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Ask HN: Autoposting script?

5 points by bkrausz ↗ HN
So as some of you may have noticed, the last 5 or so xkcd's posted have been by me. I wrote up a little autoposting script at some ungodly hour and set it up in a cron to post new comics. I am not doing this for the karma, since anyone looking at my submission history (which I assume YC would do) would notice the source of whatever karma I get. I post because I figured someone would post the xkcd at some point anyway, and I may as well save people the time.

The issue is, I've seem enough negative reactions to warrant concern. While nothing is preventing me from posting the latest comic manually each day, and considering xkcd's low volume I feel it's not a problem, I have no desire to piss anyone off. I'm also curious about how the community feels about this practice. So tell me HN: is such a practice (in the volume of 3 submissions a week) offensive? If there are a significant number of upvotes on comments against me, I will stop this practice, but I feel that tasteful bots, when used in moderation, would make things easier and more efficient on HN, though I can definitely see a potential issue with it snowballing (i.e. posting every TechCrunch entry as someone previously suggested).

Also, how do people feel about the idea of having something like an xkcd bot account, that way no one in particular benefits from the karma gain? While I recognize that most of us have xkcd in our readers, there are some who only want to view the interesting ones, which is what upvoting is meant to do anyway.

If anyone has been bothered by my use of an autoposter I apologize, I never meant to offend :).

14 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 25.2 ms ] thread
aston
I was planning at some vague point in the future to make bots for Techcrunch, PG, PB and xkcd just to take away that way to game karma. I think it'd be a net positive for the community, personally.
bkrausz
The problem is we don't want to flood HN with stuff like this...someone should look at the HN/Posts % (number of entries posted to HN/total number of entries)...I'd say if it's around a constant 2/3 it's worth doing. If I have the time I'll try to investigate this at some point...pg would be in a much better providing this info.

http://searchyc.com/top/domains shows that TechCrunch may be worth doing this for...

aston
100% of PG articles make it here, lots of TC's make it here (although many don't hit the front page), probably half of the xkcd's do, and PB's generally make it here eventually.

Also, I omitted Matt Maroon before, but his articles generally get posted, too, even when they're little comments and not actually essays.

bkrausz
Search of SearchYC based on title on 30 TechCrunch articles from March 27-29 found 7/30 articles = ~25%

PG's articles get a huge amount of karma regardless, that should probably be botted but may never make it in time (I don't know how quickly the RSS feed is generated).

rms
Doesn't bother me, except sometimes xkcd isn't on topic.
henning
It's clear now that many people have thought of or implemented autosubmitter bots. This could get ugly.

Maybe there should be a News.YC spinoff exclusively devoted to karma-bot wars so that human users don't have to witness the carnage on the front page.

tgdavies
What's the point of copying every article of anything which has its own RSS feed to news.yc?

Anyone who wants to see every xkcd will already have the RSS feed in their reader. Posting it here is just noise.

pierrefar
Agreed. Those that want to read xkcd or TC or whatever will subscribe to their respective feeds.

I like the diversity of things here on HN.

dcurtis
This is a terrible, horrible idea, and I think you should turn off your autosubmitting script.

I think users should only submit things they personally think are awesome and would interest other people.

Autoposting scripts remove the human element of "sharing links" which is what this site was built on.

Tichy
Is really every XKCD cartoon appearing on HN? I don't subscribe to xkcd, and I was hoping only a few actually get posted here.

The "problem" of bots and news sites is an interesting one, though. But why not experiment on Reddit, rather than HN?

bkrausz
I'm not experimenting so much as trying to provide a beneficial service (at 6am the differences blur significantly though).

I'd say around 25% of xkcd's are remotely relevant to this site, the question is whether or not an automated source of 1:3 signal/noise ratio is worth it.

jgrahamc
Don't do that.

If the community wants everything from a particular site submitted then let's ask PG to scrape their RSS feed.

I'm sometimes tempted to post everything from my blog, but I look at things and decide whether I think the community here will be interested: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150865

ericb
Blind submission removes the implicit "I thought this was valuable" filter and decreases the signal-to-noise ratio.
bkrausz
Ok, by overwhelming majority the script is down.

Just don't flame me if I (as a human) post an xkcd that I actually find relevant :)