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Comment by overthrow | Hacker News Reader

fyi, this comment is a copy/paste of a 4 year old comment from https://old.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/asqslg/if...

I guess HN has karma farming bots now

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Thanks. Banned.

All: if you ever notice anything like this and have a minute to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com, we'd really appreciate it. I only saw this by change.

What a bummer. Open, anonymous, and free forums are some of the most interesting places on the internet. this profit-motivated antisocial shit makes me so sad.

edit: oh. most if not all of the comments are from reddit.

https://lobste.rs/ has an interesting mechanism to curb bots on the platform.

To join to website, you have to get a referral from another current user. And this referral is public information. So if someone you referred starts acting like an ass, then you can expect some concern being directed your way. People are rightly a bit cautious with giving out referrals as a consequence.

The topics on lobste.rs are more focused on programming and computers (stuff you'd likely also see on HN), and there's not really any political discussion. Traffic is light, expect maybe a dozen new links per day.

This comment, by the way, does not constitute an invitation to ask me for a referral. I don't really know too well anyone on HN, other than the most famous users (none of who know who I am), so if you ask me for a referral, the answer is very likely "no".

The only downside is that people like myself are unlikely to know anyone who can supply an invite.

I'm curious, how did you figure this out? Do you search texts of random HN comments? Did you remember that comment? I see these posts on here sometimes, and just don't understand how the commenters so consistently find these types of things.