The article is about automated web scraping, not bots writing content.
replyThe commenters here don't care what the article is about when they can't access the article and the much more concerning question not about web scraping is.
replyI've thought about this a bit and I can't really see why someone would want to write AI content here other than to spam ads but they are handled quickly. Does anyone see AI content with a clear motivation or agenda here? There are very few rep based privileges right so that seems like an unlikely motivation as well.
replyMost of the HN bot accounts I see have a link-to-vibecoded-product in bio, and/or are trying to build up "organic" activity before a Show HN post for the same.
replyA less publicly-visible motive would be if they were building up accounts to use for paid-upvote schemes.
You can automate shilling to drive or at least influence opinion.
replyThis is a venture capitalist driven community that attracts the sleaziest kind of spammers you could think of under the badge of growth hacking and networking. Besides this very obvious motivation to spam you have all kinds of nerds here eager to do it just because they can (on one of the most famous tech places where registration is made as easy as possible)
replyI felt a vibe change, some are obvious and some not, but it does feel different, the main change i've seen is in downvotes, I don't say very controversial things and have had many things very quickly downvoted, and then slowly upvoted, I think hn was very slow to downvote in the past (except obvious trolls/spam). So for me the main worry is not even the comments, but the invisible bias generated by voting.
reply> Those who know have every incentive not to share
replyWhy do you say that?
I think HN is one of the better ones these days. I have no data to back this up, but the comments aren't like reddit comments. Go into any reddit post on the main subs, and you won't have to scroll very far to get a comment about Trump derailing the whole thing.
replyDigg's recent shutdown message talked about how bad and aggressive bots were. I'd love to see Kevin and Alex post in depth about lessons learned, Dead Internet, and call out social sites.