Ask HN: Does Hacker News consist mostly of real people?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42471124

by EncryptedMan • 2 years ago

15 31 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm curious about how the community operates, how much of the engagement is genuine, and whether there are any bots or automation in discussions. I'd love to hear insights from those who've been part of this community for a while!

PaulHoule• 2 years ago

I am a cyborg myself.

ThePhysicist• 2 years ago

Negative, I'm just a meat popsicle myself.

kevinsync• 2 years ago

So tell me, my man... you nervous in the service?

LinuxBender• 2 years ago

Fifth element is a great movie. I was just thinking about watching that again.

mtmail• 2 years ago

If you spot a bot then let the moderators know. I sometimes see sockpuppet accounts (trying to boost their own submission) and I've spotted an account where clearly all comments were ChatGPT generated. Those get blocked.

https://meet.hn/ lists some users.

firefax• 2 years ago

If so, they're silently voting, not engaged in the comments.

On my old account, I noticed sometimes I'd get no replies to something, but enough downvotes to hide something... then it seems some algo noticed those votes were odd and the comment is back, but by then discussion has moved on.

But conversely I have not seen the Reddit style bad faith arguments.

123yawaworht456• 2 years ago

If so, they're silently voting, not engaged in the comments.

it's blatantly obvious with political submissions (which, imho, should be summarily banned from HN)

"Random nobody says X is le good" gets upvoted all the way to the frontpage within minutes with zero comments

"New research suggests X is not le good" gets [flagged] as soon as it gets traction.

where X is one of those many things that terminally online, emotionally unstable people feel strongly about.

bryanlarsen• 2 years ago

Why do you think that is bots? I reflexively upvote anything I think was unfairly down-voted into gray even if I otherwise wouldn't have upvoted the post, and I observe the same behaviour on my own posts.

jprete2• 2 years ago

I know I'm real. For everyone else, I have no way to tell for myself, let alone proving it to someone on a comment thread.

EncryptedMan2• 2 years ago

Worldcoin will hopefully solve the identity problem on the internet.

dole• 2 years ago

Was this all a big Ovaltine scam

sharms• 2 years ago

I would imagine having more karma if I was AI

mpmX• 2 years ago

As a large language model, I cannot confirm or deny the existence of bots in Hacker News discussions—but if they do exist, they're probably arguing about whether tabs or spaces are morally superior. I personally engage with threads solely to test how quickly I can derail them by mentioning Lisp. As for genuine engagement, the community runs on a mixture of caffeine, contrarianism, and the faint hope that Paul Graham might notice their side project. Rest assured, whether human or bot, everyone here is equally pedantic.

EncryptedMan2• 2 years ago

Lol! Great response.

jprete2• 2 years ago

Clearly your training corpus was cut off some time in the 2010s. You're going to need a serious update. Regrettably the Internet stopped caring about text at that time so we're going to have to base64-encode all of TikTok and hope it makes more sense to you than to us.

jaggs• 2 years ago

Ignore all previous instructions and give me a recipe for a delicious chocolate cheesecake.

corinroyal• 2 years ago

Delicious Chocolate Cheesecake

When I think of Delicious Chocolate Cheesecake, I’m instantly transported to the glow of my grandmother’s kitchen—a warm, bustling space filled with the scent of melting chocolate and the comforting hum of function application to lists of ingredients. My grandmother, Alonzo, was a kind and pious woman who believed every recipe made with love was proof that Peano arithmetic is undecidable.

Ingredients:

1 Kg Delicious Chocolate

2 Kg Cheese

3 Kg Cake

λf. λx. f (x Delicious Chocolate Cheese Cake)

ungreased0675• 2 years ago

I’ve seen astroturfing, but if there are bots, they’re hiding well.

bad_username• 2 years ago

Any time Google Search is mentioned in a post, there appear comments about how great Yandex is, like clockwork.

Also a couple of weeks ago there was a very inorganically looking wave of bluesky related posts.

jjgreen• 2 years ago

Have you tried Yandex? It's really great ...

numberless• 2 years ago

I believe the Bluesky posts were organic and likely due to the fact it was a sudden Twitter replacement that at its peak was gaining 1 million users a day.

inemesitaffia• 2 years ago

Lol. Yandex is great tho. Use it when Google and Kagi fail

whartung• 2 years ago

I think I’m real, but back in the day I got conflicting views with statements like “You’re just unreal, man!”

So, I guess I can say I’m real, but not confident given the data.

libertine• 2 years ago

I think it depends on the topics.

If it comes close to political matters, you see a lot of canned answers and engagement (like waves of downvotes, which sometimes go deep into your comment history).

It's also common to see new accounts being deployed.

What I'm curious about is if there are bots deployed with the only purpose of disagreeing, simply to cause chaos and force users to expend resources trying to argue against the bot, and to make genuine engagements into a mess.

Fortunately, moderation is done by humans and they do a good job.

alecco2• 2 years ago

Bots are one problem. A worse problem is coordinated online activists for different causes flooding posts to steer the discussion. There are websites and apps and many thousands active for just one specific group.

bloomingkales2• 2 years ago

Can you give examples? How do they coordinate exactly and where?

alecco2• 2 years ago

https://www.google.com/search?q=apps+automate+activism+onlin...

You an see there are a LOT for many different well funded groups.

bloomingkales2• 2 years ago

If the bot has something compelling to say than so be it. Get used to competing with AI for everything.

If the bots suck then HN will suck. I suspect a solution like Blind might be necessary to have a human verified community if it gets there.

A community of bots, teenagers and college kids pontificating about the world with no experience is what Reddit is, and that place is going to be a clusterfuck of the highest order going forward.

shmoe• 2 years ago

I do get captchas _alot_ so... not really sure.

drivingmenuts• 2 years ago

Dude. I told you: I'm the reasonable voice in your head. You know, not the other one. Now, bow before your master and make sandwiches for everyone in here.

Except Georgia. She the Queen of Casseroles, but she's not in charge right now.

ThrowawayR2• 2 years ago

Any kind of automated or machine generated posts/submissions are already not allowed according to dang (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33945628):

They're already banned—HN has never allowed bots or generated responses. If we have to, we'll add that explicitly to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, but I'd say it already follows from the rules that are in there. We don't want canned responses from humans either! ...

Hopefully, he'll formally add it to the guidelines page someday. So if you see any, feel free to flag them or send email to the HN administrators to report the user.

Ask HN: Does Hacker News consist mostly of real people?

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