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Comment by selfunaware9 | Hacker News Reader

Good choice of a day to publish this meme article

Good choice of a day to spawn this meme account.

I keep saying this and you can check my comment history to verify - HN is botted to an extreme degree. There’s absolutely no restrictions on spinning up additional accounts and any hacker worth their salt could easily spin up an LLM to set up apparent opposition to a linked idea. It’s clear HN has absolutely no problem with this.

What is inexcusable is the large fraction of the community that sees the logic behind the article but avoids getting involved for fear of irritating some future employer, or just because they want to avoid confrontation here. We’re watching tech billionaires usher in a dystopian society in real time. And we want to talk about what exactly? Apparently anything but the Peter Thiel shaped elephant in the room.

Seems like HN is doing something to combat this, considering how many [dead] comments I see in every post (which you can enable by setting `showdead` in your user profile).

I've only recently enabled it so I don't know how frequent dead comments were before the LLM era.

Fair enough. I actually noticed that right after I posted this comment.

To be fair, I've been here for like 15 years and have had show dead on for most of it, and although the quality of them has certainly gotten lower, I'm not convinced that they are more frequent.

I think HN needs user karma and subdivisions/subforums in addition to the current system. Users will have a very limited amount of votes (like 1 or 2) per each user to up or down their karma. And subforums would have karma thresholds voted by participants, to prevent spam and low effort posting. There are even more complex approaches with better self-control too.

Sure, such systems have their own drawbacks, but as a complete system, they are usually better on average than no-karma forums.

PS: current karma should be better called a score or something similar, it is not very useful.

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