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Comment by dwedge | Hacker News Reader

> I used to argue with people on the internet, after about six replies, you realize that you’re speaking to someone incapable of thought

He realises the current woe of things but doesn't realise he's been arguing with bot farms and teams of people hired just for this reason - to sow doom, arguments and engagement.

Around 10 years ago I noticed this happening on trending topics of Twitter - it wasn't that the opponents were stupid because they disagreed, it was that they were simultaneously intelligent and stupid in the way they spoke in a way that I realised I'd never seen in genuine people, making me realise it was probably different people or bots under one account.

If I realised it 10 years ago it was probably happening for at least 15. He wasn't better than these people he was falling into their trap

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Haha it’s just a foolish move made by those from the ‘90s. We all internalized a different lesson. The younger generations have learned to brush it off and stop responding. Even if the person is human, when you fail to move toward Aumann Agreement, there is no point in persisting.

Us older ones are still fighting the last war. If only we explain it properly, maybe the bots will understand!

I justify it to myself by saying that even if I'm arguing with a bot, I want to have a counterargument posted for the benefit of the people who are reading the comments

> If only we explain it properly, maybe the bots will understand!

I'm going to be thinking about this perfect summary of my frustration of the last 20 years all day

Arguing on the internet is not about convincing the other side. It's about winning the majority opinion and getting more votes. Almost like politics.

Obvioulsy not true for all the arguments, only a subset of those not worth having.

Are you starting an online argument with me?

I googled Aumann Agreement and it’s all about agreeing about whether things are true/false/likely/unlikely.

I don’t understand your point at all in this context. What’s “Aumann Agreement” in the context of a discussion about values?

Haha, it’s figurative and requires squinting. “rational actors with common axioms will reach shared conclusions through repeated exchange of information”.

So if you’re not reaching a shared conclusion then you’re not exchanging information, you don’t have shared axioms, or one of you isn’t rational.

If it didn’t land with you, it was just a poor choice of phrase and while I care to attempt to explain it, I don’t care to attempt to defend it.

Values are not different from other positions that people might hold. I believe values and principles are just lossy compressions of positions about specifics because we cannot express them all. When you poke at the edges you find they are fractal. So “what’s your estimate for random variable X?” And “are open borders good?” Are not really different questions so much as questions about different levels of specificity.

My incomplete self-note about this here https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Principles_Are_Compressed_Im...

Have you heard about the free energy principle and free energy model of emotions? In this model, all brain does is minimize the prediction error, so all values and beliefs are bayesian priors by necessity.

Neat model. I found some references online. Thanks for introducing me to it.

Appreciate the writeup, thanks.

The outcomes those values achieve.

I used to think that the people who could not apply any semblance of logical reasoning online were just bots or trolls, but then I started meeting them in real life.

Sure, they exist, but online they are simulatenously unable to apply any logic and then surprisingly coherent and intelligent in the next reply.

>it wasn't that the opponents were stupid because they disagreed, it was that they were simultaneously intelligent and stupid in the way they spoke in a way that I realised I'd never seen in genuine people, making me realise it was probably different people or bots under one account.

I believed they were all bots until I actually interacted with such a person in real life. It's terrifying.

I've now completely stopped engaging with anyone on that platform that I can't reasonably traced back to a real person. If any non-real-name account says anything that remotely feels bad-faith in replies, I block them. Having been on the Internet since the mid 90's when it was the frontier, and everyone helped/trusted everyone else, the policy feels very wrong. But unfortunately Twitter has given no tools or alternatives to deal with the situation.

I have found that the only way to deal with this these days is basically to only use my time to discuss things with people in private, invitation only forums. HN is a rare exception for "I am pretty sure you all are not bots (yet)" and yet anonymous.

Everything else that I care about is in private Signal groups or an equivalent of same with anywhere from 15 to 200 people, and adding any new member means they need to be vouched for by an existing one. And at least 55-75% of the people know each other face to face through industry vertical specific events, trade shows, conferences and similar.

I can't even imagine trying to engage with people on something like x/twitter or other social media. Not knowing whether the 'person' you're replying to is somebody's LLM authoried bot farm.

> And at least 55-75% of the people know each other face to face through industry vertical specific events, trade shows, conferences and similar.

Tbh, my experience with _that_ has been worse than with a random sample of internet background radiation, as people seem to have no idea how to filter correctly and who to vouch for and why.

_Especially_ with people they know via work, conferences, etc. Spaces that do not filter for "genuinely relevant contributer to a conversation" at all, but encourage faking that.

Within this context it's specifically people in the ISP and telecom business, most of whom have been in the business 15, 20 or 25 years now. Some of us started out as junior NOC techs, junior sysadmin/Linux/BSD guys in the late 1990s at different dotcom 1.0 startups.

At a certain scale you know who the people are that have super-admin privileges at very specific ASNs and they are well known in the industry. Basically much as somebody in academia in a journalism school on the west coast would know who is the department head of the school of journalism at a major university in Boston or NY and recognize their name.

Now within a Signal group of 150 people adjacent to the neteng teams at large to medium sized US/Canadian ISPs, it's entirely possible that somebody let an uninvited rando in, but we don't discuss anything super sensitive (that's for more 1:1 messages). A person who has been lurking for weeks or months and suddenly starts chatting in an inauthentic way would be found out very quickly.

One of the things that ISP technical operations groups do very well is filter for non-authentic participant in something, because sales persons getting into groups of technical discussion with the angle of selling some new thing is a perpetual problem and is a well known factor to deal with.

Also sales people generally don't do well when a complex operational-related technical matter is put in front of them in a fast paced environment where they can't engage their engineering team to get an accurate reply. Ask anyone that's ever tried to get their direct cellphone number removed from a Cogent IP transit sales person's CRM system....

Yes, I got that, but what I actually mean is that these criteria do not necessarily lead to good conversations.

I know the kind of space you are referring to. I'm in those too. But my point is that they regularly disappoint me.

Which is usually worse disappointment than with randoms on the internet, because the people should know better but don't.

With these tight knit spaces you get all the social dysfunctions of people liking each other not for merit but because they've been around each other for long, and that's - for me personally - worse than the public alternative, as you suddenly do not argue with logic, but with the tribe and social cohesion.

> discuss things with people in private, invitation only forums

One of the great things about not having ads on rangerovers.pub is that Google is just not interested in indexing it, because it doesn't make them any money. It shows up here and there in search results, sporadically, especially if you know a username or phrase specific to the site, but other than that if you want to know about it you need to be told about it.

I was never a fan of web forums but they are a nice compromise between really oldschool mailing lists and FAANG content-to-eyeball transformers.

I have seen a bit of a resurgence in your classic 2005-era type interface php bulletin board in a browser, as people relegate their facebook/instagram/whatever accounts to only keeping up with family stuff posted by boomers who won't use anything else, or things like niche neighborhood based buy & sell groups (or community notice groups in like a town of 12,000).

I guess there's at least 3 or more active and currently developed software packages with open source licenses, the flaskbb that site uses, simplemachinesforum, the classic phpbb, probably some others I've forgotten about... The LAMP stack dependencies for all seem very mundane and very lightweight.

This runs on FlaskBB because I prefer Python to PHP.

I'd love to write a backend for it to expose the forum as NNTP ;-)

I recently had reason to implement something using xterm.js and node-pty for a CLI environment in a browser, so I think that it would be possible to re-implement actual IRC live chat inside a html/html5/TLS1.3 session in a browser tab too.

That feels like the intellectual equivalent of limiting your career opportunities within a small tiny villages vs. a large city. There is so much more in the city.

It's not that I don't read a great deal from a wide variety of sources, but that I reserve the small amount of free time I have per day for back-and-forth discussions (like this one) with groups of people I am fairly sure are not sock puppets. The amount of oversight that dang exercises on HN to ensure that frequent and verbose commenters are authentic people should not go without notice.

I have a theory that a good part of the filtering for authentic humans has already been done here, which gives me a higher level of confidence that I'm not metaphorically shouting into the void by conversing with somebody's LLM or social media influence apparatus.

I have moved back to my small hometown, from a large city.

My mental health improved significantly. I actually feel valuable at work. I feel pride in contributing to my local community. And the paycheck isn't actually worse.

Sounds just like gambling, honestly.

Which might be a winning strategy, but also might not be.

Nowadays it's the anonymous accounts that are generally most likely real, and the "real name" accounts with a human profile picture are most likely mass generated. You just use a name generator and pull profile pictures from Google images and you have a real user profile

Personally I always use anonymous accounts.

I have no interest in posting under my real name. My surname is too unique, and I don't want employers to find me online

This is the only way to realistically deal with it but it’s not scalable. A platform is only as useful as its non-bot users. On Twitter even the positive replies are likely bots. Real engagement is limited for most users.

On a site like HN, blocklists are very effective at keeping people off your feed.

>>anyone on that platform that I can't reasonably traced back to a real person

Not sure why that makes any difference - I've had plenty of arguments on Facebook with people who are perfectly happy to spew racist and/or conspiratorial bullshit while having their full names, their holiday photos and photos of their children and/or grandchildren attached to their identity. The weird thing is that these people are 99/100 times incapable of actually having an argument, they either start insulting you straight away or say some variation of "if you don't like what I'm saying then leave" or actually majority of time "what does a foreigner like you know about this topic".

The real names policy has yielded zero of the promised effects imho.

Same. (I would love to say, but they still get me way too often)

I can also highly encourage people to keep notes and do some basic OSINT. The effective internet is smaller than one might think, so that proves useful time and time again.

Can you elaborate on the OSINT suggestion? Do you mean on the people you engage with?

Yes, exactly. Though, not by default.

If something seems _odd_, I suggest looking up _why_ it might be odd. Gathering context, essentially.

Like "Okay, this guy is weird. Aah, okay, LinkedIn says that he works there. Okay _now_ that makes sense".

Based on that, you can then decide how to approach the (previously failing) interaction.

HN is a very easy place for that, because, to give somewhat concrete examples, if someone is shilling for something and seems unreachable for common sense, LinkedIn usually tells you that their salary depends on that.

And people play very open here, because this is treated as a business networking event.

> He realises the current woe of things but doesn't realise he's been arguing with bot farms and teams of people hired just for this reason - to sow doom, arguments and engagement.

I've had the same kind of argument you'd swear was a bot with real people I know offline. The best explanation I could come up with was that they got radicalized online, was shameless about arguing in bad faith, and was willing to say heinous things in a group text, but refused to continue the discussion when I challenged them to do so IRL when I next met them - their electronic words towards me were particularly foul. Polarization, online echo-chambers, lack of consequences, and shamelessness have conspired to crater the quality of discourse and provide plenty of fuel for bots and psy-ops operators to fan the flames.

I'd love to know if there's a documentary or something that has been done about this, that I could point non-techie people in my life to.

This is some schizo thinking. People you interact with online almost certainly aren't bots or paid.

> People you interact with online almost certainly aren't bots or paid.

Not all of them, and I'm not saying they target me. I noticed it more in popular engagement sinks - comments on popular instagram videos, replies on trending topics on Twitter, the main subs on Reddit.

There absolutely are engagement farms doing this for multiple reasons, and it at least seemed to me that most of the interactions in those places were not genuine.

Certainly aren't bots is dubious, although if there's actual interactions it's likely they aren't bots.

Paid, lmao I wish. Nobody gets paid to repeat propaganda, generally.

In 2006 i was arguing in barrens chat with someone spouting racist nazi bullshit, 3 days of this they sent me /t saying i couldnt stop them shaping the minds of young men. Shaping the minds of young men, an exact quote i would hear being used by steve bannon many years later. This.. thing.. has been active for much longer then 10 years.

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