Does HN have a bot problem?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46544746

by onesandofgrain • 7 months ago

7 12 7 months ago

news.ycombinator.com

michelsedgh2• 7 months ago

I certainly feel a lot of the comments are bots. especially if the post goes to front page

I do so as well, especially if there is any discussion of AI models. If it's Claude someone says how Qwen is better, if it's Codex, someone says Claude is better, if it's Gemini someone says OpenAI is better. I get it, it's all a battle of the most users as more users=more finetuning, but goodness lord. Everything is one overfitted mess and I can't bear read the comments anymore. Shill after shill

saidnooneever• 7 months ago

do you think they are really bots / automated or might it be that due to growing user-base quality might level down towards a more general internet platform quality? (i have no idea how to distinguish the two without logs / metrics so i have no clue, just a thought)

michelsedgh2• 7 months ago

i dont think its general internet platform quality, especially on political stuff hacker news feels more like bluesky rather than X thats why i feel like its bots just commenting not real humans. ofc theres no metric, just how i feel. and humans like if ur comment has basic common sense in it, it gets down voted haard

bediger4000• 7 months ago

I don't think there's a bot problem, but I do think there's a few voting rings.

onesandofgrain4• 7 months ago

The voting I don't mind, but the comments, they reek AI-slop, all the top ones, almost always on all AI model posts.

MisterTea3• 7 months ago

About a month ago I flagged an AI slop article that had three green accounts posting nonsense comments like "great article!" within one minute of posting. Clearly sock puppets. Few hours later it was completely removed by mods.

So yeah, it exists but to what degree?

onesandofgrain4• 7 months ago

This last week man... the amount of Gemini,Codex,Claude-shilling has been through the f* roof. Literally everyday someone is talking about how "mystically good" Claude is, how Claude is different. Wow Claude, wow codex and gemini, never going back to Qwen blabla. It's nauseating I should probably take a Meclizine to deal with it,

MisterTea3• 7 months ago

How did you verify these posts were from legit bots? Can you share an example?

I say that because I believe there are a lot of devs who really want that stuff to be true. They want to be able to perform better, they want to do less "boring work" so they can move on to bigger things and so on. And just like a person can be a fan of a sports team, a form of brand loyalty, I can certainly see people forming the same relationships with AI brands for $REASON. I don't doubt AI brand fans exist. Humans get sentimental and attached to things. Especially things that they perceive as having helped them.

password54321• 7 months ago

If you click on most profiles that comment they are at least a few years old, so probably not. But there may be an astroturfing problem.

From observation, Twitter seems to have the worst bot:person ratio. Reddit feels like it has more bots then ever as well now with a lot of accounts either being fresh or getting suspended. YouTube, I don't even look at comments but probably garbage.

Does HN have a bot problem?

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