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....

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.

Sounds just like gambling, honestly.

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

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.

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.

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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.