We are past the point that machine generated comments would survive and be engaged with by human users on Hacker News.<p>Have you suspected machine generated content in HN comment threads?<p>Would it pain you to discover you had responded to a machine?<p>Do you know anything about the prevalence of such content here or on other fora?<p>Do you disagree with my statement? Why?
>Have you suspected machine generated content in HN comment threads?<p>Yes absolutely. The thing which breaks bots is if you ask them to answer a specific question. They reveal themselves.<p>>Would it pain you to discover you had responded to a machine?<p>No.<p>Fundamentally the HN comment section has had its eternal september because of HN being listed high on the 'alternatives to reddit' options. HN now doesn't allow discussions.<p>Instead, the comments are about sorting your thoughts on the matter. See if there's thoughts which you haven't considered.<p>>Do you know anything about the prevalence of such content here or on other fora?<p>Bots reveal themselves through absurdity which makes sense in depth. A handshake with 5 hands as it were.<p>>Do you disagree with my statement? Why?<p>There's a 0% chance that there's no bots. Bots of vary degrees of sophistication have existed since irc days. My favourite I found was one which copied conversations from 1 irc channel to another. So conversations are happening which you think you are interacting with but truly you arent.
Some have speculated that this account[0] is a bot, despite claims to the contrary in their bio[1]. Not all the comments look algorithmically generated, but some are obviously computer generated or run through some sort of program.<p>This is fine if you want to write anonymously. Not so fine when the comment is done in bad faith.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=daniel-cussen" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=daniel-cussen</a><p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=daniel-cussen" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=daniel-cussen</a>
I think that most of online political opinions are bots spreading propaganda for who ever. When I talk to normal people about politics they have no idea what im on about.
Machine generated content - yes, absolutely. It wouldn't pain me in the least, Serdar Argic personally insulted me. Now, if dril was revealed to be a machine..<p>I think machine generated content isn't common on HN, because the lack of reply notifications means people fire and forget. Bots don't get much engagement. For some reason, I believe that Quora has a lot, that reddit has little, and that Twitter is swamped with it