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Comment by siva7 | Hacker News Reader

So the elephant in the room: How much of HN is bot generated? Those who know have every incentive not to share and those who don't have no way to figure it out. At this point i have to assume that every new account is a bot

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The article is about automated web scraping, not bots writing content.

The 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.

I 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.

I've noticed that too. I thought I was just posting particularly bad takes.

I'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.

Most 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.

A 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.

This 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)

That's a good point ... it's trivial to have an agent post something onto HN on your behalf, so even old accounts are not immune. It's just the nature of things now, until we get better technology to assign some sort of "ALIVENESS" attestation to folks without revealing identity too much.

> Those who know have every incentive not to share

Why 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.

Digg'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.

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