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Postedabout 1 month ago
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I have a (very) small forum (maybe 100 active users), and it gets multiple bot signups every day, almost all from Russia or other bloc/satellite countries (or laundered through an obvious VPN). If we didn't filter them, we would have tens of thousands by now making hundreds of thousands of posts per day on a forum that gets maybe 20 posts per day.
> The option that involves goading everyone into being their worst selves
Because you people don't deserve to be your best selves living your best lives
Nothin' confusing about that
Doesn’t make this the place for that, but I appreciate the neo-Dadaist intentionality.
but if that's what they're doing here, they aren't very good at it.
Myself, I suspect that it's people trying to tune or test drive their own personal LLMs.
For example, when I send my first post, I find that I cannot see it on another device that is not logged in.
It might not have been shut down Manually by the admins; HN has its own antispam system.
In my opinion, these may automatically get you tagged and shadowbanned.
- using a VPN - posting instead of comment immediately after registration - posts containing unusual links (like personal blogs)
Replacing that with bots and thinking that's equivalent is actually really sad
Any puppet account you recognize is one that has already failed. Just like with websites, time is a major factor in detecting these type of accounts. So if you can get away with posting relatively innocuous content in an automated way for a few years you can build "trust" on these various platforms.
I imagine they would feel a lot better when they aren't the odd man out, and even more so to make up the vast majority.
As things continue to escalate.
The consequences of training on the HN corpus.
I am very confident that this is the case in YouTube comments, not so sure about elsewhere.
Farming karma on HN to boost stories seems the most likeliest reason for this - an enterprise which would maybe net 3 figures in advertising dollars. But also it could just be someone wasting everyone’s time for fun - who knows?
Don't underestimate the financial impact of getting to the frontpage of HN.
I had this story hit the frontpage two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296695
From that, I got around 100 subscriptions, which to date has netted me $2,673.85. That's from a platform that was designed to payout most of the subscription cost, where I actively encouraged people not to subscribe, and has since become inactive.
A small investment in bots can very easily be worth the payout, especially for those in LCOL countries.
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