Tell Hacker News: Throwaway accounts

[unalone]

The user KrisZolar seems to have a vast amount of throwaway, spam accounts, which are upvoting one another and cluttering up this thread in particular: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=359551.

Those users are: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ScottHanson, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=SkylerNovak, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=RobertHenderson, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Huxley78, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Nerdlinger, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Dino, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=AVC, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Haggen, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=KeshRivya, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=KimStarr, and http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=HugotheMongoose.

I wanted to be absolutely certain of this before making the accusation. I'm dead certain of these names, for the following reasons:

1) They follow similar patterns. Either they are very old, inactive user names, or they are extremely new. They all make small comments in other threads that, while not contributing anything useful, are upvoted slightly - to the point where they can upvote other account names.

2) Each one has a similar, one-sided look at Ayn Rand. They all react with very immediate hostility and none of them stop to make decent arguments.

3) Every single one gets incredibly hostile towards people who claim that the article KrisZolar submitted is a poorly-written article. (That article, for the record, took a similar approach to debunking Rand.)

4) They respond to one another's comments, always in the affirmative. When discussing with other people, they each respond in turn, rarely starting a long back-and-forth discussion, and their comments are all upvoted similarly to their original comments: up one or two points in thin trickles, after they've been downvoted. This despite a lack of content.

5) Several of them have deleted their posts after being responded to.

6) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360063 is a comment thread in which Nerdlinger, who has not been a part of the ongoing thread, responds in the defensive as if he has been here for a while.

7) Similarities in the way that they speak and the way in which they use grammar.

8) If you open each of these accounts at once, you see a pattern in their posts: each posts one or two at a time, in a cycle, never simultaneously. There are gaps between their posts in which none of them speak whatsoever.

I flagged their posts, but I don't know exactly how to approach this case. I've never seen something like it on Hacker News. Hopefully this is the right protocol.

[pg]

You're right, except there are even more accounts. I killed them all. I don't know what made the guy go on a trolling rampage after all this time, but it's stopped now.

You should just send me an email when you suspect things like this; I can verify it a lot faster.

[unalone]

I wasn't entirely sure what your email address was, to be honest. I guessed when I wrote that one.

[biohacker42]

I can assure you he went on a trolling rampage because arguing and karma is a game. And us geeks love to argue and play games.

I am certain there are more like him and there will be a lot more in the future.

The interesting question is can something like a Bayesian spam filter be applied to trolling?

[dant]

Wouldn't it be a good idea to silently hide the posts from everyone except the troll. Now he (or she) has been public outed he'll probably try again with a new set of accounts.

[bayareaguy]

Do you have an automated system to verify an account is being used for this sort of astroturfing? If so I'm sure many of the folks here would be interested in it. I think a service that helped forums identify astroturfers could even be the basis for a YC company.

I would imagine simply grouping accounts by their ip address, creation time and set of articles they comment on should easily catch the unsophisticated guys.

[avinashv]

I hate to repeat what's been said already, but I think this is a different case: I applaud the effort of users like you who are preventing HN from becoming a cesspool, but this is beyond the average call of the good samaritan. Bravo. I am going to start paying much more attention to the comments here to try to weed out this kind of nonsense; sadly, I did not notice this guy at all.

Thank you.

I have to ask: how much research went into this?

[unalone]

Aw, shucks. Thanks a ton.

Not that much, surprisingly. The guy really wasn't very subtle with it. I've messed with spoof accounts in my past - I used to have an unpopular forum and I thought it would help raise user activity - and there are a lot of things that can clue you off. In this case, his accounts weren't saying rational things. I dissed the article, and one person would tell me I was being irrational, I'd respond: another person would call me an asshole and a third person would agree and call me a jerkwad. And it all seemed focused around the one thread (I'm a big fan of Rand and Gladwell, and really liked the discussion). All I did was scroll through and look for the anti-Rand people who only had a few points of karma.

Once you have the names, it was just a matter of looking at their comments. In this thread, I said to look at the time between posts: it was a lot easier than that, because I was in class and could just refresh once every fifteen minutes. One name did the talking each cycle, and each time I'd get downvoted one and his names would all get upvoted one.

This was bizarre, though. He was incredibly aggressive about the post, and extremely blatant. On this site, that stood out a lot: usually, people who insult other people get instantly downvoted. That happened to me a lot when I first joined. Here, a bunch of people were doing that and getting upvoted. I just hope this site never becomes diluted enough that something like that fails to stand out.

[tdavis]

Algorithms + "Smart People Police" make me feel safer. Nice one, unalone!

[zasz]

Wow, thanks for all the effort. Also, kudos for being cautious, and a good guy, about it.

[unalone]

Thanks for mentioning it in the original thread! I was suspicious, but had it down to paranoia before you mentioned that as well. The really old accounts made me doubt myself.

[huhtenberg]

> I've never seen something like it on Hacker News

You may want to try and deduce the list of puppets used by Michael Arington (of TechCrunch blog). Something tells me it's going to be more impressive than this one.

[SwellJoe]

TechCrunch doesn't need puppets. It has its fans. I'm not a big TC reader, but I like all the people I've met who work at TechCrunch. They're all genuinely nice folks (though Arrington has the troll gene, so sometimes he goes overboard and picks on someone smaller than him, which is rude and in poor form...but I don't mind when he picks on Google or Yahoo or MS or anyone who's accepted more than a few million in funding).

[blasdel]

You don't need sockpuppets when you have sycophants!

[spazmaster]

you must have spent _hours_ investigating this guy. wow.

[viggity]

I know the feeling though:

"I... can't... go... to... sleep... someone... is... wrong... on... the ... internet"

[unalone]

They all posted on the thread. I was in a 3-hour lab class, and happened to notice when they all commented after me.

After that, it only took about 20 minutes to check their posting times and write this up. The guy was really not subtle about it.

[daveambrose]

Good for unalone though and I agree with his assessment. It's quite impressive to see this level of commitment to HN.

Well done.

[jonas_b]

Haha, I just had a look the original post you were referring to and this conversation struck me as particularly funny:

unalone: Them, and AVC, and HugotheMongoose, and KimStarr, and Huxley78. It's baffling. I've never seen something like that happen before.

Nerdlinger: So what? I signed up to post.

unalone: I didn't mention your name, so entering right now is only slightly suspicious. :-)

[matt1]

Awesome work, thank you for helping keep YC great.

[tlrobinson]

I'm pretty sure pg said there's some anti-sockpuppet provisions in news.yc. I believe upvoting between sockpuppets is ignored.

But I agree, this seems suspicious.

[jwilliams]

Yeah there is - I've come across this (innocently, naturally) before. Not sure of the exact algorithm.

[lionhearted]

I love Hacker News. I started one of the big fights when I wrote that the guy made a flawed analogy. I leave HN for the day, come back, and all hell has broken loose with trolling and fake accounts... and then I see the guy's been wiped off the board. Awesome - thanks PG, and Unalone.

[mhartl]

I recently had a comment mildly critical of Ayn Rand mysteriously downmodded. Maybe this is why.

[unalone]

No. That was me, unfortunately. I downvoted before I checked your user name, which was a big mistake. I was going to go back and reply, but I completely forgot. Sorry about that: I'll respond to you right now.

[DanielBMarkham]

Kudos for the work!

Like DavidW, I'm interested in the meta-issues involved here: how many more fakers are out there? Are we attracting this kind of activity in some way? If we can block spam with code, can we block this activity with code?

[boundlessdreamz]

Another spam account. http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sanjeevbhiru1

[Dilpil]

Have you considered a career as a private detective?

[dhughes]

Looks like solid evidence to me, good work.

[rms]

email pg...

[unalone]

I wrote to [email protected]. Hopefully that's the correct address.

[jsdalton]

hey unalone, i take it THIS is the site you were referring to on reddit earlier today ;)

[unalone]

Yessir. I didn't exactly know this would be happening when I mentioned it, though.