Yet, the quality of discussions is often really high, and I usually learn more from the community than the articles themselves.
Is HN bot-free mainly due to the niche audience it's targeting, or is it because the community is good at downvoting useless bot comments?
I think we should appreciate @dang's and other maintainers' efforts, too.
The same is not true of, say, Reddit, where you can build up karma posting jokes and cat pictures, and where there is higher mass market potential for shilling products.
Even if you had a magic bot that evaded dang and all the downvoters, your ad for weight loss pills will fall on deaf ears. It’s just not the right audience.
That said, I do occasionally wonder if certain of the comments are from real people. Although an occasional comment from me could have others thinking the same.
A few years ago it was about 300k unique daily views. Inwoukd guess it's around 600k now. So not really small, but small relative to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
name at example dot com
If you posted your (let's say) Gmail address on HN, the spam level of your inbox wouldn't change. Gmail might work a bit harder filtering out some spam, but it would be lowest-common-denominator stuff that they easily recognize.
I have seen some people doing things like //\\//name\///at\\\///domain///\\com which might be more unexpected, and therefore might help. But any practice if it becomes common will be seen through.
HN I see sometimes where it isn't the link that's the goal, it's the top comment for the link. So the OP is a bot with a clean record but the top commenter is the narrative pusher.
Plus there's the good old link to the blacklisted but unbanned topics. Check out J**n P***n's spam and they aren't blocked but the accounts that post them get a strike.
It's a moving target and they get better all the time. I red it somewhere that you could post about i*l and p***e and in minutes the bots would appear, but the i word has gotten a lot more sophisticated lately. Their s emm emm operation is among the best in the world.
Lastly, many state actors are very good on offense (S and the I word) but everyone is terrible on defense. It's still the wild west out there and the bad guys are winning.
My $0.02 YMMV
(also, they shadowban people a lot sadly, it's hard to use throwaways sometimes)
They get flagged in just a few minutes usually.
I no longer visit other social media, but I remember the feeling of impotence upon seeing nothing happen after you report a quadruplicate post, or unhinged death threat, or troll piffle, or disingenuous attempt at self-promotion.
Elsewhere, some users end up with learned helplessness and just accept the site is 50% shit; other users end up being hyper-vigilant and add to the noise with rants and accusations.
Here on HN mods and reasonable users still have control.
http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
That was twenty years ago (about).
Before spam filters were common and when spam was just getting started. Back when spam filters they were cutting edge.
I suspect it has kept pace and that’s why HN has so little spam…but that’s just a guess.
Both.
One mod wasn't sufficient to keep bots at bay on a podunk PHP forum with hundreds of members 15yr ago. It's not sufficient to stem the tide of far, far better bots that lurk the internet today. There's other mechanisms at play.
We do also write software, so the mod work is (thankfully) not all manual.
And they are…?
So basically it's a tough nut to crack for little gain. Why bother when you can write Reddit bots that are far more impactful and will earn far more money.
Edit: Yes I know stuff is recommended to be bought or sold here. It's absolutely nothing compared to Reddit where you can pimp viral content for a brand as top level content and where you have subs that are specifically about consumerists things (what X should I buy type subs).
There are plenty of direct and indirect recommendations for goods and services. "Who's hiring" is a good example of that. Posts about a particular product often garner posts about similar products. To be clear, I agree it's not the main thrust of this site, but let's not be blind to it happening, often for purely benign purpose.