This is a site guideline I fervently disagree with. Throwaways with no reputation to back them up should be treated as irrelevant - they don't face any social costs and indeed they accomplish their goal almost immediately and there is no mechanism, none whatsoever, to undo their damage.
The problem is the fundamental information disparity. The guidelines want us to treat anonymous astroturfers with the same deference we treat "a source familiar with the matter" as reported by a national news publication. There's a difference though: journalists ostensibly act as a filter and a guard against bad faith[1] use of on background or off the record conversations, and try to fact check or cross reference those statements. And journalists usually know who their sources are, and statements in error can result in that source no longer being valued or used.
Hacker News as a discussion site has none of that. We have no way to know if this person actually works at Facebook, actually conveys true information about Facebook, and if it turns out 6 months from now that they're an astroturfing troll or PR firm, the damage is already done. Disinformation online works so well because the initial comment, like this one, gets so much traction and it's unlikely any retraction - if it ever comes - reaches the same audience and causes a reversion of their prior beliefs.
I think it's very silly that the policies ensure the site is exceptionally vulnerable to disinformation campaigns, and too many people presume good faith in an age of anonymous online bad faith discourse.
[1] - let's not wade into the current dialectic, but this is the ostensible purpose of journalists knowing sources, but not divulging them
You're only counting the cost of one side. Anything will look bad if you evaluate it that way.
The other side is that internet users massively project "astroturfing", "shill", "spy", "foreign agent" and so on, onto other commenters and opinions they happen not to like. That's actually the larger problem; in fact, based on countless hours I've spent investigating these phenomena on HN, it is overwhelmingly the larger problem. It's not a close call.
Users taking such cheap shots at each other degrades discussion in really bad ways, so we don't allow it unless they have some basis for what they say. If you look closely at how often it comes up, you'll see that people almost never provide any basis—not a glimmer of anything objective—beyond just disliking what someone else said. Someone posting an opposing opinion on the internet is evidence of nothing but that people have differing views. That is no basis for denouncing someone as a traitor or a criminal, least of all on a site that asks users to be kind and thoughtful and make substantive comments.
So HN's rule is that it's not ok to lob such accusations, or insinuate them, unless there's something more than pure imagination to go on. If people are worried, they are welcome to contact us; we investigate, and if the data gives some reason to conclude that abuse is happening, we crack down on it. But if we look and find no evidence of manipulation, we don't. That seems obviously the right policy to me. The alternative would be to punish users without evidence. That wouldn't be right.
Does that mean we're vulnerable to super sneaks who manipulate the site so cleverly as to leave no traces in the data? Yes, any internet community is vulnerable to that. The best we can do as a community to defend against that is to do what we should be doing anyway: refute bad arguments.
Refuting bad arguments doesn't work if the argument is made, has its persuasive impact and reach, and then it's later discovered it was disinformation.
Edit: To continue to refute your own bad argument, you wrote here:
> (1) don't comment about shilling (astroturfing/bots/trolls/spies) unless you have specific evidence, keeping in mind that the presence of opposing views is not evidence
But the reason disinformation works online is that such information isn't readily accessible. You've tautologically put user "adgineer" above reproach. Even asking whether the user has a conflict of interest is against the rules, as you've told me personally before.
To summarize, dang, you have a bad argument here: HN policy encourages astroturfers and disarms the community from asking people about potentially disingenuous behavior.
That may be true, but this is also the sole comment from this account, made to defend the ad policies of a company known to take veeeeeery large liberties with the data of it's userbase, both to enhance features and to sell ad targeting.
Like if it's HN's policy to not call things astroturfing, fine, I'll accept that. But if it talks like a duck, walks like a duck, and posts in it's own defense for no apparent reason like a duck...
It doesn’t matter. One is still claiming astroturfing with nothing but circumstantial evidence. If you have actual evidence that this account is a troll, post it.
Regarding the “new account” argument: HN encourages throwaways. Maybe OP didn’t want to lose karma on their main account. Maybe they don’t want people knowing who he is? It doesn’t matter.
I never said we should believe him. Just that we shouldn’t claim astroturfing without evidence. We shouldn’t necessarily believe OP without evidence either.
Realistically, on a social site without additional evidence, the default assumption on the modern web should be that a given account is being compensated for what they're posting. An account's history might allow us to adjust that prior.
