[21echoes]

>> So let's see, you opened with conspiracy theory nutjob

> Given that Snapchat Beliebers (employees?) have come out of the woodwork to downvote me into oblivion, it's not that far fetched.

You're not helping dodge the "conspiracy theory nutjob" case, here..

[michaelochurch]

So, first of all, let me say that I once wrote a system to spot fake reviews, so I know the statistical signature. You get a lot more out of the timing than the content (especially if it's just up- or down-votes). Fake reviews or votes tend to come in "bursts" over a couple of hours. For example, if a comment that is rapidly getting upvotes suddenly ends up at -4 (or lower) and multiple unrelated posts are getting downvoted at the same time ("stalker downvoting") that's a sign of it.

These are most likely "meat-puppets" rather than sock-puppets. The difference is that sock-puppets are one person making multiple accounts (which I'm sure Hacker News defends against) and meat puppets are when it's separate people (e.g. a whole office). Many startups engage in meat puppetry (e.g. "everyone in the office, vote on this story") around articles that pertain to them.

One notable example is on Glassdoor pertaining to the company Knewton. First of all, negative reviews of Knewton get killed pretty quickly because they get user-flagged (presumably, by Knewton people) into oblivion. But you can see statistical evidence of meat-puppetry in the dates of reviews. A company that had previous been getting about 1 review every 80 days suddenly gets 6 (!) five-star reviews, with no nuance and nothing negative to say, within 96 hours (Feb. 7-11, 2014). The odds of that happening by chance are about 80 billion to 1 against. Before Knewton aggressively policed Glassdoor, the average review was lower (around 2.5-3.0 if I recall correctly). Now it's 4.4, due to this work. It doesn't take much for a company like Knewton to completely break Glassdoor if it's willing to sink that low.

When you learn the signals you can spot this stuff pretty easily. Just the fact of something being downvoted doesn't necessarily tell you anything (it could just be a shitty comment). It's when you see sudden trend changes, and spill-over effects to other comments, and when the topic pertains to a specific company, that there's likely a PR effort going on. Of course, these are all statistical inferences with non-zero error probabilities attached, and I have no way of proving (nor do I really care, because it's not worth my attention) whether the "downvote squad" came from Snapchat or from some other cluster of fanboys.

I've had a lot of comments get downvoted and, 99% of the time, the downvotes are genuine and come from disinterested users without an agenda (they just don't like the comment and, to be fair, some of my HN comments are better than others). When a comment that is quickly getting upvotes suddenly dives, and a bunch of your related comments dive as well, and when there's an obvious motive because the comment pertains to one company or founder, it's likely that the votes are correlated... but not that interesting, because (a) it can't really be proven, and (b) downvotes on a message board don't really matter. Truth be told, this statistical wonkery is probably only interesting to me.

[tptacek]

Since you've made an issue of this: I downvoted your comments on this thread. I don't like Snapchat and find its CEO kind of skeezy. But there are worse things you can be than kind of skeezy.

[S4M]

For what is worth, I downvoted your first comment, and I'm not an employee of SnapChat - in fact, I don't even know what SnapChat is exactly. The reason why I downvoted you is already explained by the commenters who responded to you.

I suspect other people were interested in your reaction to this article, and like me, they thought it was pretty poor and downvoted you - nothing to do with Snapchat employees.

Apart from that, if you think Evan Spiegel cherry picked an email nicely written that leaked from the Sony hack, nobody or nothing would prevent you to look for all emails from him that leaked and cherry pick the ones that make him look like an asshole; in fact it would do more to prove your point and while being more time efficient than constantly monitoring the karma of the comment to find evidence of a fake review - which I doubt, since the comment hasn't been flag-killed - and write super long replies like you just did.

[ececconi]

For what it's worth. Fake accounts cannot down vote. I don't even have the ability to down vote. You need karma for that. People down-voted you because your comments are off the mark. It's absurd to think you're blaming anyone but yourself for that.

[billsossoon]

I can't downvote you, but I would if I could. Not because I work for Snapchat, or because Spiegel needs defending. I'd downvote you because because your comments here are petty and baseless, and sound a little delusional.

[21echoes]

You know what else makes a comment dive rapidly in votes? A bad comment on a popular thread that's spiking in traffic.

It's amazing to me that you're so single-minded about how no one other than a snapchat employee could possibly disagree with your comment. This bleeds through your original comment as well: "How could someone possibly find value in anything this frat boy has to say? BI must have been paid to post this". Reasonable people out here in the real world realize that, however much we disagree with a given person, not everyone who disagrees with us is a puppet of said person.

[vxNsr]

because you're asking: I downvoted your org comment after you claimed the sony hack was a pr stunt, or seemed to be saying that anyway, after that I stopped voting bec it the whole thing seemed to have devolved into a pissing contest.