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Ask HN: How do we deal with "hacking" Hacker News?

1 points by jumploops ↗ HN
Howdy folks!

I just stumbled across a post[0] on Reddit, in which a user asked an AI model to promote his vibecoding project.

The agent submitted links to a bunch of sites, and the top site was HN with 1.5k views.

Color me surprised, as I've seen an explosion of LLM-content on other more popular platforms, but HN has usually been better than most.

How do we deal with this in the future?

Is flagging enough?[1]

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665756

[1]I believe I found the post, which was already flagged when I discovered it, but I'll refrain from sharing here.

8 comments

[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 8.1 ms ] thread
minimaxir
People submitting posts to HN automatically has been a thing; the rise of AI agents hasn't changed that and has not affected HN's "immune system". People who need agents to growth hack tend to have crappy sites that already signal said immune system so it works out.

1.5k views is not a lot of views and is more damning by faint praise.

uberman
If the contnet aligns with the interests of this community as apparently it did generation a bunch of views that I'll take your word for, then if it really a problem? If the community does not like something they can ignore downvote and flag and it will go wherever the crap goes.
guiambros
I tend to agree, although I wonder if we won't get flooded by agents pretending to be regular users and submitting their slop to HN. It might well be happening already (e.g., [1]).

Worse: it will get harder to differentiate what is a legitimate ShowHN from a nefarious agent trying to infiltrate malware. Yes, supply-chain attacks existed for ages, but now script kiddies can create xz-level attacks without even realizing it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49667385

brazukadev
the problem is that the "aligns with the interests of this community" can also be manipulated.
Tbarlow
The signal-to-noise problem isn't new, but agents make the cost of noise near zero. Flagging scales with human attention, which is exactly the resource being drained.
gus_massa
For single bad post, flagging is probably enough. For repeated bad post or egregious single post, send an email to hn@ycombinator.com so dang/tomhow can take a look.

In border cases, I post a softball question to try to guess if there is a human on the other side.