3 ms·

With AI running rampant, it seems security through obscurity is basically the best thing we have. Everyone knows reddit, facebook, xitter, etc so any clown can

With AI running rampant, it seems security through obscurity is basically the best thing we have. Everyone knows reddit, facebook, xitter, etc so any clown can and does have bots running loose. HN is "obscure" in that most normies don't know about this place, and so it's relatively safe from the floods of spam. But I think it's just a matter of time until non-tech people start looking for those few bastions of human comments online, come across this place, and a great flood begins and it'll never be undone. After that, I guess it'll be a rise of invite-only forums like we had in the early 2000s all over again.

ultratalk 7mo ago
Eternal AI september.
- JetSetIlly 7mo ago
  Eternal LLMber
Mountain_Skies 7mo ago
I've asked ChatGPT a question about something I read in a thread here and it responded with a comment from that thread, even though the thread was less than an hour old. HN is well known in the tech community and there are certain subjects, especially anything involving Israel or India, that nearly instantly result in a flood of comments from bad actors. HN isn't Reddit but it's also a shadow of what it once was, which is driving away more of the productive participation in favor of agenda-based posting.
- WesolyKubeczek 7mo ago
  Note that these topics often involve comments which you can predict very easily. Internet users are like that, agenda or no. Wasn’t it in the heyday of forums that you could recognize the most prolific/annoying members by their style and vocabulary? A model should have no problem pulling such things off.
  - WarmWash 7mo ago
    It pretty regular that for major post, you can find the same few highly upvoted comments on all the platforms with the story
- gzread 7mo ago
  Search engines seem to index HN in near real time. They must have custom scraping code to follow the incrementing post IDs.
  - enoint 7mo ago
    Claw plugins for HN APIs arrived pretty early.
r721 7mo ago
Dang told me in 2019 that HN gets 150M page views a month, so it's not that obscure actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21201120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21201120
- ahofmann 7mo ago
  150m page views a month is peanuts and very far away from the "social" networks numbers. I don't have those numbers, but I know how many page views we had 2011 while running a german browser game community.
  - armchairhacker 7mo ago
    The internet seems to have grown massively within the past couple years (unfortunately, almost certainly because of bots). I bet the number today is orders of magnitude higher.
    - troosevelt 7mo ago
      I would bet money that HN's traffic is not orders of magnitude higher than 2020. HN is not as popular as HNers think it is.
      - armchairhacker 7mo ago
        We don't disagree. The extra traffic is almost if not entirely bots (especially scrapers)
firecall 7mo ago
> After that, I guess it'll be a rise of invite-only forums like we had in the early 2000s all over again. Which would be totally fine with me TBH. Rather amusingly, invite-only torrent sites might be the only semi-public authentically human hangouts left on the internet!
- eikenberry 7mo ago
  I was thinking the same thing, that this wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. I'm curious how far it will go.. if we'll get invite-only mesh networks with self-contained mini-internets and the like.
tlonny 7mo ago
HN may not be “mainstream” but it is certainly _very_ vulnerable to bot spam given the topics discussed and the make-up of the audience. You can already see it happening now - at least the bots that write like vanilla Claude/ChatGPT. Presumably there is a much larger hidden cohort of bots that are instructed to talk more naturally and thus are better adept at flying under the radar…
- dangus 7mo ago
  I would say that HN has a lot of features that would be seen as draconian in how much they limit your interaction by other platforms. You can barely comment before you are rate limited. You can’t upvote until you’ve been around a pretty long time. New accounts are given a green badge of dishonor that makes users scrutinize their comments more. I’m not saying these are bad things but they’re probably too restrictive for a social media network that’s just meant to be a good fun time.
  - gzread 7mo ago
    If you are rate limited, a moderator has manually applied a rate limit to your account. Accounts are not rate limited by default. You can appeal the decision by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
    - Cpoll 7mo ago
      I think there's a short-term rate limit applied to everyone, e.g. you get a message if you try to post three replies in the same minute. I've seen it once, and I don't think I'm active enough to have earned a manual flag.
  - qingcharles 7mo ago
    The karma points you get on HN are worthless, which I think is a bonus. They don't buy you anything. On Reddit, for instance, many parts of the site are walled off until you have "farmed" enough karma to participate.
    - 7mo ago

ultratalk 7mo ago

Eternal AI september.

JetSetIlly 7mo ago
Eternal LLMber

Mountain_Skies 7mo ago

I've asked ChatGPT a question about something I read in a thread here and it responded with a comment from that thread, even though the thread was less than an hour old. HN is well known in the tech community and there are certain subjects, especially anything involving Israel or India, that nearly instantly result in a flood of comments from bad actors. HN isn't Reddit but it's also a shadow of what it once was, which is driving away more of the productive participation in favor of agenda-based posting.

WesolyKubeczek 7mo ago
Note that these topics often involve comments which you can predict very easily. Internet users are like that, agenda or no. Wasn’t it in the heyday of forums that you could recognize the most prolific/annoying members by their style and vocabulary? A model should have no problem pulling such things off.
- WarmWash 7mo ago
  It pretty regular that for major post, you can find the same few highly upvoted comments on all the platforms with the story
gzread 7mo ago
Search engines seem to index HN in near real time. They must have custom scraping code to follow the incrementing post IDs.
- enoint 7mo ago
  Claw plugins for HN APIs arrived pretty early.

r721 7mo ago

Dang told me in 2019 that HN gets 150M page views a month, so it's not that obscure actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21201120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21201120

ahofmann 7mo ago
150m page views a month is peanuts and very far away from the "social" networks numbers. I don't have those numbers, but I know how many page views we had 2011 while running a german browser game community.
- armchairhacker 7mo ago
  The internet seems to have grown massively within the past couple years (unfortunately, almost certainly because of bots). I bet the number today is orders of magnitude higher.
  - troosevelt 7mo ago
    I would bet money that HN's traffic is not orders of magnitude higher than 2020. HN is not as popular as HNers think it is.
    - armchairhacker 7mo ago
      We don't disagree. The extra traffic is almost if not entirely bots (especially scrapers)

firecall 7mo ago

> After that, I guess it'll be a rise of invite-only forums like we had in the early 2000s all over again. Which would be totally fine with me TBH. Rather amusingly, invite-only torrent sites might be the only semi-public authentically human hangouts left on the internet!

eikenberry 7mo ago
I was thinking the same thing, that this wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. I'm curious how far it will go.. if we'll get invite-only mesh networks with self-contained mini-internets and the like.

tlonny 7mo ago

HN may not be “mainstream” but it is certainly _very_ vulnerable to bot spam given the topics discussed and the make-up of the audience. You can already see it happening now - at least the bots that write like vanilla Claude/ChatGPT. Presumably there is a much larger hidden cohort of bots that are instructed to talk more naturally and thus are better adept at flying under the radar…

dangus 7mo ago
I would say that HN has a lot of features that would be seen as draconian in how much they limit your interaction by other platforms. You can barely comment before you are rate limited. You can’t upvote until you’ve been around a pretty long time. New accounts are given a green badge of dishonor that makes users scrutinize their comments more. I’m not saying these are bad things but they’re probably too restrictive for a social media network that’s just meant to be a good fun time.
- gzread 7mo ago
  If you are rate limited, a moderator has manually applied a rate limit to your account. Accounts are not rate limited by default. You can appeal the decision by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
  - Cpoll 7mo ago
    I think there's a short-term rate limit applied to everyone, e.g. you get a message if you try to post three replies in the same minute. I've seen it once, and I don't think I'm active enough to have earned a manual flag.
- qingcharles 7mo ago
  The karma points you get on HN are worthless, which I think is a bonus. They don't buy you anything. On Reddit, for instance, many parts of the site are walled off until you have "farmed" enough karma to participate.
  - 7mo ago