Ask HN: Are you talking to robots on Hacker News?

[songshu]

We are past the point that machine generated comments would survive and be engaged with by human users on Hacker News.

Have you suspected machine generated content in HN comment threads?

Would it pain you to discover you had responded to a machine?

Do you know anything about the prevalence of such content here or on other fora?

Do you disagree with my statement? Why?

[incomingpain]

>Have you suspected machine generated content in HN comment threads?

Yes absolutely. The thing which breaks bots is if you ask them to answer a specific question. They reveal themselves.

>Would it pain you to discover you had responded to a machine?

No.

Fundamentally the HN comment section has had its eternal september because of HN being listed high on the 'alternatives to reddit' options. HN now doesn't allow discussions.

Instead, the comments are about sorting your thoughts on the matter. See if there's thoughts which you haven't considered.

>Do you know anything about the prevalence of such content here or on other fora?

Bots reveal themselves through absurdity which makes sense in depth. A handshake with 5 hands as it were.

>Do you disagree with my statement? Why?

There's a 0% chance that there's no bots. Bots of vary degrees of sophistication have existed since irc days. My favourite I found was one which copied conversations from 1 irc channel to another. So conversations are happening which you think you are interacting with but truly you arent.

[gravitate]

Some have speculated that this account[0] is a bot, despite claims to the contrary in their bio[1]. Not all the comments look algorithmically generated, but some are obviously computer generated or run through some sort of program.

This is fine if you want to write anonymously. Not so fine when the comment is done in bad faith.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=daniel-cussen

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=daniel-cussen

[roflyear]

I guess this guy must be shadow banned. Sad.

[dangerface]

I think that most of online political opinions are bots spreading propaganda for who ever. When I talk to normal people about politics they have no idea what im on about.

[bediger4000]

Machine generated content - yes, absolutely. It wouldn't pain me in the least, Serdar Argic personally insulted me. Now, if dril was revealed to be a machine..

I think machine generated content isn't common on HN, because the lack of reply notifications means people fire and forget. Bots don't get much engagement. For some reason, I believe that Quora has a lot, that reddit has little, and that Twitter is swamped with it

[eimrine]

I would be glad if machines answer my questions.