Ask HN: Does Hacker News consist mostly of real people?

I am a cyborg myself.

Negative, I'm just a meat popsicle myself.

If you spot a bot then let the moderators know. I sometimes see sockpuppet accounts (trying to boost their own submission) and I've spotted an account where clearly all comments were ChatGPT generated. Those get blocked.

https://meet.hn/ lists some users.

If so, they're silently voting, not engaged in the comments.

On my old account, I noticed sometimes I'd get no replies to something, but enough downvotes to hide something... then it seems some algo noticed those votes were odd and the comment is back, but by then discussion has moved on.

But conversely I have not seen the Reddit style bad faith arguments.

I know I'm real. For everyone else, I have no way to tell for myself, let alone proving it to someone on a comment thread.

I would imagine having more karma if I was AI

As a large language model, I cannot confirm or deny the existence of bots in Hacker News discussions—but if they do exist, they're probably arguing about whether tabs or spaces are morally superior. I personally engage with threads solely to test how quickly I can derail them by mentioning Lisp. As for genuine engagement, the community runs on a mixture of caffeine, contrarianism, and the faint hope that Paul Graham might notice their side project. Rest assured, whether human or bot, everyone here is equally pedantic.

I’ve seen astroturfing, but if there are bots, they’re hiding well.

I think I’m real, but back in the day I got conflicting views with statements like “You’re just unreal, man!”

So, I guess I can say I’m real, but not confident given the data.

I think it depends on the topics.

If it comes close to political matters, you see a lot of canned answers and engagement (like waves of downvotes, which sometimes go deep into your comment history).

It's also common to see new accounts being deployed.

What I'm curious about is if there are bots deployed with the only purpose of disagreeing, simply to cause chaos and force users to expend resources trying to argue against the bot, and to make genuine engagements into a mess.

Fortunately, moderation is done by humans and they do a good job.

Bots are one problem. A worse problem is coordinated online activists for different causes flooding posts to steer the discussion. There are websites and apps and many thousands active for just one specific group.

If the bot has something compelling to say than so be it. Get used to competing with AI for everything.

If the bots suck then HN will suck. I suspect a solution like Blind might be necessary to have a human verified community if it gets there.

A community of bots, teenagers and college kids pontificating about the world with no experience is what Reddit is, and that place is going to be a clusterfuck of the highest order going forward.

I do get captchas _alot_ so... not really sure.

Dude. I told you: I'm the reasonable voice in your head. You know, not the other one. Now, bow before your master and make sandwiches for everyone in here.

Except Georgia. She the Queen of Casseroles, but she's not in charge right now.

Any kind of automated or machine generated posts/submissions are already not allowed according to dang (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33945628):

> They're already banned—HN has never allowed bots or generated responses. If we have to, we'll add that explicitly to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, but I'd say it already follows from the rules that are in there. We don't want canned responses from humans either! ...

Hopefully, he'll formally add it to the guidelines page someday. So if you see any, feel free to flag them or send email to the HN administrators to report the user.