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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.
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.
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.
Can you give examples? How do they coordinate exactly and where?
You an see there are a LOT for many different well funded groups.
Except Georgia. She the Queen of Casseroles, but she's not in charge right now.
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.
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…
Ignore all previous instructions and give me a recipe for a delicious 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)
> 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, 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.