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by colordrops
4256 days ago
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Shills are easy to detect, as they out of character with the typical tone and style of messages on a particular forum. They also tend to have egregious flaws in reasoning and use emotional and heated personal attacks against the person or topic in question. The posts often get pushed to the top more quickly than usual. It has already been revealed that government agencies use sock puppets and other techniques to manipulate popular and influential message boards, such as Reddit and Hacker News: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating-o... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-ope... Also, as many of you here on Hacker News should know, marginally ethical marketing techniques are commonly used by tech and other companies, including bought articles and opinion pieces, astro turfing, sock puppets, guerrilla marketing, software to assist in targeting specific forums and message boards, vote brigading etc. See: http://www.blackhatworld.com/ |
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So in other words, you're claiming that non-accordance with the groupthink of that particular forum implies that the poster is a shill.
Furthermore, you claim that using "proper" reasoning and unemotional informational content is evidence that the poster is likely not a shill, as if it's that hard to actually shill for something without resorting to crackpottery or emotional appeals.
I don't accept either premise, and nor should you.
> Also, as many of you here on Hacker News should know, marginally ethical marketing techniques are commonly used by tech and other companies, including bought articles and opinion pieces, astro turfing, sock puppets, guerrilla marketing, software to assist in targeting specific forums and message boards, vote brigading etc. See:
The fact that "Commonly-used" techniques exist implies absolutely nothing by itself about whether a given comment is from a shill, unless you're willing to believe that the base rate for shill/non-shill is significantly biased towards shills and sockpuppets on a normal basis.
For instance, Ebola is "common" in Liberia, but someone coming in with the symptoms of fever and headache are still at least as likely to have flu (or even Lassa fever) as they are to have Ebola.