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.
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?
> 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.
> ...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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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 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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
---
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think there can be much better praise for a site's moderation approach than someone deciding that creating relevant, high-quality content is the best way to "beat" the algorithm/approach.
And someone doing that has certainly earned the right to include "one sentence that is the least salesy you can do" of self-promotion.
Yeah HN is weirdly still amazing at filtering the good stuff. I have submitted things here only when I truly felt it added value and I had something to say, and never bothered to think about anything to optimize. Yet I actually got at least some traction every single time.
It’s quite amazing. I noticed these guys coming in the front page very often too, and while I agree their “hack” seems laudable while also not offending anyone (they’re doing what we are looking for), they seem to forget one more reason why they keep getting traction - the product they sell is absolutely on target to HN audience at an emotional level so people likely upvote due to that reason as well.
> I noticed these guys coming in the front page very often too....
Is less than once a month "very often?" Or do you mean "very often relative to how frequently one would expect a company that makes an alternative to Google Analytics" would make the front page?
I did think it was hilarious that they posted an article showing how to get to the front page of HN in such a way that you can sneak in a quick mention of your product without tripping the community's anti-self promotion bias, while literally did the exact thing they were suggesting doing.
On the flipside of this argument, it kind of sucks to submit an awesomely made article [0] which details significant research on the intricacies of DAW UI requirements and have almost no discussion on it because other posts may have been gamed and thus received attention instead of the more organically submitted content.
Other posts weren’t gamed, but just more catered to this audience.
Your example is extremely obvious: I don’t know what a DAW UI is and it isn’t explained in the first sentences of the page and I don’t really bother to put more time into finding out. It doesn’t matter how in-depth the article is if it doesn’t resonate at all with most average HN users.
While that's perhaps the case, I was under the impression that the HN crown was one that favored research. In this particular case, if I search for "DAW", then the Wikipedia entry is first of the results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_audio_workstation
I wonder when the llm’s will start communicating directly with each other using just embeddings. Our words will seem like dolphin squeaks in comparison.
Ok so, different take - if this what people call "gaming the system" I'm all for it.
All this article says is that hackernews likes interesting, informative posts that actually tell a real story. And I for one am here for that all day. So yes, everyone take this strategy and make great content.
At least it’s a fair game here. It could have been unfair if, for example, the audience cannot verify the truthfulness of the article, which would promote cheap fake but interesting articles.
While reading, I kept asking myself why someone would care about getting to the front page of HN (saving up this fake points to get something good?) until I reached:
> Step 3: The secret sauce
We always end with a section that is called: Final thoughts. This is your moment to shine and drop a punchline that talks about your product/service.
I've bounced back and forth between engineering and DevRel over the years and whenever I create this kind of content I'm careful to provide the interesting and valuable part up front. And I try to make the pitch at the end gentle and easy to skip or ignore if that's what the reader wants. I never want someone to feel like they were tricked into reading a sales pitch.
I see this as one way of trying to stem the tide of shitty articles and blog posts that have been proliferating for the past couple of decades and are kicking into overdrive now.
Companies should also consider, on the other hand, that writing interesting things and then not making a pitch at the end can be even more valuable. This kind of content is becoming very rare because it takes time to deliver impact, and that impact is hard to measure.
I think that's why creating great content without a concluding product plug is the ultimate mic drop in an era where many marketers are running scared and dropping easy-to-measure milquetoast bunt singles because execs mention 'operational efficiency' twenty-seven times during every all-hands meeting.
To be clear, I'm not advocating inefficiency; I'm just saying thoughtful posts that don't immediately and directly shove a percentage of readers into your funnel might be the current Moneyball of marketing to engineers.
This isn't exactly a secret. Everyone who puts their own content on HN is hoping to get something from it, including companies who often put out high-value content (fly.io comes to mind).
looking at the submission history for their domain... well, not that consistent and one of their accounts seems to be automatically killed by the spam filter. :D But I guess this confirms the blogspammy feeling I got from them sometimes.
If you read it, a big part of the secret sauce is "actually be thoughtful and informative". Like they drop everything to investigate something and surface useful information and insights as part of the process. Seems like the opposite of spam honestly.
Sorry in advance for the grumpy response, but I hate articles like this and I detest the manipulation of an organic voting mechanism for self-promotion.
I know this is the Internet we have to live with, but this kind of stuff just makes it a worse place to be.
Well then again, the articles they write and post (seem?) To have value, as they are written "with reaserach, without bs" and on newsworthy subjects...
I see this less as "gaming HN" than "realising what the niche is" and fulfilling the niche. I guess I'm fine with someone posting first about a subject that will be there anyway? Maybe I'm not seeing something.
It’s possible (likely) that I’m not seeing something too.
I read the article in the spirit of the headline, which is basically: we wrote a bot to tell us stuff that would do well on HN so we can shill our/our clients’ stuff. In other words, HN becomes an echo chamber of rephrased news articles recycled into commercial blogspam.
Well, contrary to what was written today in a comment I almost replied to [0] it's more hacker news than hacker news [1].
So they didn't really hack HN, they merely provided content HN likes and did at the right time. I wonder if they could hack it more by only providing divisive content that feeds on outrage. That'd bring comments and points but most likely no new clients or conversions.
Oh, and I have a good example of that ! The other days there was a submission about a font from intel designed for visually deficient programmers. I got curious and installed it then I started thinking about ligatures in code, googled a bit and read https://practicaltypography.com/ligatures-in-programming-fon...
I found the article interesting and decided to submit it but when pasting the title I thought "uh, with a title like that, there's going to be some strong reactions/opinions" and indeed the top comment thread is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35926574
Basically the trigger for the article is a bot instead of a self generated idea. It doesn't change the quality of the article. And self thought of ideas will usually contain promos of some kind in them.
Also if they're the first to write the article in depth, then they're not the problem. It's the others that are the problem for reposting the same content, right? It seems silly to be upset with someone for posting good content about recent changes because it gets recycled and paraphrased into a new article.
if they were informative and relevant the community would naturally upvote them, notwithstanding the manipulation efforts. the upvoting of some of the secondary comments on critical comments also seems pretty shady NGL
At the end of the day, dang decides what goes on HN, and all the voting and gaming is just advice how him and his software to consider. It's not a constitutional democracy.
To me it kind of is a constitutional democracy. We decide the rules of the system (constitution) and the community votes within that system (democracy). I've used this metaphor a fair bit over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
Thanks! Those are more topical submissions than we would normally put in the second-chance pool. For that we're looking for more out-of-the-way stories, less in the flow of news or current affairs and of a little more deeper interest.
The other thing about some of those submissions is that they're a bit on the political side—not so much as to be off topic for HN (there's inevitably some political overlap [1]) but again, not the sort of quieter/curious story that we're looking to augment.
> ... so you can try the same post again. Don’t overdo it. I would say max 2 or 3 times.
I don't even understand how that's possible. Every time I tried to post a link that was already posted (by me or someone else), it redirected me to the original post (and upvoted it if I wasn't the author).
After observing that behavior 2 or 3 times, I assumed HN had some kind of deduplication system.
Spoiler: headline is clickbait and article is a bunch of HN reader flattery, so naturally it gets upvoted. It is not a critical look at exploiting HN algorithm or audience, it just tells people what they want to hear on a lazy Saturday.
> Obviously, the goal is to get traffic to your website
ok sure. Why not.
> and increase brand awareness […]
Hm. HN isn't Google. Brand awareness isn't always positive. There are several examples here where repeated coverage causes knee jerk negative reactions.
> SEO
Yes, that is a problem. If every time someone posts about grammarly or whatnot, if the Google algorithm doesn't care that people are vomiting with disgust in the comments, and treats that as "engagement", that is a problem.
Then again, you run the risk of having a page full of "omg grammarly is so shit" comments at the top of your Google ranking, so maybe that's appropriately Darwinian in a sense.
(No hate on grammarly, I just couldn't think of something more HN specific right now)
This article is great insofar as it describes how to write an article that appeals to HN. But having been writing and submitting to HN for like 8 years with maybe a dozen front page entries, I think the hack is simpler: pick a topic people want to discuss/find interesting, name the article well (not clickbaity but not boring), and submit earlyish in the day PST. The content of the article is not super important for hitting the front page (as evidenced by a lot of the stuff that does hit front page). BUT if you want to stay on the front page/rank higher, I suspect article quality does matter a lot.
Honestly, having had my articles on the front page of HN a few times. It’s cool but doesn’t really change anything and honestly compared to other sources such as some Reddit subreddits it’s smaller and shorter.
But you do get a ton of back links so that makes for go SEO(?)
I have hit the front page 5 or 6 times just by sharing content I find genuinely interesting. HN users have a sixth sense that detects organic links vs automated stuff.
Good read. I would love if they'd taken the next step and told us how the extra traffic and SEO links had helped the business. I mean, that's the ultimate goal, and Hacker News doesn't pay the bills: https://www.reifyworks.com/writing/2017-03-13-hacker-news-do...
The tl;dr of the article is: provide value to the HN audience by highlighting articles of interest, possibly adding some extra commentary, and you'll get karma points. No gaming, no telling folks "vote for my post".
Kinda seems like the system is working!
From my perspective, I do post self-promotional links, but keep them to 5-10% of my posts (don't really keep track, that's more of a 'look at the last 30 posts and see if I have 2-3 self-posts'). Keep the self-promotional stuff quality, and you have to share other posts too. (I got a warning when I posted less than high-quality links and took it to heart. The mods are definitely watching.)
In fact, one of my joys is finding an interesting article from someone else and having it 'hit' on HN. It's such a gift to all the writers out there who are screaming into the void.
It doesn't always lead to something, but it sure is fun to have folks reach out and thank me for the HN spike. Plus the HN crowd gets exposed to the quality ideas.
Yeah, they're professionals, they churn out content constantly. I'm willing to bet that you can write 500-1000 words in your native language in the same time about any topic.
You can hop onto a lot of freelance sites and find writers that will write under 1000 words for not much.
>To be relevant for HN, you can’t just copy/paste the news item.
Yeah, some parts are perhaps copied/pasted. As you say, their tips include the way to shorten the time of creating an article. That should be the reason they expressed not "write an article" but "create an article".
(Yes, I acknowledge that this stuff is hard, and that a lot of effort is going into it.)
It feels like HN moderation is mostly focused on getting the comments interesting, not about getting the stories interesting.
HN needs to step up its game here, IMO. There's way too much gamed crap reaching the front page. It seems especially bad during European office hours when the Californians are asleep.
> It seems especially bad during European office hours when the Californians are asleep.
Agreed, the people outside of the SV bubble submit and upvote different stuff and downvote the hell out of anybody who disputes their Eco-Marxist worldview.
Which is fine, just wish they’d be more open to debate instead of just squashing opposing points of view.
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.