I am back.

submitted by magnora7[A] from (self.SaidIt)

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[–]Zapped 7 insightful - 3 fun7 insightful - 2 fun8 insightful - 3 fun -  (6 children)

Good to see you back and active.

Do you have the time to look at the timing of the attacks, like every 3 months or after a newsworthy event? Have you tried to put together a pattern of when the posts or comments are made, like between the hours of 10am and 2am EST? Do the same accounts interact with each other in the comment sections more often than other accounts? Do some of the accounts that interact but have different "personalities" use the similar language or phrases?

I'm sure you're way ahead of this, but I'm curious to what you find out, when and if you feel its ok to disclose what you find. I would like to reaffirm what you said about not interacting with those accounts. It only feeds them what they are hungry for.

[–]magnora7[S] 18 insightful - 6 fun18 insightful - 5 fun19 insightful - 6 fun -  (5 children)

Glad to see you too. The pattern of when they are around seems to be pretty random. I do notice they spend about a few hours on saidit, and then will go away for that day and come back the next day at some random time. I see this over and over, for literally 20-30 days in a row, each day burning through about 5-20 accounts, some months old, depending on how much traction they got that day. There will be a few months of this, then a month or two off. Then back on again. For 3 years now.

I have lots of various patterns to recognize them by, but I don't want to say too much about that or else they'll hide those patterns and then my job will become even more difficult. But I will say they also post garbage spam from many accounts like "Samsung router drivers" links while they do these cultural attacks. And the "Americans" comment bot will suddenly spring to life at the same time as well, sometimes itself making 3 accounts a day, like today. So it's a multi-faceted approach, using many accounts, diluting the quality in many ways simultaneously. I used to think it was just ad bots (which it is sometimes) but I've noticed lately that the volume of ad posts flares up dramatically always at the exact same days as we get cultural attacks too, so I've begun to realize they're related. Someone just wants to turn this site to a trash heap by filling it with various types of garbage and seems to be being paid to do it given their tenacity. And that troll farm probably has a list of 10-20 forums they hit and cycle through, which is why they'll hit this one heavy for a few hours, go away to another site, and then come back the next day.

I mean if you think about it, if reddit can destroy all its competition by paying a couple people $12/hr, why wouldn't they? Or if China can destroy places of free discussion by paying some random college students to poison the well of discussion and never get caught, why wouldn't they? There's lots of groups out there who could be doing this, but whoever it is, it's become pretty clear it's a very purposeful campaign. One with focus, tenacity over literally years, and a lot of developed complex strategies they cycle through like a playbook. This also implies money is involved to me.

As much as I hate it, it seems to be the most reasonable explanation given what I've seen across the last 3 years. And this exact thing is affecting a lot of forums. It's destroying and souring the culture of the internet and everyone can see it, which has non-internet cultural repercussions too. I hope those people feel ashamed about what they're doing, but I'm not sure they're capable of shame. Which is why they're such a great fit for the job of destroying human culture. If he were alive, I wonder what Aaron Swartz would say about this type of cultural attack, because it certainly is the attack style of the new decade.

Basically it seems DDOS attacks to take down websites are old hat, cultural attacks are the new way. If the culture is destroyed, and no one will go there because it's so hostile and alienating, then what use is the forum? This is so much harder to defend against than a DDOS attack. In fact I would say weakness to this style of attack may be the main reason why so many reddit alternatives have failed.

Anyway, it's true that the best strategy is still not to feed the trolls. Just report the comment or post, and PM me if you think you've spotted one. Thanks!

[–][deleted] 6 insightful - 3 fun6 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 3 fun -  (4 children)

Very interesting. Something that's kept me at Saidit is that I think most of us agree that Big Corp and special interest groups of the 1% (internationally) are actively damaging any small group or business that can impact their market share. Many on Saidit disagree with me about the specific approaches of the 1% to glean everything from the 99%, but there seems to be a general agreement that this is endemic in US political culture (and in India, Brasil, Russia, Turkey, the Philippines, the UK, etc., etc.). You note the other forums that were attacked, and I would argue that some of the attacks can be from some of the small/developing forums, which receive funding from politically motivated donors.

One interesting development with the cultural attacks is how familiar they are with Saidit, and how they tried use our interests against us. This I see in the broader context online, whereby strategies are to divide people by having them argue over misinformation, disinformation, facts, science &c.

On another note, the attackers actively went after /u/TheAmeliaMay, and this person handled it very well (under the circumstances), but one very disturbing issue here is that Amelia did not deserve the personal attacks from the Saidit community, and some of these people were also foolled by the attackers. I know from personal experience that one has to have a thick skin to remain at Saidit. I hope /u/TheAmeliaMay will engage with us again soon, and will know that there are those of us here who are very grateful for Amelia's support and engagement.

[–]magnora7[S] 7 insightful - 4 fun7 insightful - 3 fun8 insightful - 4 fun -  (3 children)

One interesting development with the cultural attacks is how familiar they are with Saidit, and how they tried use our interests against us.

For instance, when we set up saidit, within the first week someone had used an automated script to register over 1000 usernames. They already had the API script set up because we're built the same way as reddit. They just pointed the script toward our site and stole a lot of people's usernames from reddit, so they couldn't register the same names on saidit.

These people know what they're doing.

I agree, Amelia handled it well given the circumstances. I think Amelia is taking a break but will probably be back, they just need to take a breather after all the craziness from the attack, which I totally understand! It's upsetting to see some people on saidit fall for the attack tricks, but that's why those tricks are used, because people do still fall for it. That's why education and discussion about these topics is so important. In theory, if we understand how the tricks work completely, the tricks no longer work on us. So all of us have to learn all of the tricks. It's a lot to ask, but the whole global internet culture has to mature in this way for things to move forward, I believe. We have to see the tricks for what they are, and learn not to react emotionally to those intentionally trying to provoke us.

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Holy Mackerel. I remember Redditors bragging about their scripts for vote, account and post management years ago, when Aaron Swartz was also briefly engaged, and thereafter. But I've not seen these discussions for many years. (As you probably know, everything changed at Reddit during Digg's first major blackout, and their kiddos created Reddit accounts. I can't remember when that was.)

[–]magnora7[S] 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

The Digg exodus to reddit was in 2010. The technology has gotten better and better for infiltrating forums, I have no idea how Aaron would deal with this. Also there weren't really long-term large-scale paid shill groups when Aaron was around, imo they've become a prominent thing in just the last 10 years or so