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The argument against bots would be that it makes it more difficult to go through the 'new' section and find quality posts to up vote if everyone did this. In f

• raganwald 16y ago
  The argument against bots would be that it makes it more difficult to go through the 'new' section and find quality posts to up vote if everyone did this. If everyone wrote bots that auto-submitted feeds from authors who consistently get upvotes from HN readers? How is that a problem? If the problem is submitting articles that HN readers don't find interesting--spam, not ham--banning bots is unlikely to help. How do you stop me from submitting every article I write? There is a huge amount of content out there loosely relevant to HN readers. Bits overwhelming the new page are a symptom, not a disease. The disease is that the new page doesn't scale well to handle a large volume of submissions. As HN grows, the number of submission si going to grow as well, with or without bots. Behind the scenes, there must be some changes to accomodate this, such as algorithmically showing users new stories they are most likely to find interesting, or showing users a random selection fo new stories from the last hour. Bots merely accelerate the decline of the new page's usefulness. Banning bots that auto-submit high quality feeds isn't going to work if we allow HN to grow at its current rate.