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• dang 6y ago
  I'm not sure whether you're asking "does this count as breaking that rule?" or "does this count as evidence that HN is overrun by bots?" Answer to "does this count as breaking that rule?": no, Troy emailed us long in advance and he had lots of specific data that we could look at. Answer to "does this count as evidence that HN is overrun by bots?": no, our systems had caught most of that activity long before. I posted over 20 comments in the thread you link to, covering a lot of these points; see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24785165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24785165. And if you read Troy's original report you'll notice that the examples he shows of them succeeding come from other places than HN: https://twitter.com/troyd/status/1315441811658219520 https://twitter.com/troyd/status/1315441811658219520 https://twitter.com/troyd/status/1316038695535833089 https://twitter.com/troyd/status/1316038695535833089 If there are botnets or rings escaping our attention and succeeding on HN, they would need to be several levels more sophisticated than that one. One thing to realize is that HN's anti-abuse systems don't always reveal publicly that accounts or sites have been caught. It can often be more effective to preserve information asymmetry and fight the abuse in subtler ways. Re Rohrschach: the fact that it's considered dodgy is part of why I use the analogy. Most internet speculations about bots, astroturfers, shills, spies, brigaders, foreign agents and all the rest of it, are way dodgier than that.