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What % of HN is bots/AI do we think? This is the only site I use that has any social part to it, and I'm beginning to think that many of the comments aren't real. I don't know if it's in my head - but it all feels off to me. Either that or it's just a different crowd from years ago.

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easily 30-40%. you could see trends even as far back as 2020. same patterns as with reddit.

e.g. bunch of old accounts with random bursts of activity, often posting to old / stale threads (e.g. 2-3 days old, when no one is looking at them), and often saying generic one liners or regurgitating summarizations of top / most upvoted points.

except when the posts were about some hot topic, bet you can guess which ones...

AWS AI Researchers put bot traffic as high as 50% across the internet in this study from June 2024: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.05749

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