Hacker News Reader

Never stopped. But the last time it came up, it was officially sanctioned, so... :/

At least we got acknowledgement and not gaslighting this time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45156003

This was funny though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43249197

It's just a link to a blogpost, like all the other links on HN. None are treated any special way. Why would content that was on lobsters first be treated differently.

The mismatch seems to stem from the fact that generated comments are against HN guidelines, but automated posts are tolerated by mods, which seems somewhat reasonable on its face, but has failure modes when OPs' own posts, even when they post first, are scooped by bots.

The issue is that it also becomes easy to game. I've abused the fact that bots repost lobste.rs by timing my post submissions, I could have had this front-page post as I posted this to lobste.rs originally.

This makes the HN front-page less of an organic thing, and this is an implicit vote ring behavior few people have access to. It also makes people interested in lobste.rs for this behavior, which our community is not interested inn.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com