101–110 of 147 posts
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Why doesn’t HN have botspam then?
Traffic + downvotes. A blog may have downvotes but not the human traffic to utilize them
To protect against false positives, accounts with enough karma can vouch for dead comments to bring them back to life.
Botspam killed blog comments, same way it killed discussion boards. Even if it's not link spam, the bots are using comment fields for C&C for botnets. Besides that, I think there is a point in removing comments and interactivity in general. They hardly ever invite any interesting discussion. Comments are generally impersonal and low effort and invite a lot of shitty behavior. If you have something substantive to say,…
The discussion boards I'm on that are still active do not have a spam problem. The usual methods of limiting new accounts and giving established accounts a bit of moderation power (e.g. several accounts flagging a post as spam hides it from other users) seems to be sufficient as long as the traffic is there.
I think the bigger problem in most cases is that people have left for more centralized platforms because the barrier to entry is lower, or some parts of the user experience are better. One part of the UX that centralized platforms do better is allowing users to get updates on more conversations in one place. Polling a large number of sites gets annoying, and email is not a great notification system (web push notifications are improving this).
More federated systems could help here, though I haven't been especially impressed with Matrix or ActivityPub-based social networking so far.
Upon further reflection, it's also about sense of community, or lack thereof - on social networks, I know who's reading my comments and I can engage with them. On blogs... I have no idea who else is reading it, I may never come back to see any responses, I may not care about anybody else's comments without context to put them in, so neither the incentive nor feedback loop are there for me.
(I may comment on e.g. Rock Paper Shotgun, but I don't consider it a blog - it's an online magazine and it has both the sense of community and daily return value. )
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Why doesn’t HN have botspam then?
Larger forums like HN and Reddit have the economies of scale on their side. They have a lot more time and money to throw on solving the problem than a blogger or someone who runs a phpBB-forum as a hobby.
No, they get others to do it
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> Even if it's not link spam, the bots are using comment fields for C&C for botnets Any examples of this that aren’t just PoCs?
It's very hard to actually demonstrate without a doubt, but a lot of the blog spam you see basically has a very clear numbers station vibe. No links, just fairly obviously machine generated word salad.
The problem isn't having comments on your blog, it's having locally scoped identities to comment on your blog. It essentially removes all cost for "destructive" participation, whether it be spam, harassment or other trolling. This is solved either by moving commenting entirely off-site to a larger network, or by using identities from a larger scope.
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Maybe that's an idea for a product: find discussions on HN, Twitter, Reddit, FB etc about your blog post and embed them on the blog where you would usually see the comments. Not sure how big the market is, but...
I've thought about this, and would love a browser extension that would let me see all the past discussions when I visit a website that has previously been submitted to HN. Maybe one day I'll make it.