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Ask HN: Has Hacker News already been Infiltrated by Clawd Bots?

4 points by baxtr ↗ HN
With the rise of LLM bot networks and boards, I’m wondering if HN has already been infiltrated by bots.

EDIT What I mean: I’m wondering if people let their bots post/comment on their behalf. I’m wondering how we can detect and prevent this from happening at scale.

I don’t think simple things account creation date alone is a reliable qualifier. You could easily give your bot access to post using an old account.

3 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 21.4 ms ] thread
rvz
So we are re-inventing what was then called a 'botnet' but with LLMs.

What's old is now 'new' again.

bell-cot
What does "infiltrated by bots" mean? I'm sure there are some users running scripts, bots, and/or ai's here. Others are obviously just here to pitch their product, or seem like shills for various things.

But overall - whatever dang & co are doing to minimize the problem seems to be working fine.

gus_massa
If you see a very strange pattern, you can send an email to hn@ycombinator.com so dang/tomhow can take a look.

As the other comments say, there is a lot of spam that is detected automatically and manually. You can take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newest with "showdead" enabled. While you are there, remember to upvote good post and flag spam.