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Comment by nico | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I’m afraid this won’t really go anywhere, but it’s a good conversation to have

On one hand, judging by the comments, there’s quite a bit of interest on disclosure

On the other hand, corporations and big advertisers (spammers?) might not really want it. Or is there a positive aspect in disclosure for them?

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>I’m afraid this won’t really go anywhere

California tends to be pretty good (well, "good". relative to federal and other states) at getting consumer friendly bills passed. They don't always work, but the intent for many bills feel focused on the people.

>On the other hand, corporations and big advertisers (spammers?) might not really want it.

Of course they don't. I would love one day seeing how many bots there truly are on Reddit and seeing how close to Dead Internet we are.

I don't think HN hits the 10m threshold to require disclosure. But I also doubt many bots are on here.

As bots get smarter we need to give them more access not less, people have been used as useful idiots and puppets for far too long I don't see why we should make an exception for bots.

If having to disclose to your users/customers that they're interacting with a bot makes them stop interacting then that sucks for you. I work in this space and we proudly advertise when you're talking to a bot and our users actually choose it over the option to connect to a human.

Our staff do better work but the bot is instant. It seems people would rather go back and forth a few times and be in the drivers seat than wait on a person.

I see a similar phenomenon in a lot of places that have both kiosks and counters with people. But it seems to depend on how simple the transaction or process is

If it’s simple enough for self-service, most people prefer the kiosks, sometimes even queueing for the kiosks and avoiding the people at the counters (eg. movie theaters, fast food places, supermarket checkout)

But if it’s something more complicated, people tend to either prefer (or end up anyway at) the counters with people (eg. airports, car rentals, in-store customer service)

Because of scale. Fool one person and you're a conman, fool a million and you're a politician. But with software anybody can jump to arbitrarily high scales, limited only by money.

I'd say if you control what information 1.411 billion people have access to you have scale on your side.

So it's not scale.

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