20 ms·

I wonder the same about HN. Has anyone done this kind of analysis? Me good LLM

reaperducer 2y ago
In the seven years I've been on HN, it has gone through different phases, each with a noticeable change in the quality of the comments. One big shift came at the beginning of COVID, when everyone went work-from home. Another came when Elon Musk bought X. There have been one or two other events I've noticed, but those are the ones I can recall now. For a short while, many of the comments were from low-grade Russian and Chinese trolls, but almost all of those are long gone. I don't know if it was a technical change at HN, or a strategy change externally. I don't know if it's internal or external or just fed by internet trends, but while it is resistant, HN is certainly not immune from the ills affecting the rest of the internet.
- diggan 2y ago
  How are you so sure these users are actually bots? Just because someone disagrees with you about Russia or China doesn't mean that's evidence of a bot, no matter how stupid their opinion is.
  - JohnMakin 2y ago
    Anyone who’s spent any amount of time in this space can spot them pretty quickly/easily. They tend to stick to certain scripts and themes and almost never deviate.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - yodon 2y ago
      Ten years ago those accounts existed, too. Back then we called them "people."
      - JohnMakin 2y ago
        Not at all - ten years ago russian misinformation campaigns on twitter and meta platforms were alive and well. There was an entire several hundred page report about it, even.
    - diggan 2y ago
      How is that different from humans? Humans have themes/areas they care more about, and are more likely to discuss with others. It's not hard to imagine there are Russians/Chinese people caring deeply about their country, just like there are Americans who care deeply about US.
      - JohnMakin 2y ago
        C’mon. When you have an account that is less than a year old and has 542 posts, 541 of which are repeating very specific kremlin narratives verbatim, it isn’t difficult to make a guess. Is your contention that they are actually difficult to spot, or that they don’t exist at all? because both of those views are hilariously false.
        diggan 2y ago
        I feel like you're speaking about specific accounts here, since it's so obvious and exact. Care to share the HN accounts you're thinking about here? My contention is that people jump to "It's just a bot" when they parrot obvious government propaganda they disagree with, when the average person is as likely to parrot obvious propaganda without involving computers at all. People are just generally stupid by themselves, and reducing it to "Robots be robotting" doesn't feel very helpful when there is an actual problem to address.
        JohnMakin 2y ago
        No, I'm not. And I don't/won't post any specific accounts. I'm speaking more generally - and no one is jumping to anything here, you're projecting an argument that absolutely no one is making. The original claim was that russian/chinese bots were on this platform and left. I've only been here about 1.5 years, so I don't know the validity of that claim, but I have a fair amount of experience and research in the last ten years or so on the topic of foreign misinformation campaigns on the web, so it sounds like a very valid claim, given how proliferate these campaigns were across the entire web. It isn't an entirely new concept or unknown, and that isn't what is happening here. You're making a lot of weird assumptions, especially given the fact that the US government wrote several hundred pages about this exact topic years ago.
    - dang 2y ago
      In my experience, that's not true. Rather, people are much too quick to jump to the conclusion that so-and-so is a bot (or a troll, a shill, a foreign agent, etc.), when the other's views are outside the range of what feels normal to them. I've written a lot of about this dynamic because it's so fundamental. Here are some of the longer posts (mini essays really): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39158911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39158911 (Jan 2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851 (May 2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398725 (June 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 (May 2020) Since HN has many users with different backgrounds from all over the world, it has a lot of user pairs (A, B) where A's views don't seem normal to B and vice versa. This is why we have the following rule, which has held up well over the years: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - JohnMakin 2y ago
        In my research and experience, it is. I’m making no comment about bots/shills on this site, either, I’m responding to the plausibility of the original comment.
        diggan 2y ago
        > I’m making no comment about bots/shills on this site, either, I’m responding to the plausibility of the original comment. The original comment: > I wonder the same about HN. Has anyone done this kind of analysis? Me good LLM Slightly disingenuous to argue from the standpoint of "I'm talking about the whole internet" when this thread is specifically about HN. But whatever floats your boat.
      - imiric 2y ago
        Hey, I would appreciate if you could address some of my questions here[1]. I do think it's unrealistic to believe that there is absolutely zero bot activity, so at least some of those accusations might be true. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41711060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41711060
  - iterateoften 2y ago
    Hackernews isn’t the place to bring that up regardless of your opinion. So out of context political posts should be viewed with at least some scrutiny.
    - diggan 2y ago
      This I agree with, off-topic is off-topic and should be removed/flagged. But I'm guessing we're not talking about simple rule/guidelines-breaking here.
    - imiric 2y ago
      That's true, but maybe there should be a meta section of the site where these topics can be openly discussed? While I appreciate dang's perspective[1], and agree that most of these are baseless accusations, I also think that it's inevitable that a site with seemingly zero bot-mitigation techniques, where accounts and comments can be easily automated, doesn't have some or, I would wager _a lot_, of bot activity. I would definitely appreciate some transparency here. E.g. are there any automated or manual bot detection and prevention techniques in place? If so, can these accounts and their comments be flagged as such? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41710142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41710142
      - dang 2y ago
        We're not going to have a meta section for reasons I've explained in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22649383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22649383 (March 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24902628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24902628 (Oct 2020) I've responded to your other point here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41713361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41713361
      - intended 2y ago
        There are a few horsemen of the online community apocalypse, 1) Politics 2) Religion 3) Meta Fundamentally - Productive discussion is problem solving. A high signal to noise ratio community is almost always boring, see r/Badeconomics for example. Politics, religion are low barrier to entry topics, and always result in flame wars, that then proceed to drag all other behavior down. Meta is similar: To have a high signal community, with a large user base, you filter out thousands of accounts and comments, regularly. Meta spaces inevitably become the gathering point for these accounts and users, and their sheer volume ends up making public refutations and evidence sharing impossible. As a result, meta becomes impossible to engage with at the level it was envisioned. In my experience, all meta areas become staging grounds to target or harass moderation. HN is unique in the level of communication from Dang.
  - metalliqaz 2y ago
    I don't know about anyone else, but to me a lot of bot traffic is very obvious. I don't have the expertise to be able to describe the feeling that low quality bot text gives me, but it sticks out like a sore thumb. It's too verbose, not specific enough to the discussion, and so on. I'm sure there are real pros who sneak automated propaganda in front of my eyes with my notice, but then again I probably just think they are human trolls.
    - diggan 2y ago
      > but it sticks out like a sore thumb Could you give some examples of HN comments that "sticks out like a sore thumb"? > It's too verbose, not specific enough to the discussion, and so on. That to me just sounds like the average person who feels deeply about something, but isn't used to productive arguments/debates. I come across this frequently on HN, Twitter and everywhere else, including real life where I know for a fact the person I'm speaking to is not a robot (I'm 99% sure at least).
      - metalliqaz 2y ago
        sorry, I didn't mean to give the impression that I was talking about HN comments specifically. I was talking about spotting bot content out on the open Internet. as for verbosity, I don't mean simply using a lot of text, but rather using a lot of superfluous words sentences. people tend not to write in comments the way they would in an article.
  - simion314 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - diggan 2y ago
      > If the account is new and promoting Ruzzian narrative by denying the reality I can be 99% sure it is a paid person copy pasting arguments from a KGB manual, 1% is a home sovieticus with some free time. I'm not as certain as you about that. Last time the US had a presidential election, it seems like almost half the country is either absolutely bananas and out of their mind, or half the country are robots. But reality turns out to be less exciting in reality. People are just dumb, and spew whatever propaganda they happen to come across "at the right time". Same is true for Russians as it is for Americans.
      - consteval 2y ago
        I think it's mostly a timing thing. It's one thing for someone to say something dumb, but it's another for someone to say it immediately on a new account. That, to me, screams bot behavior. Also if they have a laser focus. Like if I open a twitter account and every single tweet is some closely related propaganda point.
      - simion314 2y ago
        [flagged]
        dang 2y ago
        Nationalistic flamewar will get you banned here, regardless* of which country you have a problem with. No more of this, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html * https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20nationalistic&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
        simion314 2y ago
        Will I be allowed to say just provide some links instead and let the community inform themselves if I am not allowed to share my observations? Or links to real news events are also not allowed.
  - reaperducer 2y ago
    How are you so sure these users are actually bots? I stated nothing about bots. Re-read what I wrote.
    - diggan 2y ago
      Bots, trolls, foreign agents, a dear child has many names. Point is the same, name calling without evidence does nothing to solve the problem.
      - pixl97 2y ago
        Ignoring there are problems doesn't solve anything either.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  HN has mechanisms to detect upvotes and comments that seem to be promoting a product or coordinated in some other way. I'm not sure what they do behind the scenes or how effective it is but it's something. Also other readers downvote bot spam. Obvious bot/LLM-generated comments seem to be "dead" quite often, as are posts that are clearly just content/ad farm links or product promotions or way off-topic.
- jperras 2y ago
  16 year HN vet here. This place has both changed a _lot_ and also very little, depending on which axis you want to analyze. One thing that has been pretty consistent, however, is the rather minimal amount of trolls/bots. There are some surges from time to time, but they really don't last that long.
datadrivenangel 2y ago
HN remains good primarily because of the moderators. Thanks Dang!
- wickedsight 2y ago
  Agreed. There's some Dang good work being done here. Hope he gets rewarded well for it.
- bediger4000 2y ago
  Wait you mean absolute freedom of speech, countering bad speech with more good speech doesn't work?
- imiric 2y ago
  The mods certainly do a great job of keeping things running smoothly here, but I wouldn't say it's _primarily_ because of them. I think it's primarily due to the self-moderation of the community itself, who flag and downvote posts, follow the community guidelines, and are still overall relatively civil compared to other places. That said, any community can be overrun by an Eternal September event, at which point no moderation or community guidelines can save it. Some veteran members would argue that it's already happened here. I would say we've just been lucky so far that it hasn't. The brutalist UI likely plays a part in that. :)
  - conductr 2y ago
    I think it has happened actually. Early on HN was almost purely entrepreneurial although through a tech POV. These days, it’s much more general or broadly tech related. The discussion I gather is most people here are tech employees and not necessarily entrepreneurs. It’s obviously has not gone to hell like the bot ridden examples, but it’s drastically different IMO.
    - ffsm8 2y ago
      The bots aren't completely dominating here yet, because the price/benefit isn't really there yet. Twitter is a source of news for some journalists of varying quality, which gives them a motivation to influence. On HN, who are you going to convince and what for? The only thing that would come to mind would be to convince venture capital to invest in your upstart, but you'd have to keep it up while convincing the owners of the platform that you're not faking it - which is gonna be extra hard as they have all usage data available, making it significantly harder to fly under the radar. Honestly, I just don't see the cost/benefit of spamming HN to change until it gets a lot cheaper so that mentally ill ppl get it into their head that they want to "win" a discussion by drowning out everything else
yodon 2y ago
Real question for those convinced HN is awash in HN bots: What actual value do you believe there is, other than curiosity, that is driving people to build the HN spam bots you think you're seeing? Karma doesn't help your posts rank higher. There is no concept of "friends" or "network." Karma doesn't bring any other value to your account. My personal read is it's just a small steady influx of clueless folks coming over from Reddit and thinking what works there will work here, but I'm interested in your thoughts.
- hashmap 2y ago
  Karma is a number that can go up. Numbers going up is a supernormal stimulus for humans.
  - criddell 2y ago
    They should get rid of the number and change it to be only "low" or "high".
    - diggan 2y ago
      Get rid of karma + get rid of ranking comments at all. Just render them in a tree-format with oldest/newest first, everyone has equal footing :)
  - vunderba 2y ago
    True but at least for Hacker News you have to at least click through to the member profile to see how many banana stickers and external validation they've accrued.
- jppope 2y ago
  In theory you could Show HN and have your bots upvote it... that would indeed be good marketing.
  - diggan 2y ago
    Vote-rings are trivial to detect though, automated or manual. I'd be surprised if HN hasn't figured out ways against it during the time it's been online.
vunderba 2y ago
I'd like to think we have enough of a proactive community to mitigate this issue for the most part - just set your profile back to Show Dead / etc. if you want to see the amount of chaff that gets discarded. Also, wasn't the initial goal of lobste.rs to be a sort of even more "mensa card carrying members only" exclusive version of Hacker News?

In the seven years I've been on HN, it has gone through different phases, each with a noticeable change in the quality of the comments. One big shift came at the beginning of COVID, when everyone went work-from home. Another came when Elon Musk bought X. There have been one or two other events I've noticed, but those are the ones I can recall now. For a short while, many of the comments were from low-grade Russian and Chinese trolls, but almost all of those are long gone. I don't know if it was a technical change at HN, or a strategy change externally. I don't know if it's internal or external or just fed by internet trends, but while it is resistant, HN is certainly not immune from the ills affecting the rest of the internet.

diggan 2y ago
How are you so sure these users are actually bots? Just because someone disagrees with you about Russia or China doesn't mean that's evidence of a bot, no matter how stupid their opinion is.
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  Anyone who’s spent any amount of time in this space can spot them pretty quickly/easily. They tend to stick to certain scripts and themes and almost never deviate.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - yodon 2y ago
    Ten years ago those accounts existed, too. Back then we called them "people."
    - JohnMakin 2y ago
      Not at all - ten years ago russian misinformation campaigns on twitter and meta platforms were alive and well. There was an entire several hundred page report about it, even.
  - diggan 2y ago
    How is that different from humans? Humans have themes/areas they care more about, and are more likely to discuss with others. It's not hard to imagine there are Russians/Chinese people caring deeply about their country, just like there are Americans who care deeply about US.
    - JohnMakin 2y ago
      C’mon. When you have an account that is less than a year old and has 542 posts, 541 of which are repeating very specific kremlin narratives verbatim, it isn’t difficult to make a guess. Is your contention that they are actually difficult to spot, or that they don’t exist at all? because both of those views are hilariously false.
      - diggan 2y ago
        I feel like you're speaking about specific accounts here, since it's so obvious and exact. Care to share the HN accounts you're thinking about here? My contention is that people jump to "It's just a bot" when they parrot obvious government propaganda they disagree with, when the average person is as likely to parrot obvious propaganda without involving computers at all. People are just generally stupid by themselves, and reducing it to "Robots be robotting" doesn't feel very helpful when there is an actual problem to address.
        JohnMakin 2y ago
        No, I'm not. And I don't/won't post any specific accounts. I'm speaking more generally - and no one is jumping to anything here, you're projecting an argument that absolutely no one is making. The original claim was that russian/chinese bots were on this platform and left. I've only been here about 1.5 years, so I don't know the validity of that claim, but I have a fair amount of experience and research in the last ten years or so on the topic of foreign misinformation campaigns on the web, so it sounds like a very valid claim, given how proliferate these campaigns were across the entire web. It isn't an entirely new concept or unknown, and that isn't what is happening here. You're making a lot of weird assumptions, especially given the fact that the US government wrote several hundred pages about this exact topic years ago.
  - dang 2y ago
    In my experience, that's not true. Rather, people are much too quick to jump to the conclusion that so-and-so is a bot (or a troll, a shill, a foreign agent, etc.), when the other's views are outside the range of what feels normal to them. I've written a lot of about this dynamic because it's so fundamental. Here are some of the longer posts (mini essays really): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39158911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39158911 (Jan 2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851 (May 2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398725 (June 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 (May 2020) Since HN has many users with different backgrounds from all over the world, it has a lot of user pairs (A, B) where A's views don't seem normal to B and vice versa. This is why we have the following rule, which has held up well over the years: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - JohnMakin 2y ago
      In my research and experience, it is. I’m making no comment about bots/shills on this site, either, I’m responding to the plausibility of the original comment.
      - diggan 2y ago
        > I’m making no comment about bots/shills on this site, either, I’m responding to the plausibility of the original comment. The original comment: > I wonder the same about HN. Has anyone done this kind of analysis? Me good LLM Slightly disingenuous to argue from the standpoint of "I'm talking about the whole internet" when this thread is specifically about HN. But whatever floats your boat.
    - imiric 2y ago
      Hey, I would appreciate if you could address some of my questions here[1]. I do think it's unrealistic to believe that there is absolutely zero bot activity, so at least some of those accusations might be true. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41711060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41711060
- iterateoften 2y ago
  Hackernews isn’t the place to bring that up regardless of your opinion. So out of context political posts should be viewed with at least some scrutiny.
  - diggan 2y ago
    This I agree with, off-topic is off-topic and should be removed/flagged. But I'm guessing we're not talking about simple rule/guidelines-breaking here.
  - imiric 2y ago
    That's true, but maybe there should be a meta section of the site where these topics can be openly discussed? While I appreciate dang's perspective[1], and agree that most of these are baseless accusations, I also think that it's inevitable that a site with seemingly zero bot-mitigation techniques, where accounts and comments can be easily automated, doesn't have some or, I would wager _a lot_, of bot activity. I would definitely appreciate some transparency here. E.g. are there any automated or manual bot detection and prevention techniques in place? If so, can these accounts and their comments be flagged as such? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41710142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41710142
    - dang 2y ago
      We're not going to have a meta section for reasons I've explained in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22649383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22649383 (March 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24902628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24902628 (Oct 2020) I've responded to your other point here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41713361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41713361
    - intended 2y ago
      There are a few horsemen of the online community apocalypse, 1) Politics 2) Religion 3) Meta Fundamentally - Productive discussion is problem solving. A high signal to noise ratio community is almost always boring, see r/Badeconomics for example. Politics, religion are low barrier to entry topics, and always result in flame wars, that then proceed to drag all other behavior down. Meta is similar: To have a high signal community, with a large user base, you filter out thousands of accounts and comments, regularly. Meta spaces inevitably become the gathering point for these accounts and users, and their sheer volume ends up making public refutations and evidence sharing impossible. As a result, meta becomes impossible to engage with at the level it was envisioned. In my experience, all meta areas become staging grounds to target or harass moderation. HN is unique in the level of communication from Dang.
- metalliqaz 2y ago
  I don't know about anyone else, but to me a lot of bot traffic is very obvious. I don't have the expertise to be able to describe the feeling that low quality bot text gives me, but it sticks out like a sore thumb. It's too verbose, not specific enough to the discussion, and so on. I'm sure there are real pros who sneak automated propaganda in front of my eyes with my notice, but then again I probably just think they are human trolls.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > but it sticks out like a sore thumb Could you give some examples of HN comments that "sticks out like a sore thumb"? > It's too verbose, not specific enough to the discussion, and so on. That to me just sounds like the average person who feels deeply about something, but isn't used to productive arguments/debates. I come across this frequently on HN, Twitter and everywhere else, including real life where I know for a fact the person I'm speaking to is not a robot (I'm 99% sure at least).
    - metalliqaz 2y ago
      sorry, I didn't mean to give the impression that I was talking about HN comments specifically. I was talking about spotting bot content out on the open Internet. as for verbosity, I don't mean simply using a lot of text, but rather using a lot of superfluous words sentences. people tend not to write in comments the way they would in an article.
- simion314 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - diggan 2y ago
    > If the account is new and promoting Ruzzian narrative by denying the reality I can be 99% sure it is a paid person copy pasting arguments from a KGB manual, 1% is a home sovieticus with some free time. I'm not as certain as you about that. Last time the US had a presidential election, it seems like almost half the country is either absolutely bananas and out of their mind, or half the country are robots. But reality turns out to be less exciting in reality. People are just dumb, and spew whatever propaganda they happen to come across "at the right time". Same is true for Russians as it is for Americans.
    - consteval 2y ago
      I think it's mostly a timing thing. It's one thing for someone to say something dumb, but it's another for someone to say it immediately on a new account. That, to me, screams bot behavior. Also if they have a laser focus. Like if I open a twitter account and every single tweet is some closely related propaganda point.
    - simion314 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - dang 2y ago
        Nationalistic flamewar will get you banned here, regardless* of which country you have a problem with. No more of this, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html * https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20nationalistic&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
        simion314 2y ago
        Will I be allowed to say just provide some links instead and let the community inform themselves if I am not allowed to share my observations? Or links to real news events are also not allowed.
- reaperducer 2y ago
  How are you so sure these users are actually bots? I stated nothing about bots. Re-read what I wrote.
  - diggan 2y ago
    Bots, trolls, foreign agents, a dear child has many names. Point is the same, name calling without evidence does nothing to solve the problem.
    - pixl97 2y ago
      Ignoring there are problems doesn't solve anything either.
SoftTalker 2y ago
HN has mechanisms to detect upvotes and comments that seem to be promoting a product or coordinated in some other way. I'm not sure what they do behind the scenes or how effective it is but it's something. Also other readers downvote bot spam. Obvious bot/LLM-generated comments seem to be "dead" quite often, as are posts that are clearly just content/ad farm links or product promotions or way off-topic.
jperras 2y ago
16 year HN vet here. This place has both changed a _lot_ and also very little, depending on which axis you want to analyze. One thing that has been pretty consistent, however, is the rather minimal amount of trolls/bots. There are some surges from time to time, but they really don't last that long.

datadrivenangel 2y ago

HN remains good primarily because of the moderators. Thanks Dang!

wickedsight 2y ago
Agreed. There's some Dang good work being done here. Hope he gets rewarded well for it.
bediger4000 2y ago
Wait you mean absolute freedom of speech, countering bad speech with more good speech doesn't work?
imiric 2y ago
The mods certainly do a great job of keeping things running smoothly here, but I wouldn't say it's _primarily_ because of them. I think it's primarily due to the self-moderation of the community itself, who flag and downvote posts, follow the community guidelines, and are still overall relatively civil compared to other places. That said, any community can be overrun by an Eternal September event, at which point no moderation or community guidelines can save it. Some veteran members would argue that it's already happened here. I would say we've just been lucky so far that it hasn't. The brutalist UI likely plays a part in that. :)
- conductr 2y ago
  I think it has happened actually. Early on HN was almost purely entrepreneurial although through a tech POV. These days, it’s much more general or broadly tech related. The discussion I gather is most people here are tech employees and not necessarily entrepreneurs. It’s obviously has not gone to hell like the bot ridden examples, but it’s drastically different IMO.
  - ffsm8 2y ago
    The bots aren't completely dominating here yet, because the price/benefit isn't really there yet. Twitter is a source of news for some journalists of varying quality, which gives them a motivation to influence. On HN, who are you going to convince and what for? The only thing that would come to mind would be to convince venture capital to invest in your upstart, but you'd have to keep it up while convincing the owners of the platform that you're not faking it - which is gonna be extra hard as they have all usage data available, making it significantly harder to fly under the radar. Honestly, I just don't see the cost/benefit of spamming HN to change until it gets a lot cheaper so that mentally ill ppl get it into their head that they want to "win" a discussion by drowning out everything else

yodon 2y ago

Real question for those convinced HN is awash in HN bots: What actual value do you believe there is, other than curiosity, that is driving people to build the HN spam bots you think you're seeing? Karma doesn't help your posts rank higher. There is no concept of "friends" or "network." Karma doesn't bring any other value to your account. My personal read is it's just a small steady influx of clueless folks coming over from Reddit and thinking what works there will work here, but I'm interested in your thoughts.

hashmap 2y ago
Karma is a number that can go up. Numbers going up is a supernormal stimulus for humans.
- criddell 2y ago
  They should get rid of the number and change it to be only "low" or "high".
  - diggan 2y ago
    Get rid of karma + get rid of ranking comments at all. Just render them in a tree-format with oldest/newest first, everyone has equal footing :)
- vunderba 2y ago
  True but at least for Hacker News you have to at least click through to the member profile to see how many banana stickers and external validation they've accrued.
jppope 2y ago
In theory you could Show HN and have your bots upvote it... that would indeed be good marketing.
- diggan 2y ago
  Vote-rings are trivial to detect though, automated or manual. I'd be surprised if HN hasn't figured out ways against it during the time it's been online.

vunderba 2y ago

I'd like to think we have enough of a proactive community to mitigate this issue for the most part - just set your profile back to Show Dead / etc. if you want to see the amount of chaff that gets discarded. Also, wasn't the initial goal of lobste.rs to be a sort of even more "mensa card carrying members only" exclusive version of Hacker News?