Comment by kdheiwns
17 hours ago
With AI running rampant, it seems security through obscurity is basically the best thing we have. Everyone knows reddit, facebook, xitter, etc so any clown can and does have bots running loose. HN is "obscure" in that most normies don't know about this place, and so it's relatively safe from the floods of spam. But I think it's just a matter of time until non-tech people start looking for those few bastions of human comments online, come across this place, and a great flood begins and it'll never be undone. After that, I guess it'll be a rise of invite-only forums like we had in the early 2000s all over again.
HN may not be “mainstream” but it is certainly _very_ vulnerable to bot spam given the topics discussed and the make-up of the audience.
You can already see it happening now - at least the bots that write like vanilla Claude/ChatGPT. Presumably there is a much larger hidden cohort of bots that are instructed to talk more naturally and thus are better adept at flying under the radar…
I would say that HN has a lot of features that would be seen as draconian in how much they limit your interaction by other platforms.
You can barely comment before you are rate limited.
You can’t upvote until you’ve been around a pretty long time.
New accounts are given a green badge of dishonor that makes users scrutinize their comments more.
I’m not saying these are bad things but they’re probably too restrictive for a social media network that’s just meant to be a good fun time.
I’ve never seen people on the likes of blackhatworld selling hacker news accounts or services. The glass half full take on this is that hn is surprisingly robust in its ability to deal with vote manipulation.
If you are rate limited, a moderator has manually applied a rate limit to your account. Accounts are not rate limited by default. You can appeal the decision by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
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The karma points you get on HN are worthless, which I think is a bonus. They don't buy you anything. On Reddit, for instance, many parts of the site are walled off until you have "farmed" enough karma to participate.
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Dang told me in 2019 that HN gets 150M page views a month, so it's not that obscure actually:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21201120
150m page views a month is peanuts and very far away from the "social" networks numbers. I don't have those numbers, but I know how many page views we had 2011 while running a german browser game community.
The internet seems to have grown massively within the past couple years (unfortunately, almost certainly because of bots). I bet the number today is orders of magnitude higher.
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> After that, I guess it'll be a rise of invite-only forums like we had in the early 2000s all over again.
Which would be totally fine with me TBH.
Rather amusingly, invite-only torrent sites might be the only semi-public authentically human hangouts left on the internet!
I was thinking the same thing, that this wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. I'm curious how far it will go.. if we'll get invite-only mesh networks with self-contained mini-internets and the like.
Eternal AI september.
Eternal LLMber
I've asked ChatGPT a question about something I read in a thread here and it responded with a comment from that thread, even though the thread was less than an hour old. HN is well known in the tech community and there are certain subjects, especially anything involving Israel or India, that nearly instantly result in a flood of comments from bad actors. HN isn't Reddit but it's also a shadow of what it once was, which is driving away more of the productive participation in favor of agenda-based posting.
Search engines seem to index HN in near real time. They must have custom scraping code to follow the incrementing post IDs.
Claw plugins for HN APIs arrived pretty early.
Note that these topics often involve comments which you can predict very easily. Internet users are like that, agenda or no. Wasn’t it in the heyday of forums that you could recognize the most prolific/annoying members by their style and vocabulary? A model should have no problem pulling such things off.
It pretty regular that for major post, you can find the same few highly upvoted comments on all the platforms with the story