Hype. HN is _the_ platform to create hype among the early adopter, super-spreader/tech exec kind of people and because of that has an absolutely massive indirect reach.

Just look how often PR reps appear here to reply to accusations - they wouldn't bother at all if this was just some random platform like reddit.

I'm not convinced HN is awash in bots, but there are certainly some inauthentic accounts here.

What if you want to change public opinion about $evilcorp or $evilleader or $evilpolicy? You could explain to people who love contrarian narratives how $evilcorp, $evilleader and $evilpolicy are actually not as bad as mainstreamers believe, and how their competitors and alternatives are actually more evil than most people understand.

HN is an inexpensive and mostly frictionless way to run an inception campaign on people who are generally better connected and respected than the typical blue check on X.

Their objective probably isn't to accumulate karma because karma is mostly worthless.

They really only need enough karma to flag posts contrary to their interests. Even if the flagged posts aren't flagged to death, it doesn't take much to downrank them off the front page.

You can't underestimate this being a bot playground/training ground with no particular purpose beyond getting the bot to say realistic/interesting replies.

I have zero interest in bots, but if I did, the hacker news API would be exactly how I would start.

maybe 10 years ago, but this is not the case today.

I've hardly seen here any proselytizers from Oracle, Salesforce, IBM and they are dong just fine. Ditto for Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Facebook - they used to be represented more here, but their exodus hardly made any difference.

Gartner has more influence on tech than Hacker News.

In theory you could Show HN and have your bots upvote it... that would indeed be good marketing.

Vote-rings are trivial to detect though, automated or manual. I'd be surprised if HN hasn't figured out ways against it during the time it's been online.

Social media accounts with high engagement, and a long life, have monetary value. This is true of most social media platforms.

HN generally does a good job of minimizing the value of accounts, thus discouraging these kinds of games, but I imagine it still happens.

The type of engagement and audience arguably matters more.

> What actual value do you believe there is, other than curiosity, that is driving people to build the HN spam bots you think you're seeing?

Testing.

And as siblings say, karma is more valuable than you might think. If you can herd a bunch of karma via botting, you can then [maybe] use that karma to influence all sorts of things.

> If you can herd a bunch of karma via botting, you can then [maybe] use that karma to influence all sorts of things.

How? Karma on HN is not like Karma elsewhere. The idea of [maybe] monetizing HN Karma reads like the old southpark underpants gnome meme[0].

[0]https://imgflip.com/memetemplate/49245705/Underpants-Gnomes

Assuming karma helps you get posts on the front page (does it?) then karma helps spam.

At any rate, HN attracts trolls. I'm sure it will also attract trolls who use AI to increase their rate of trolling.

>Assuming karma helps you get posts on the front page (does it?)

No, karma does not help you get posts on the front page.

Karma is a number that can go up. Numbers going up is a supernormal stimulus for humans.

They should get rid of the number and change it to be only "low" or "high".

Get rid of karma + get rid of ranking comments at all. Just render them in a tree-format with oldest/newest first, everyone has equal footing :)

True but at least for Hacker News you have to at least click through to the member profile to see how many banana stickers and external validation they've accrued.

To promote political views and startups and scams, and other things that benefit the bot operators.

This is a small but highly influential forum and absolutely is gamed. Game theory dictates it will be.

If you turn on show dead, you'll see that some accounts just post spam or weird BS that ends up instantly dead. I think Evon LaTrail is gone now, but for years posted one or more links to his/her/their YouTube videos about personal sanitation and abortion per day.

There is a stream of clueless folks, but there are also hardcore psychos like LaTrail. The Svelte magazine spammer fits in this category.

I've definitely seen comments that feel very authentically posted (not LLM generated) but are a weird mixture of vitriol and spite, and when you list other comments from that user it's 90% marked dead.

I often wonder if the user is even aware that they're just screaming into the void.