Comment by pinkmuffinere

3 months ago

I was thinking of setting up a system to highlight sock-puppeters and other consistent-rule-violating accounts, as a 'fun project' that might improve the HN experience. But it strikes me that the HN staff probably already does something like this, they may not welcome a side-loaded project of this sort, and it would require some automated crawling of HN (which again may be unwelcomed). Finally, I don't actually have experience in this area. Is this something that would be welcomed, or unwanted?

My initial thought is to set up a devoted account like "sock_puppet_detector", and using the infrastructure from https://hackersmacker.org/, add any likely sock-puppets as 'foes'.

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pinkmuffinere

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vunderba  3 months ago

It'd be pretty easy to spot too, because most people don’t even bother trying to hide it (either out of laziness and/or ineptitude).

A lot of users don’t seem to realize that anyone can click on the domain in a "Show HN", and Hacker News will show you all the times that domain has been submitted. So you’ll see four or five different low karma sock puppets accounts that have all submitted the same site.

rdevilla  3 months ago

I'm wary about new accounts such as yours wanting to censor and shape discourse by antagonizing people who hold diverse views that differ from your own here.

The HN culture has shifted drastically over the past 5 years.

  • ropable  3 months ago

    "New account". Meanwhile, the account is 4.5 years old with 2600 karma and has hundreds of thoughtful comments.

  • pinkmuffinere  3 months ago

    To be clear, I wouldn't filter people just because they have different views than me (the goal is to automate the detection, to avoid the effort of reading all the comments -- I should mostly not be in the loop). But I have come across accounts that openly admit to being sock-puppets (eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47242156). These sorts of accounts I would highlight.

    Likewise for guideline-abusers. I don't really know what heuristic you would use to detect rules abuse, but I imagine there are at least some clear violations that could be detected.

    Finally, I think I'd make one account for sock-puppets, another for guidelines-abusers, etc, so people can 'subscribe' to whatever degree of 'highlighting' that they want.