Item — HN Reader

I don't think that's true at all.

One of the things HN does is not let you interact in certain ways until you've earned sufficient karma. This is a basic proof-of-work. If your bot can't average a positive karma, then it'll never get certain privileges.

Not to say the system is perfectly tuned for bots, because it's not. The point is that proof of identity is not the only option.

2 comments

HN is almost entirely about the comments. Voting is useful as a tool for loosely sorting content but otherwise, HN could easily do without it. Some of the most valuable comments come from people with barely any karma. And that’s why HN is great! The restrictions on voting and flagging for new users could be removed without impacting the quality of HN. I can’t imagine any scenario in which HN’s current system could survive the same slopification that is happening on reddit.

HN is doing okay at the moment because nobody is yet publishing ebooks and videos on how to astroturf HN to launch your SaaS. Unfortunately, Reddit hasn’t escaped that fate.

They get the privilege of immediately polluting the website with LLM-generated comments.

Many of them sound and look completely normal and have others on here interacting with them. They don't use em dashes, sometimes they'll use all lowercase text, sometimes the owner of the bot will come out and start commenting to throw you off.

All examples I've witnessed here.

HN should immediately start implementing at least some basic bot detection methods without requiring us to email them every time. I've discovered multiple bots make detailed comments within 30 seconds of each other in different threads, something a normal human wouldn't be able to do. That should be at least flagging the account for review. Obviously they'll get smarter and not do that soon but it would help in the short term.

I'd say it's not an issue but everything I described above has happened in less than a month and every day now I'm discovering bots here.

I do agree that bots are or will be an existential risk for every online forum. But I also think that an attempt to fix it that takes away anonymity is a cure that's worse than the disease.

My best understanding is yes -- there are signal that somebody is a bot (like how quickly they post), but if HN bans based on those signals then whoever made the bot will keep tweaking the code.

I feel like I rarely see bots in the top 5 comments of any article I read, or otherwise causing major disruption.

I think we just need to get creative about ways a platform can prove somebody is an invested human without tying it back to any personally identifiable information.