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Comment by garry | Hacker News Reader

One answer: @dang

I know mod-worship is fashionable around here but... bullshit.

One mod wasn't sufficient to keep bots at bay on a podunk PHP forum with hundreds of members 15yr ago. It's not sufficient to stem the tide of far, far better bots that lurk the internet today. There's other mechanisms at play.

Sounds suspiciously like something a bot would say to have us let our guard down...

As does this: it's bots all the way down ...

> There's other mechanisms at play.

And they are…?

It's a bunch of people who have the critical thinking skills required to spot bots (not saying they used them). Nothing is bought, sold or recommended to be bought or sold here. It's already somewhat of an ideological echo chamber and it's not really a place for mass market news and trends so few are coming here looking to be informed about things the people buying bot time care about.

So basically it's a tough nut to crack for little gain. Why bother when you can write Reddit bots that are far more impactful and will earn far more money.

Edit: Yes I know stuff is recommended to be bought or sold here. It's absolutely nothing compared to Reddit where you can pimp viral content for a brand as top level content and where you have subs that are specifically about consumerists things (what X should I buy type subs).

> Nothing is bought, sold or recommended to be bought or sold

There are plenty of direct and indirect recommendations for goods and services. "Who's hiring" is a good example of that. Posts about a particular product often garner posts about similar products. To be clear, I agree it's not the main thrust of this site, but let's not be blind to it happening, often for purely benign purpose.

Worship and respect are easily confused yet distinct. Using worship as a slur indicates a lack of understanding why the respect exists (because the job is thankless and yet executed well continually).

Crediting someone for something for which there are alternate explanations and for which the credited party could not have reasonably have pulled off is solidly in the worship camp.

dang is not the only moderator here. Just the only public one.

Sorry I'm late to this, but you're right, of course. The community does most of the work.

We do also write software, so the mod work is (thankfully) not all manual.

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