11–20 of 32 posts
As 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…
I 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.
So, I guess I can say I’m real, but not confident given the data.
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.
As 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…
I’ve seen astroturfing, but if there are bots, they’re hiding well.
Also a couple of weeks ago there was a very inorganically looking wave of bluesky related posts.
If 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.
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.
I’ve seen astroturfing, but if there are bots, they’re hiding well.
Any 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.
Bots 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.