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by LinuxBender
1267 days ago
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Browse HN with showdead on and check out some of the shadowbanned posters. You can find many with long histories of "dead" comments that keep posting anyway. My theory is that the bots keep posting because there are enough "legit" bots that pull HN data from the API to put into an assortment of search engines and other statistical tools that ultimately Google and Bing will crawl those links from the secondary sites pulling data from HN. I could be wrong but the only other explanation is that the bots are just incredibly poorly coded. At least I can't think of another reason. I have no idea if the legit bots using HN's API have showdead enabled. If they do that could be part of the problem. I say this having fought bots in the past on forums and the bot operators would certainly know if their posts were no longer visible to others so they would just keep creating new accounts. I would block IP's, then they would use proxies. I would block proxies, they would use Tor. I would block Tor then they would just create a few accounts a day then let them "warm up" with real content. This led me to putting people into "ranks" and only people that had been interacting with the site could post messages that could be read real time, whereas low rank accounts had to be moderator approved. I had SQL code in a cron job that would delete posts over 30 days old in the newbie rank if I did not get around to deleting them manually. |
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https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=aaron695
My theory is that such users do know their status but just figure it doesn't matter and that people like me--who absolutely browse the site with showdead and would want all my friends to as well, as I don't want to not hear what someone says merely because they got angry--do read their content, and people like us are their true audience.