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> what makes you think HN is not full of bots? Good point. I suppose I just always imagined a place full of bots to be a bit more messy. On the subject, how

> what makes you think HN is not full of bots? Good point. I suppose I just always imagined a place full of bots to be a bit more messy. On the subject, how funny it would be to train bots to be polite and to the point (rather than clickbaity). How funny it would be to be engrossed in a community, and think "wow, what a bunch of nice interesting people," but really they're robots that are mindlessly striving towards being the perfect neighbor.

dilippkumar 7y ago
Anecdotally, I once tried to create an account on HN by going through tor - HN allowed my account creation to go through and even let me post my comment. But my comment wasn't visible to anyone else. It was all very clever. I think the HN's simple user interface is deceptively simple - there is clearly a lot more going on than I had assumed.
- dang 7y ago
  There are lots of filters based on past activity by spammers, trolls, and so on. But in the scenario you describe, moderators would eventually review your comment and restore it to visibility, assuming it wasn't bad in some noteworthy way. Users with 'showdead' turned on in their profile (and who have karma > 30) can do the same: if you see a [dead] post that shouldn't be dead, you should vouch for it by clicking on its timestamp, then clicking 'vouch' at the top of its page. This is why we added that feature.
  - Tomte 7y ago
    > Users with 'showdead' turned on in their profile (and who have karma > 30) can do the same: if you see a [dead] post that shouldn't be dead, you should vouch for it Wow. I've been on HN for some time now [1], and that's news to me. I remember seeing "vouch" before, but not for a long time. I simply assumed you had taken that privilege away from me. It makes sense to only show it for "showdead" users, but it never occurred to me. Edit: [1] and it turns out that today is my cake day. Very fitting. :-)
- fragmede 7y ago
  (Afaik. It's not like I work here) HN also has an ability to 'shadowban' users. It looks like everything's working to you (well, the bot code), but no other users see anything from the so called bot.
thisBrian 7y ago
Relevant xkcd [1] A fun weekend project would be to utilize GPT-2 [2] to model HN comments; quite the challenge considering the usually insightful comments here when compared to other sites. [1] https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ [2] https://github.com/openai/gpt-2 https://github.com/openai/gpt-2
- lowdose 7y ago
  On reddit whole sub communities are based on gpt-2, it is just going to increase the noise to signal ratio.
  - tfehring 7y ago
    In particular, https://old.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/top/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/top/ is pretty entertaining.
    - lowdose 7y ago
      I agree the content is actually funny in that reddit tread. I wonder how good it can become with a really large good database. I read in some article of OpenAI a dataset gets better by for example replace names by pronouns.
smt88 7y ago
> but really they're robots that are mindlessly striving towards being the perfect neighbor Once conversational algorithms reliably pass the Turing test, I guarantee this will happen. State actors may be doing it already. A non-conversational version of this has existed in online gaming for decades. The catch-22 in starting any new forum or social network is that to attract new users, there must be old users. Some social networks (notoriously dating sites and reddit) started out with employees acting as many users to make the network seem less empty. It's already possible to pay humans to do this, but it's likely prohibitively expensive. If machines can do it, suddenly you can have thousands or millions of "users" for almost no cost.

dilippkumar 7y ago

Anecdotally, I once tried to create an account on HN by going through tor - HN allowed my account creation to go through and even let me post my comment. But my comment wasn't visible to anyone else. It was all very clever. I think the HN's simple user interface is deceptively simple - there is clearly a lot more going on than I had assumed.

dang 7y ago
There are lots of filters based on past activity by spammers, trolls, and so on. But in the scenario you describe, moderators would eventually review your comment and restore it to visibility, assuming it wasn't bad in some noteworthy way. Users with 'showdead' turned on in their profile (and who have karma > 30) can do the same: if you see a [dead] post that shouldn't be dead, you should vouch for it by clicking on its timestamp, then clicking 'vouch' at the top of its page. This is why we added that feature.
- Tomte 7y ago
  > Users with 'showdead' turned on in their profile (and who have karma > 30) can do the same: if you see a [dead] post that shouldn't be dead, you should vouch for it Wow. I've been on HN for some time now [1], and that's news to me. I remember seeing "vouch" before, but not for a long time. I simply assumed you had taken that privilege away from me. It makes sense to only show it for "showdead" users, but it never occurred to me. Edit: [1] and it turns out that today is my cake day. Very fitting. :-)
fragmede 7y ago
(Afaik. It's not like I work here) HN also has an ability to 'shadowban' users. It looks like everything's working to you (well, the bot code), but no other users see anything from the so called bot.

thisBrian 7y ago

Relevant xkcd [1] A fun weekend project would be to utilize GPT-2 [2] to model HN comments; quite the challenge considering the usually insightful comments here when compared to other sites. [1] https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ [2] https://github.com/openai/gpt-2 https://github.com/openai/gpt-2

lowdose 7y ago
On reddit whole sub communities are based on gpt-2, it is just going to increase the noise to signal ratio.
- tfehring 7y ago
  In particular, https://old.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/top/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/top/ is pretty entertaining.
  - lowdose 7y ago
    I agree the content is actually funny in that reddit tread. I wonder how good it can become with a really large good database. I read in some article of OpenAI a dataset gets better by for example replace names by pronouns.

smt88 7y ago

> but really they're robots that are mindlessly striving towards being the perfect neighbor Once conversational algorithms reliably pass the Turing test, I guarantee this will happen. State actors may be doing it already. A non-conversational version of this has existed in online gaming for decades. The catch-22 in starting any new forum or social network is that to attract new users, there must be old users. Some social networks (notoriously dating sites and reddit) started out with employees acting as many users to make the network seem less empty. It's already possible to pay humans to do this, but it's likely prohibitively expensive. If machines can do it, suddenly you can have thousands or millions of "users" for almost no cost.