And even a cursory glance throughout this thread would reveal that it isn't exactly brimming over with warm and fuzzy feelings about the US, so I don't know what it is you're worried about. This pervasive shilling you claim is happening here doesn't seem to be working.

You may be right. You may very well be right. But you're not accomplishing anything except signaling to people that if they think too hard about certain points of view, then they're just being stooges. You can argue against it without stooping to the same tactics you're accusing others of.

I'm not attacking someone just because of his opinion, nor am I advocating that. I'm calling out a shill. Look at the facts. One post before today. A pro-NSA post that reads like rhetoric. This post is voted up to the very top comment of the discussion, DESPITE the lack of "warm and fuzzy feelings about the US". Now, in a conversation where the sentiment is so anti-NSA, why do you think this has so many upvotes? That's evidence of rigged voting. That he has failed to sway opinion here does not at all mean that he isn't a shill.

That's enough evidence to convict.

Look, here's an article where you can start reading about these kind of psyops: http://ultraculture.org/blog/2014/02/26/reddit-shills-tried-... Discussion forums like this one need to be aware of this sort of thing going on. We have to talk about it. We have to try and point out people whose job it is to steer conversations to their liking. It is the right of a free people to associate and freely converse with their peers and make up their own minds free of malicious interference and cointelpro. If government agents actively manipulate public opinion in favor of them, and the public opinion is different from what it otherwise would be, then there is no democracy. That is wrong.

What can we do, when there's no proof? We can use our brains and examine the evidence. We can call out obvious shills to try and stem the tide. That is what I am advocating for. We should point out obvious shills so that discussions have more of a chance at reaching their natural conclusions. You seem to be advocating that we do nothing at all, and that is what I disagree with.

And here I just figured folks would think it was a throwaway account that somebody used to avoid having paranoid internet trolls dig into their online presence. Seemed like such a good cover, too.

Brb gotta dictate a memo to psyops.

Not at all. I'm only suggesting that what you're doing is counterproductive.

> Now, in a conversation where the sentiment is so anti-NSA, why do you think this has so many upvotes? That's evidence of rigged voting.

It might be. But we don't actually know how HN's voting algorithm works (secret sauce), and we do know for a fact that the HN staff will manipulate vote gravity in order to make the content of a thread more accurately reflect 'quality'. So it's not exactly ironclad evidence of government vote rigging, when Hacker News is a black box which is rigged by design.

It's also not out of the realm of possibility that more people who agree with yeahyeah's point of view have upvoted him than people have upvoted other threads. And this is a long thread, so the effect of commenting and upvoting throughout may be cumulative. And some comments in other threads have been downvoted into near oblivion.

>If government agents actively manipulate public opinion in favor of them, and the public opinion is different from what it otherwise would be, then there is no democracy. That is wrong.

Actually, I would argue that is democracy working as intended. The government has the right to present its point of view and try to convince people to agree with it - that is literally how democracy is supposed to work. The government may be trying to 'actively manipulate public opinion in their favor,' but on a discussion forum, so is everyone else. That's the point of a forum, and it's especially true on HN, where die-hard capitalists and anarchists and everyone in between all fight for the intellectual high ground. The government doesn't actually have some kind of magic that makes people believe them, theirs is just one more voice in the herd.

>What can we do, when there's no proof? We can use our brains and examine the evidence. We can call out obvious shills to try and stem the tide.

I think a more effective countermeasure would be to examine the evidence of the arguments presented and call out lies when you encounter them. Attack the comment, not the commenter, particularly since you're never going to have more than suspicion and confirmation bias as evidence.

> It's also not out of the realm of possibility that more people who agree with yeahyeah's point of view have upvoted him than people have upvoted other threads. And this is a long thread, so the effect of commenting and upvoting throughout may be cumulative. And some comments in other threads have been downvoted into near oblivion.

So because there's no absolute proof, he's not a shill. How about deciding what's more likely? What is more likely: that this post was voted to the top despite lack of support in the thread, or that a circle of upvoters voted it up? Remember, it is a LOT easier to hit that upvote button than to make an actual contribution to the discussion, so you would expect to find that a ring of shills would operate in that fashion. One posts, as that takes actual thought and effort, and the rest upvote.

> Actually, I would argue that is democracy working as intended. The government has the right to present its point of view and try to convince people to agree with it - that is literally how democracy is supposed to work

If they want to convince people of their point of view, then why can't they do it legitimately?

Do you somehow think that this sort of behavior isn't subversive? That it doesn't work? And that makes it okay for the government to manipulate public opinion in this way?

It's okay. I can't believe you think that. There is one hell of a difference between presenting your own point of view and having thousands of fake people presenting the views that they are paid to.

> I think a more effective countermeasure would be to examine the evidence of the arguments presented and call out lies when you encounter them. Attack the comment, not the commenter, particularly since you're never going to have more than suspicion and confirmation bias as evidence.

No. Doing both is much more effective. Otherwise they control the first posts, they make a sense of a false consensus in their favour, and these things really can influence how people think. Don't believe me? Research it yourself.

I would much rather people make up their own minds instead of being tricked into thinking what the government wants them to. I still find it hard to believe that I live in a world where the latter is what actually happens.

You're assuming those are the only two credible possibilities. This thread could also be at the top because of the cumulative lack of upvotes, or the weight of downvotes (which have been biased to count more compared to upvotes), in other threads. Or because of the effect of upvotes on individual posts, or its relative length compared to the others. I think it's too complex and opaque a system to read so definitively, particularly given the effort put into it by the staff to prevent exactly the sort of gaming you're talking about.

Although, yes, given those two scenarios specifically, the 'circle of upvoters' is the more plausible.

>If they want to convince people of their point of view, then why can't they do it legitimately?

That's the problem - what you're calling out as evidence of illegitimate actions could just as well be legitimate. Your evidence is that people apparently agree with and voted up yeahyeah, and that yeahyeah's account seemed insufficiently 'real'. Have you taken into account the possibility that people might actually agree with the post?

>Doing both is much more effective. Otherwise they control the first posts, they make a sense of a false consensus in their favour, and these things really can influence how people think. Don't believe me? Research it yourself.

But I have a hard time believing that people are that malleable, or that such a simple tactic could be so effective. Although there is perhaps a good argument to be made against karma-based systems being in any way meritocratic, 'consensus' on Hacker News doesn't really count for much.

Just for giggles, I'll let you reply to yourself on this one:

> You seem to think it's a good idea to summarily believe accusations with no evidence and no attempt to involve the legal system and convict someone in the court of public opinion just because somebody said something.

Me thinks you managed to derail the conversation to a much greater degree than yeahyeah ever could. Saying this as someone who likes voluntaryism but acknowledges that it might be an idealist view that is incompatible with many hidden variables of the real world, I acknowledge that three-letter agencies might have a place in this world. Yeahyeah just pointed this out. He didn't prevent you from creating good counterarguments. He made a very valid point, that unlike dragnet surveillance of snowden this revelation is more targeted, and invited you to a discussion of whether it has a right place in this world. You on the other had shat across the screen with tangential accusations. Me thinks you are the shill.

Thank you for illustrating my point so well.