Ask HN: How many HN users are bots?

4 pointsProAm1 comment

Reddit has bots, twitter has bots, facebook has bots... It seems to be a problem on those social media sites... The typical HN user would be more technically inclined to create a bot just to see if they could do it and get away with it.

How many users here on HN do you honestly think are bots?

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I created a bot a while back based on phantom.js a headless browser. Mostly I wanted to see if upvotes could be scripted and I wanted to play with phantom.js. It seems that the system is based on 1 vote per public IP. It's possible to use many instances of DO/GCloud/AWS.

I would suggest that there are probably a few vote brigade bots out there. I think the most common bot would be a story cross poster, which takes top-stories from places like lobste.rs et. al. and posts them to HN to build reputation.

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