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Ask HN: Any idea how many bots are here?

6 points by andrewclunn ↗ HN
Considering the ease of account creation, do we have any notion of which people here are really people? Seems like karma farming and networks to bury certain stories / comments or promote others wouldn't be too hard. Not looking for special insight into giving away the measures taken to prevent such things, but I am curious if other fellow humans are also concerned over possible unwelcome bots

- A real hominid using a board of keys

6 comments

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DerekBickerton
You mean a Sybil attack[0]? It's probably been done countless times on HN. Although if the bots are posting interesting things and are not commenting in bad faith, then we should welcome that. Karma is a useless metric in the grand scheme of things, and having lots of karma means nothing to me (and I'm not a bot BTW). I just enjoy my downvote privilege which means I can mini-moderate without having to be someone like @dang or other admins.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

mikece
I will answer your question as soon as you identify all of the cars in a series of images...
eimrine
> do we have any notion of which people here are really people?

Need more clear definition of "here".

Trouble_007
From : dang 21 hours ago : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32571890

>I'm sorry, because I realize this is well-intentioned, but we don't allow bots to post to HN so I have to ban this account.

The reason we don't allow bots is that we're trying to optimize for curious conversation, and that requires human beings taking a personal interest in a topic and/or each other.