HN may not be “mainstream” but it is certainly _very_ vulnerable to bot spam given the topics discussed and the make-up of the audience.
You can already see it happening now - at least the bots that write like vanilla Claude/ChatGPT. Presumably there is a much larger hidden cohort of bots that are instructed to talk more naturally and thus are better adept at flying under the radar…
I would say that HN has a lot of features that would be seen as draconian in how much they limit your interaction by other platforms.
You can barely comment before you are rate limited.
You can’t upvote until you’ve been around a pretty long time.
New accounts are given a green badge of dishonor that makes users scrutinize their comments more.
I’m not saying these are bad things but they’re probably too restrictive for a social media network that’s just meant to be a good fun time.
I’ve never seen people on the likes of blackhatworld selling hacker news accounts or services. The glass half full take on this is that hn is surprisingly robust in its ability to deal with vote manipulation.
If you are rate limited, a moderator has manually applied a rate limit to your account. Accounts are not rate limited by default. You can appeal the decision by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
I think there's a short-term rate limit applied to everyone, e.g. you get a message if you try to post three replies in the same minute. I've seen it once, and I don't think I'm active enough to have earned a manual flag.
The karma points you get on HN are worthless, which I think is a bonus. They don't buy you anything. On Reddit, for instance, many parts of the site are walled off until you have "farmed" enough karma to participate.
Not exactly true.
You get the right to down vote and if I promote my totally not a scam product on HN, people will check my user account and see: on wow over 9000 karma? Gotta be trust worthy, when in truth it's just been karma farming.
HN does limit some of it, but it's not a panacea.
I don't know, never found much value in karma. I recreate an account at least once a year for no particular reason and it roughly takes me a week to get enough karma to do what is important (flagging posts).
My account is literally 4 years old and I'm not even halfway there.
How do you do it?
And I'm trying to limit myself from saying unwanted things like criticizing ** or saying something nice about **. (Self censoring to avoid downvotes).
Maybe I should be more active.