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Comment by runawaybottle | Hacker News Reader

Bots are promoting things on HN?

Not necessarily promoting things, but I'm 100% sure there are bots crawling the comments for keywords (product/project mentions) so that the creators/employees of said product/project can show up in the comments to answer questions if need be.

Also, from time to time I see accusations that anti-CCP comments/articles are flagged to death by bots, but I've never witnessed this first-hand.

The voting and posting activity on threads heavily critical of the chinese government have seemed very suspect to me as well. Many of the names defending the government having post histories of only government defense and "what about other country" while votes end up going through cycles of rising gradually and being downvoted all at once.

If you spend enough time in those threads to notice patterns, and even look through people's posting history, you're essentially acting like a bot crawling the site.

If you then downvote those posters you disagree with, it creates a very suspicious voting pattern on their end.

Could you distinguish your own behavior from that of a bot (or a bot-assisted human) if you didn't know it was just you in front of your screen?

That makes zero sense. I'm not dropping comments that have already been upvoted into negatives in seconds and I don't have a user name of random letters a few months old with only 4 or 5 comments, all defending the chinese government in heavily commented threads about a story critical of the chinese government.

Of course you're not dropping comments from +3 to -4 (or whatever) on your own, but it only takes six other people who share your opinion to do that. As for people with only 4 or 5 comments, they're not going to have enough karma to downvote anyone.

um... I use Google Alerts for this... You might be behind the times. (Not the CCP stuff)

TIL! I always figured there was just some crawler bot on GitHub that people were using, this is even easier.

Your first paragraph application of bots is 95+% positive I’d think and I’m 100% supportive of the use of crawlers for that and then hope the humans who pick it up act positively.

(I’m not even sure I’d consider something that was itself read-only in nature to be a “bot” but I suppose it technically is.)

If you look at most CCP-related stories posted here they almost immediately devolve into intense flame-wars where any nuance is discarded. The official reason for these posts to be killed is because they trip all sorts of anti-flame killswitches and frankly that doesn't seem far fetched at all to me. These threads are usually an embarrassment for this community honestly.

Came here to say the same thing. When I see these submissions – pro or anti-CCP – and I see the discussion that results, I'm inclined to flag them. Such stories are not good material for HN, and the submission guidelines make that clear. I thought this was precisely what flagging of submissions was for.

It's also worth noting that some of the worst stories that have resulted in the most division have been ideologically driven. I recall a libertarian think tank that had a number of accounts that apparently existed purely to make submissions for those sites. I'm sure there are other groups that are at it too, I just found that one to be particularly blatant.

Regardless of your political views, the submission of such stories seems to inevitably result in a flame-war that seems only to serve to degrade this community's technologically-orientated mutual respect.

Why would they scrape it when they can just use the search api and ping it every so often?

I don’t think they’re promoting things, but it’s possible that nefarious actors could write a script to create accounts to upvote things.

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