aware that folks can have multiple passports, but it will be good enough to ensure that abuse is minimal and real humans are behind the accounts.
The main problem with this is that a hell of a lot of people don’t want to give sensitive personal documents to social media platforms.
Yeah. That will be the challenge.
I hope that enough are willing to if the benefits and security are explained plainly enough. For example, I don’t intend to store any passport info, just hashes. So there should be no risk, even if the DB leaks.
Less than half of Americans have passports, and of the remaining half, a significant fraction do not have the necessary documents to obtain one. Many of these people are poor, people of color, or marginalized in other ways. Government ID is needed, but you generally find the GOP against actually building a robust, free, ubiquitous system because it would largely help Americans who vote Democratic. This is also why the GOP pushes Voter ID, but without providing any resources to ensure that Americans can get said ID.
To be fair, you generally don't see Dems pushing for such a free and ubiquitous system, either - "voter ID is bad" is so entrenched on that side of the aisle that any talk about such a system gets instant pushback, details be damned.
Passport might be a bit onerous - it's expensive and painful process and many don't need it.
But it's a hilarious sign of worldwide government incompetence that social insurance or other citizen identification cards are not standard, free, and uniquely identifiable and usable for online ID purposes (presumably via some sort of verification service / PGP).
Government = people and laws. Government cannot even reliably ID people online. You had one job...
When it comes to government-issued IDs, "standard" and "free" is a solved problem in almost every country out there. US is a glaring exception in this regard, particularly so among developed countries. And it is strictly a failure of policy - US already has all the pieces in place for this, they just need to be put together with official blessing. But the whole issue is so politicized that both major parties view it as unacceptable deviation from their respective dogmas on the subject.
> But it's a hilarious sign of worldwide government incompetence that social insurance or other citizen identification cards are not standard, free, and uniquely identifiable and usable for online ID purposes (presumably via some sort of verification service / PGP).
Singapore does this. Everybody who is resident in Singapore gets an identity card and a login for Singpass – an OpenID Connect identity provider that services can use to obtain information like address and visa status (with user permission). There’s a barcode on the physical cards that can be scanned by a mobile app in person to verify that it’s valid too.
In the United States, the lack of citizen identification cards is largely due to Republican opposition. People who lack ID are more likely to be democratic voters, so there is an incentive to oppose getting them ID. There's also a religious element for some people, connected to Christian myths about the end of the world.
This is utter nonsense.
> This trusted identity should be something governments need to implement.
I rather live with dead-internet than this oppressive trash.
On the other hand I think the best social media out there today is 4chan. Entirely anonymous. Also, the crass humor and nsfw boards act as a great filter to keep out advertising bot networks from polluting the site like it did with reddit. No one one wants to advertise on 4chan or have their brand associated with it, which is great for quality discussion on technical topics and niche interests.
4chan is actually one of the worst social media out there. They are responsible for a hell of a lot of hate campaigns out there. Anonymity breeds toxicity.
> For example, what happens if Google cracks down hard on this and suddenly 60-80% of YouTube traffic (or even ad-traffic) evaporates because it was done by bots? It would wipe out their revenue.
Nonsense. Advertisers measure results. CPM rates would simply increase to match the increased value of a click.
I do wonder if ProductHunt uses any CAPTCHA solution.
In spite of the flack that CAPTCHAs usually get, I still think they have a lot of value in fighting the majority of these spam attacks.
The common criticisms are:
- They impact usability, accessibility and privacy. Users hate them, etc.
These are all issues that can be improved. In the last few years there have been several CAPTCHAs that work without user input at all, and safeguard user privacy.
- They're not good enough, sophisticated (AI) bots can easily bypass them, etc.
Sure, but even traditional techniques are useful at stopping low-effort bots. Sophisticated ones can be fought with more advanced techniques, including ML. There are products on the market that do this as well.
- They're ineffective against dedicated attackers using mechanical turks, etc.
Well, sure, but these are entirely different attack methods. CAPTCHAs are meant to detect bots, and by definition, won't be effective against attackers who decide to use actual humans. Websites need different mechanisms to protect against that, but those are also edge cases and not the main cause of the spam we see today.
I wonder how much of Meta and other social media ad revenue is based on bot activity.
You can setup a campaign where you pay for comments and you're actually paying Meta to show your ad to a bunch of bots.
Does anyone have more resources/inside info that confirms/denies this suspicion?
I do - I think the effect on Meta’s ad revenue is nil.
Advertisers measure ad campaigns by ROAS (return on ad spend). This is driven by actual dollars spent, cutting out all bots right away.
Clicks / views / comments are irrelevant except as far as getting the ad to show for actual buyers.
I've advertised quite a bit on Meta, and also hired people to do it for me. ROAS, for me, is the most important metric, but it's not the only metric people look at. Speaking from experience, plenty of people like to look at and optimize other metrics.
For interest’s sake, what other metrics do you find most valuable?
> You can setup a campaign where you pay for comments
You cannot setup a campaign where you pay for comments (https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1438417719786914#). But maybe you mean other user generated content like messages. You ought to be able to figure out pretty quickly if those are authentic.
My bad, I guess I was thinking of engagement campaigns and yes messaging campaigns
Do you care if they are authentic? Probably not. You are in the business of getting clicks on an ad. Your client has to worry about actually converting that to product sales. Thats their problem and not yours as the ad firm.
Meta and ad agencies are definitely incentivized that your ads convert and that engagement is authentic. Otherwise why deal with them at all? SMBs are like 40% of Meta's revenues, the entire world finds the product valuable. It is a little glib to try to make the contrarian case on conversion.
The toxic part of their incentives is that they want businesses to commit large budgets on campaigns whose performance you can measure with very little money spent and very little data.
Yes definitely. But then that last sentence sorta leads to the first question you had- why deal with them at all?
I think it's because despite that toxicity it still seems to be the best ad platform in town. Haven't seen anybody suggest a better alternative. Feels almost monopolistic.
I've heard it said that Meta prioritizes like this:
1. Users 2. Meta 3. Advertisers
I have a feeling it's actually:
1. Meta 2. Users 3. Advertisers
But in the end, advertisers always end up on the bottom. Especially since advertisers need Meta more than Meta needs any one of them.
Facebook has become full of generic name accounts posting generic AI generated content. Despite all flagging it is incessant, which tells me it’s likely sanction or even created by the company to fill content gaps. I’d say 30-50% or content that shows for me is suspicious.
I often wonder this as well. Would love to have more insight into that
If people are paying lets say these morally questionable companies like meta ad campaigns, they deserve what they get. I don't want to condone any criminal behavior, but this whole business of people's mass manipulation is vastly immoral bunch of white (or not so white) lies.
Who do you suggest as an alternative for paid ads?
Building relationships with clients, same as it ever was. There are companies today that have been selling for example very specific machined parts for 100 years. You have never heard of them. They don’t advertise on facebook. Yet they bring in enough work to stay in business without these paid campaigns. The secret sauce? The rolodex and actually calling potential clients directly.
Well, about that thing. Some of our local companies in machining and other things somehow buy private emails and phone numbers. While I work at a place that do not directly need such services, my spam box and my work phone(mobile) blocklist is full of services calling me to offer their latest price and if I can forward them to my boss or whatever. So, either online ads or other forms of spamming.
This answer is a good answer for some companies, but for other companies it's very hand-wavy. Paid ads have value and you can make a pretty penny even on Meta (actually, especially on Meta compared to others) if you do it right.
Still curious about alternatives for paid ads
What?
How do you meet these clients in the first place?
How do you get them to answer their phone?
How do you get word-of-mouth if you’re just starting out?
Edit: reduced level of snark
Usually they cold call or email with prices/quotes/offers(see my previous comment to parent), and somehow they harvest of buy the contacts of businesses and employees.
I sometimes suspect that, there are some ways to collect these from linkedin or the business card printers sell the contact info in black(due to strict data privacy act in EU). Because only two places my work email & work phone number being available are at the business card printer and linkedin(we need to use work email to access some elearning things, don’t ask).
What's the endgame of a dead internet? Everyone leaves and most interactions happens in private group chats?
It's the serendipity of the original internet I'll miss the most.
I weep at the thought that every site will require login with sso from google (and maybe Apple if you're lucky). We're close to that already.
If only micropayments had taken off or been included in the original spec. Or there were some way to prove I am human without saying _which_ human I am.
It would be nice if there were identity providers that could vend attribute certificates with no PII besides the desired attributes, such as:
- is_human
- is_over_18
- is_over_21
- is_over_65
- sex/gender?
- marital status?
- ...?
- device_number (e.g., you
might be allowed N<4 user
attribute certs, one per-
device)
The issuer would have to keep track of how many extant certificates any given customer has and revoke old ones when the customer wants new ones due to device loss or whatever.
Any company that has widespread physical presence could provide these. UPS, FedEx, grocery stores, USPS, etc.
> I weep at the thought that every site will require login with sso from google (and maybe Apple if you're lucky)
I think that's where we're going. Not only is it a decent way of filtering out bad accounts, it's also often easier to implement on the dev side.
I am still very curious about why the micropayment failed. I recall mass outrage at Brave for tying the concept with “cryptocurrency” but at the time the concept(minus the crypto and brave holding the tip unannounced if the site didn’t join-in) seemed decent.
Would the concept work, if it was unbundled from cryptocurrency and made into something like, Paypal, where you add money(prepaid), visit some site, if the site is registered, you see a donate button and decide to donate few cents/dollars/euros/yens whatever the native currency of the author is and at the end of the month, if the donations collected was more than enough to cover the fees + excess, it would get paid out to author’s desired mode of withdrawal?
> Or there were some way to prove I am human without saying _which_ human I am.
I'm sure at some point a sort of trust network type thing will take off. Will be hard to find a way to make it both private and secure, but I guess some smart people will figure that out!
PH has always been a weird place, the comments are always Linkedin level of boring (Copy paste positivity about basically every product) and it always felt like people were just commenting there to funnel people to their own profile.
I feel the same. I’m not surprised by this, a sleazy site is going to attract sleazy actors. Me good llm.
Since I know you personally, I know how much work you put into this and it shows. Nicely done
Thanks Siri! Yep back to normal work now.
Related:
Product Hunt isn't dying, it's becoming gentrified
Somebody needs to sell t-shirts “me good LLM”
I will wear it everytime I meet AI investors
The second histogram looks more human than the "not bot" first one?
Second user clearly takes a look before work, during their lunch-break and then after work?
There frequency of "game-changing" in comments would say otherwise. It's probably cron running at those intervals, not a work schedule.
I expect that nowadays many online are speaking with GenAI without even realising it.
It’s already been bad enough that you may be unknowingly conversing with the same person pretending to be someone else via multiple accounts. But GenAI is crossing the line in making it really cheap for narratives to be influenced by just building bots. This is a problem for all social networks and I think the only way forward is to enforce validation of humanity.
I’m currently building a social network that only allows upvote/downvote and comments from real humans.
>I’m currently building a social network that only allows upvote/downvote and comments from real humans.
And how exactly do you do that? At the end of the day there is no such thing as a comment/vote from a real human, it's all mediated by digital devices. At the point the signal is digitized a bot can take over the process.
By validating each account with a passport and ensuring that only one account per passport is allowed.
Aside from the practical and technical problems you're greatly limiting your audience. Most people who don't travel internationally don't have a passport. In Europe this might be a smaller number but in the USA and Canada I would guess this is a majority of people. Non-citizens won't have a passport. Most young adults will not have one. Many older people will have let theirs expire.
Yeah, that's the challenge. My bet is that there are enough people out there with passports to make an interesting social network.
Of course, getting someone to share their passport will be another filter. But I hope that I can convince people that the benefits are worth it (and that I will be able to keep their data safe, by only storing hashes of everything).
Ok, so you get some critical amount of 'humans' to share "a" passport. Now you've built an expensive and high quality lead finder for scammers/spammers. You've increased the value floor for people submitting fake passports. Also, how are you paying for verification of the passports?, VC money to get from the loss phase to the making enough to support itself on ads? How are you dealing with government data requests, especially in the case where said data can be attributed to a real human?.
Maybe I'm wrong, but just a social network of 'real people' doesn't seem like enough in itself. What is going to bring people there with the restrictions and potential risks you're creating.
How do I know that, you will handle my passport data with care? Banks I can trust(despite numerous leaks), you as a random social media or online service with zero regulation, I won’t. Plus this opens up immense ways to sue you for collecting unnecessary data and personal information, unless you are massive and have an army or lawyer or have a KYC requirement.
I plan to outline exactly what data I store. I don't plan to store raw passport number/name details, rather a hash so I can verify the same passport isn't used twice.
So even if the DB leaks no one (except the government) will be able to tie your real life identity to the account.
No passport, but perhaps face picture that is also encoded with on device verifiable token.
I think there is actually a use case for blockchain (don't pile on!) for this. I have a vague idea of a unique token that goes on every camera and can be verified from the blockchain. If a picture has the token you know it's real... like i said, it's vague idea but i think it's coming
No need for blockchain. All you need is this: https://contentauthenticity.org/.
The problem with this is that it's still easy to forge.
I'll certainly consider playing with ways to identify human uniqueness that don't require passports. But passports are the most obvious route to doing so.
What about people who buy stolen passports on the dark web? Or passport details that get leaked in data breaches
We need a German to chime in with whatever word describes this scenario, when someone suggests an action is not worth doing because of corner cases or inability to perfectly execute a process.
In this hypothetical, let's say we'd tackle the dark web passport market issue when we get there.
hehe yeah, it's funny how many are focusing on the small edge case that makes a certain solution not 100% perfect.
There is also another issue: people can have more than one passport if they're dual citizens. But you know what... I think that's fine.
Why would I ever give my passport to your website or anyone elses?
Because it enables you to be a part of a social media that is guaranteed to be majority human-centred. Why wouldn't you give your passport to a website? Don't you already do so for crypto or other banking?
who is going to upload their passport to use social media?
People already upload their passport for lots of things, why not social media?
> People already upload their passport for lots of things
I sure don't.
> why not social media?
privacy?
Good bot (/s)
I don't know that "real humans" is good enough. You can do plenty of manipulation on social networks by hiring lots of real humans to upvote/downvote/post what you want. It's not even expensive.
Yeah. But the cost is significantly higher than ramping up GenAI to make you thousands of accounts.
There is no fool proof solution to this. But perfect is the enemy of the good. Right now social media is pretty far from being “good”.
Do you think TikTok view counts are real?
Alternatively, is there anything stopping TikTok from making up view count numbers?
Facebook made up video view counts. So what?
TikTok can show a video to as many, or as few, people as it wants, and the number will go up and down. If the retention is high enough, for some users, to show ads, which are the videos that the rules I'm describing apply to with certainty, why can't it apply those rules to organic videos too?
It's interesting. You don't need bots to create the illusion of engagement. Unless you work there, you can't really prove or disprove that user activity on many platforms is authentic.
What is the primary point(s) of building bots that do this kind of thing, that seemingly flood the internet with its own Great Internet Garbage Patch?
It is always money. You can sell “I will get your launch to top 10 in ProductHunt.” Yes if/when taken too far, everyone will ditch ProductHunt and it will die, but until then, a quick buck can be made.
It isn't always money. Sometimes it's just lulz.
Reply All had did a podcast (ep #178) about people who are running bots on Counter-Strike that ruin the game. They tracked down a person who does this and they just basically do it to be annoying.
> [... ]what’s the point of running them? Like, what do you get out of the exercise?
> There are many reasons to run them. Most if not [all] casual players dislike bots (which is a reason to run them)
by the looks of the graphs in the linked article, it appears ProductHunt is already a zombie
Existing businesses did this with live humans.
Ranking/review sites for B2B services would work with paying customers to solicit interviews and reviews from their customers, and of course only the 5 star reviews get posted.
Heck, a lot of these "bots" may actually be a real human working a table of 100 cell phones in some cheaper country.
Excellent detective work. The trends for bots vs humans are kind of disturbing in that humans (as detected) seem to be doing fewer votes and leaving fewer comments with time, while bots are doing the opposite. Is this another indication that the Dead Internet Theory is true?
DIT was misnamed... Dead Internet Prophecy would have been a better term, something that hadn't happened yet, but will come true in the future.
It was misnamed because (centralised sites != internet).
Lie down with social media dogs, get up with fleas.
Related, a real human on HN is limited to 5 comments per 6 hours, while bad actors simply need to create hundreds of accounts to avoid this limit.
> Related, a real human on HN is limited to 5 comments per 6 hours, while bad actors simply need to create hundreds of accounts to avoid this limit.
I don't think that's true. I think that's an anti-abuse mode some accounts fall into.
I have always assumed it's sort of an algorithm that manages this, some combination of account duration, "points", etc..
Or just recent activity. I think I've seen it happen to accounts that were digging in their heels and vigorously defending some wrong/incorrect/unpopular point they made upthread. Then all the sudden they're mentioning the post limit and editing posts to reply. I'm guessing it's a combination of high (recent) post volume and down-votes that triggers it.
It's part of the philosophy of HN. Arguments that are just people repeating the same points back and forth aren't interesting or enlightening.
I think there are two things at play here. One is when you're rate limited because dang limited you because you're violating the site guidelines. It's a less drastic step than all your posts showing up as dead.
Second is, the further you are "to the right" in a discussion - the more parents you have to go through to get to a top-level comment - I thing you eventually get to a delay there, just to stop threads from marching off to infinity with two people (who absolutely will not stop and will not agree, or even agree to disagree) going on forever. I'm not sure what the indent level is that triggers this, but I would expect some sort of exponential backoff.
I get the rationale for it. My only gripe with it is that it says "you're posting too fast, wait a few minutes" when I wasn't posting fast, and it blocks account activity for hours. I don't like automated messages that lie.
It's even tougher for some accounts, too.
EU needs to regulate this too.
We are in the twilight of the open Internet, at least for useful discourse. The future is closed enclaves like private forums, Discord, Slack, P2P apps, private networks, etc.
It won't be long before the entire open Internet looks like Facebook does now: bots, AI slop, and spam.
Partially unrelated: "Me good LLM" is the Post-GPT "Ok boomer" :3