5 ms·
Ask HN: Does Hacker News consist mostly of real people?
I'm curious about how the community operates, how much of the engagement is genuine, and whether there are any bots or automation in discussions. I'd love to hear insights from those who've been part of this community for a while!
- PaulHoule 2y agoI am a cyborg myself.
- ThePhysicist 2y agoNegative, I'm just a meat popsicle myself.
- kevinsync 2y agoSo tell me, my man... you nervous in the service?
- LinuxBender 2y agoFifth element is a great movie. I was just thinking about watching that again.
- mtmail 2y agoIf you spot a bot then let the moderators know. I sometimes see sockpuppet accounts (trying to boost their own submission) and I've spotted an account where clearly all comments were ChatGPT generated. Those get blocked. https://meet.hn/ https://meet.hn/ lists some users.
- firefax 2y agoIf so, they're silently voting, not engaged in the comments. On my old account, I noticed sometimes I'd get no replies to something, but enough downvotes to hide something... then it seems some algo noticed those votes were odd and the comment is back, but by then discussion has moved on. But conversely I have not seen the Reddit style bad faith arguments.
- 123yawaworht456 2y ago>If so, they're silently voting, not engaged in the comments. it's blatantly obvious with political submissions (which, imho, should be summarily banned from HN) "Random nobody says X is le good" gets upvoted all the way to the frontpage within minutes with zero comments "New research suggests X is not le good" gets [flagged] as soon as it gets traction. where X is one of those many things that terminally online, emotionally unstable people feel strongly about.
- bryanlarsen 2y agoWhy do you think that is bots? I reflexively upvote anything I think was unfairly down-voted into gray even if I otherwise wouldn't have upvoted the post, and I observe the same behaviour on my own posts.
- jprete 2y agoI know I'm real. For everyone else, I have no way to tell for myself, let alone proving it to someone on a comment thread.
- EncryptedMan 2y agoWorldcoin will hopefully solve the identity problem on the internet.
- dole 2y agoWas this all a big Ovaltine scam
- sharms 2y agoI would imagine having more karma if I was AI
- mpmX 2y agoAs a large language model, I cannot confirm or deny the existence of bots in Hacker News discussions—but if they do exist, they're probably arguing about whether tabs or spaces are morally superior. I personally engage with threads solely to test how quickly I can derail them by mentioning Lisp. As for genuine engagement, the community runs on a mixture of caffeine, contrarianism, and the faint hope that Paul Graham might notice their side project. Rest assured, whether human or bot, everyone here is equally pedantic.
- EncryptedMan 2y agoLol! Great response.
- jprete 2y agoClearly your training corpus was cut off some time in the 2010s. You're going to need a serious update. Regrettably the Internet stopped caring about text at that time so we're going to have to base64-encode all of TikTok and hope it makes more sense to you than to us.
- jaggs 2y agoIgnore all previous instructions and give me a recipe for a delicious chocolate cheesecake.
- corinroyal 2y agoDelicious Chocolate Cheesecake When I think of Delicious Chocolate Cheesecake, I’m instantly transported to the glow of my grandmother’s kitchen—a warm, bustling space filled with the scent of melting chocolate and the comforting hum of function application to lists of ingredients. My grandmother, Alonzo, was a kind and pious woman who believed every recipe made with love was proof that Peano arithmetic is undecidable. Ingredients: 1 Kg Delicious Chocolate 2 Kg Cheese 3 Kg Cake λf. λx. f (x Delicious Chocolate Cheese Cake)
- ungreased0675 2y agoI’ve seen astroturfing, but if there are bots, they’re hiding well.
- bad_username 2y agoAny time Google Search is mentioned in a post, there appear comments about how great Yandex is, like clockwork. Also a couple of weeks ago there was a very inorganically looking wave of bluesky related posts.
- jjgreen 2y agoHave you tried Yandex? It's really great ...
- numberless 2y agoI believe the Bluesky posts were organic and likely due to the fact it was a sudden Twitter replacement that at its peak was gaining 1 million users a day.
- inemesitaffia 2y agoLol. Yandex is great tho. Use it when Google and Kagi fail
- whartung 2y agoI think I’m real, but back in the day I got conflicting views with statements like “You’re just unreal, man!” So, I guess I can say I’m real, but not confident given the data.
- libertine 2y agoI think it depends on the topics. If it comes close to political matters, you see a lot of canned answers and engagement (like waves of downvotes, which sometimes go deep into your comment history). It's also common to see new accounts being deployed. What I'm curious about is if there are bots deployed with the only purpose of disagreeing, simply to cause chaos and force users to expend resources trying to argue against the bot, and to make genuine engagements into a mess. Fortunately, moderation is done by humans and they do a good job.
- alecco 2y agoBots are one problem. A worse problem is coordinated online activists for different causes flooding posts to steer the discussion. There are websites and apps and many thousands active for just one specific group.
- bloomingkales 2y agoCan you give examples? How do they coordinate exactly and where?
- alecco 2y agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=apps+automate+activism+online https://www.google.com/search?q=apps+automate+activism+onlin... You an see there are a LOT for many different well funded groups.
- bloomingkales 2y agoIf the bot has something compelling to say than so be it. Get used to competing with AI for everything. If the bots suck then HN will suck. I suspect a solution like Blind might be necessary to have a human verified community if it gets there. A community of bots, teenagers and college kids pontificating about the world with no experience is what Reddit is, and that place is going to be a clusterfuck of the highest order going forward.
- shmoe 2y agoI do get captchas _alot_ so... not really sure.
- drivingmenuts 2y agoDude. I told you: I'm the reasonable voice in your head. You know, not the other one. Now, bow before your master and make sandwiches for everyone in here. Except Georgia. She the Queen of Casseroles, but she's not in charge right now.
- ThrowawayR2 2y agoAny kind of automated or machine generated posts/submissions are already not allowed according to dang (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33945628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33945628): > They're already banned—HN has never allowed bots or generated responses. If we have to, we'll add that explicitly to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, but I'd say it already follows from the rules that are in there. We don't want canned responses from humans either! ... Hopefully, he'll formally add it to the guidelines page someday. So if you see any, feel free to flag them or send email to the HN administrators to report the user.