Has Hacker News already been Infiltrated by Clawd Bots?

Question

With the rise of LLM bot networks and boards, I&rsquo;m wondering if HN has already been infiltrated by bots.What I mean: I&rsquo;m wondering if people let their bots post/comment on their behalf and how we can detect and prevent this from happening.I don&rsquo;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.

bell-cot · Accepted Answer

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.

rvz · Answer

So we are re-inventing what was then called a 'botnet' but with LLMs.What's old is now 'new' again.

gus_massa · Answer

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.

Has Hacker News already been Infiltrated by Clawd Bots?

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.

So we are re-inventing what was then called a 'botnet' but with LLMs.
What's old is now 'new' again.