The mods certainly do a great job of keeping things running smoothly here, but I wouldn't say it's _primarily_ because of them.
I think it's primarily due to the self-moderation of the community itself, who flag and downvote posts, follow the community guidelines, and are still overall relatively civil compared to other places.
That said, any community can be overrun by an Eternal September event, at which point no moderation or community guidelines can save it. Some veteran members would argue that it's already happened here. I would say we've just been lucky so far that it hasn't. The brutalist UI likely plays a part in that. :)
I think it has happened actually. Early on HN was almost purely entrepreneurial although through a tech POV. These days, it’s much more general or broadly tech related. The discussion I gather is most people here are tech employees and not necessarily entrepreneurs.
It’s obviously has not gone to hell like the bot ridden examples, but it’s drastically different IMO.
The bots aren't completely dominating here yet, because the price/benefit isn't really there yet.
Twitter is a source of news for some journalists of varying quality, which gives them a motivation to influence.
On HN, who are you going to convince and what for?
The only thing that would come to mind would be to convince venture capital to invest in your upstart, but you'd have to keep it up while convincing the owners of the platform that you're not faking it - which is gonna be extra hard as they have all usage data available, making it significantly harder to fly under the radar.
Honestly, I just don't see the cost/benefit of spamming HN to change until it gets a lot cheaper so that mentally ill ppl get it into their head that they want to "win" a discussion by drowning out everything else
> On HN, who are you going to convince and what for?
There are plenty of things bots would be useful for here, just as they are on any discussion forum. Mainly, whenever someone wants to steer the discussion away from or towards a certain topic. This could be useful to protect against bad PR, to silence or censor certain topics from the outside by muddying up the discussion, or to influence the general mindset of the community. Many people trust comments that seem to come from an expert, so pretending to be one, or hijacking the account of one, gets your point across much more easily.
I wouldn't be so sure that bots aren't already dominating here. It's just that it's frowned upon to discuss such things in the comments section, and we don't really have a way of verifying it in any case.
>On HN, who are you going to convince and what for?
Eh, following individuals and giving them targeted attacks may well be worth it. There are plenty of tech purchasing managers here that are responsible for hundreds of thousands/millions in product buys. If you can follow their accounts and catch posts where they are interested in some particular technology it's possible you could bid out a reply to it and give a favorable 'native review' for some particular product.
Restatement of op's point. Small reason of agreement based on widely public information. Last paragraph indicating the future cannot be predicted and couching the entire thing in terms of a guess or self-contradiction.
This is how chatgpt responds to generic asks about things.
