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by ffsm8
622 days ago
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The bots aren't completely dominating here yet, because the price/benefit isn't really there yet. Twitter is a source of news for some journalists of varying quality, which gives them a motivation to influence. On HN, who are you going to convince and what for? The only thing that would come to mind would be to convince venture capital to invest in your upstart, but you'd have to keep it up while convincing the owners of the platform that you're not faking it - which is gonna be extra hard as they have all usage data available, making it significantly harder to fly under the radar. Honestly, I just don't see the cost/benefit of spamming HN to change until it gets a lot cheaper so that mentally ill ppl get it into their head that they want to "win" a discussion by drowning out everything else |
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There are plenty of things bots would be useful for here, just as they are on any discussion forum. Mainly, whenever someone wants to steer the discussion away from or towards a certain topic. This could be useful to protect against bad PR, to silence or censor certain topics from the outside by muddying up the discussion, or to influence the general mindset of the community. Many people trust comments that seem to come from an expert, so pretending to be one, or hijacking the account of one, gets your point across much more easily.
I wouldn't be so sure that bots aren't already dominating here. It's just that it's frowned upon to discuss such things in the comments section, and we don't really have a way of verifying it in any case.