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Tell HN: Suspicious but well-meaning new spam accounts?

35 points| zyfo | 14 years ago

Take a look at these users: deathmatch, redrising1, keyboarder, whiteduck, arcanebook, gildedsuit

Quotes: I wish more people did this. // This is a good addition. // Look amazing. I wish you guys all the best. // Yeah I imagine Y Combinator is a lot more important. // This is amazing. // Maybe you could try some sort of side project? If it's exciting enough it might motivate other areas of your life.

All registered within the last 24 hours. All posting in the same threads. All with the same (positive) tone. Yet they aren't generic enough to be auto-generated, so it looks like a human (humans?) are writing these.

Is this a social experiment, a way to build credible accounts which can be used for spamming, or something else?

11 comments

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[+] pg|14 years ago|reply
I wiped them all. Please let me know if you see more. Here's a good place to watch: http://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments
[+] Fixnum|14 years ago|reply
Not so subtle, but user CANWorkSmart seems to have created a bunch of shills to comment on his (now dead) post at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3010356.

Might be worth it for a mod to kill them off...

edit: the '-----' appears in place of the 'reply' link when the post can't be replied to (in this case because the submission is dead?).

[+] Joakal|14 years ago|reply
Thanks for this great thread, zyfo.

Have a good day.

Real: Several reasons;

1) A way to get points to go over HN's thresholds. It's quite a good idea if you want to game HN to upvote selfish support/articles and/or downvote undesirable comments/articles. It's more possible to get attention to flagged articles, but risky because moderators will look at the content and strip away flag and the up/down vote powers.

2) Train the spam filter to like those messages. Unlikely, but attempted against email spam filters though (Look up 'unsolicited bizarre nonsense email stories').

3) People with nothing to say but really feel that they must say something even if it's not contributing. I gather the sentiment is that those people should follow the HN guidelines and spirit because there are those that fear the immature link aggregator plague (Reddit, Digg, etc). There's no help for them otherwise.

[+] threecreepio|14 years ago|reply
These kinds of things definitely need to be overseen/'banned' somehow, but it's a bit easy to wind up catching too many real users in the net, that I'd rather have a few bad eggs around personally.

I feel plenty worse seeing users like http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=EllieAsksWhy , with all their comments silently marked as 'dead' and made invisible without them having any idea what's going on, than I do having to ignore a few spammers.

(edit: note, you have to mark "showdead" as "yes" in your profile to see what i'm talking about)

[+] lrm242|14 years ago|reply
These are probably attempts to create aged accounts with karma to be used for spamming later. IMO, it represents an escalation of the spamming that HN has seen in the past.
[+] stefanobernardi|14 years ago|reply
Since the presence on the homepage is given both by upvotes and comments, they are probably using these accounts to get more comments and get && stay on the homepage.

I guess pg will implement something against this pretty soon (just checking if the commenters on a thread usually only or mostly comments on that specific poster's threads and giving negative value to those comments should do it).

[+] dholowiski|14 years ago|reply
What IP addresses are they coming from? I find it easy to spot spammers on my site because they all come from the same subnet of IP addresses, in China. Anyway, unless they're 100% specific and relevant, they're probably spam.
[+] mkramlich|14 years ago|reply
I've seen similar suspicious patterns on Amazon and eLance.

I discovered what appeared to be suspicious clusters of Indian accounts in particular, on eLance, all with ridiculous project descriptions, that are then all seemingly awarded to other accounts within the same "circle", racking up huge US dollar fee amounts in project awards, very quickly, with lots of suspicious mutual account birth timestamps (where both the project awarder and the project winner both seem to join the site on the same day, award a project to the other very soon thereafter, etc.). Shame that people engage in practices like this. Adds a lot of noise, drowning out signal. I've pretty much given up on using any low-bar-to-participate crowdsourced opinion site, and eLance-like sites, due to this phenomenon.

I'm also reminded of a guy I once worked with, who never seemed to do anything or deliver anything real, and yet has something like 50+ recommendations on LinkedIn. A talker/political kind of guy -- a middle manager. Whereas I know another guy, same company, who was super productive, heads-down coder, effective, delivered, innovative, very smart, solved lots of very big and very real technical problems while at that company, and he had like 1 LinkedIn recommendation -- an engineer, of course. You just know the first guy was offering "scratch my back, I scratch yours" deals to his mutual recommender buddies (assuming all of them were even real people), whereas the second guy was quiet, non-political, non-slimy, honest and humble. Again, any sort of crowdsourced opinion or social network voting system can and WILL be gamed, driving the signal to noise ratio down.

Solving this problem in general, in my opinion, is/was right up there with solving the spam problem for email.

[+] my2cents49|14 years ago|reply
Sounds more like money laundering than racking up reputations.