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by kdheiwns14 hours ago |
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upvoteby tlonny10 hours ago|
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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…

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upvoteby dangus6 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby HughParry51 minutes ago|
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I’ve never seen people on the likes of blackhatworld selling hacker news accounts or services. The glass half full take on this is that hn is surprisingly robust in its ability to deal with vote manipulation.
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upvoteby gzread6 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby Cpoll3 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby qingcharles5 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby 0dayz4 hours ago|
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Not exactly true.

You get the right to down vote and if I promote my totally not a scam product on HN, people will check my user account and see: on wow over 9000 karma? Gotta be trust worthy, when in truth it's just been karma farming.

HN does limit some of it, but it's not a panacea.

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upvoteby himata41133 hours ago|
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I don't know, never found much value in karma. I recreate an account at least once a year for no particular reason and it roughly takes me a week to get enough karma to do what is important (flagging posts).
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upvoteby wafflemaker2 hours ago|
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My account is literally 4 years old and I'm not even halfway there.

How do you do it?

And I'm trying to limit myself from saying unwanted things like criticizing ** or saying something nice about **. (Self censoring to avoid downvotes).

Maybe I should be more active.

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upvoteby r72112 hours ago|
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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

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upvoteby ahofmann12 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby armchairhacker10 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby troosevelt6 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby armchairhacker1 hours ago|
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We don't disagree. The extra traffic is almost if not entirely bots (especially scrapers)
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upvoteby firecall11 hours ago|
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> 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!

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upvoteby eikenberry1 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby ultratalk13 hours ago|
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Eternal AI september.
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upvoteby JetSetIlly12 hours ago|
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Eternal LLMber
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upvoteby Mountain_Skies13 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby gzread8 hours ago|
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Search engines seem to index HN in near real time. They must have custom scraping code to follow the incrementing post IDs.
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upvoteby enoint5 hours ago|
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Claw plugins for HN APIs arrived pretty early.
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upvoteby WesolyKubeczek11 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby WarmWash5 hours ago|
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It pretty regular that for major post, you can find the same few highly upvoted comments on all the platforms with the story
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