
Spambots on HN posting in cryptocurrency discussion - StanAngeloff
I recently stumbled upon a Ripple article submitted on HN [1] [2]. The discussion itself seems to be dominated by spambots. This got me thinking, how much of the comments on HN are submitted by bots? If the article got more attention, the spambots would be virtually indistinguishable from regular chatter. Who benefits from &quot;inventing&quot; these bots?<p>[1]: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14922965
[2]: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20170814204950&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14922965
======
gus_massa
Most of these cases are detected automatically and the site is banned by the
mods. See for example
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14886728](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14886728)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14858303](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14858303)

In most cases they use only 5 or 6. Sometimes they are real users that only
create an account to write a comment that says "Amazing!!!".

Depending of the number of fake comments and if they retry, the site and users
get a warning or are marked as autokilled.

Anyway, it's better to send this kind of reports to hn@ycombinator.com ,
because these post may disappear unnoticed.

------
greenyoda
Interesting... In that thread, none of the commenters replied to any existing
comment - they all replied at the top level. And it seems like a few skeptical
comments were thrown in to make the discussion seem more credible - the users
"cryptoscam" and "anash23" were also newly-created accounts with no other
activity.

The text doesn't seem like it was generated by bots, however. The comments get
shorter and shorter (with more typos) as if someone was getting tired of
typing all that stuff.

------
sctb
We take this kind of abuse seriously, so please email us at hn@ycombinator.com
if you ever see anything like it. The community is pretty sharp at detecting
this kind of organized behavior though, especially with the combination of new
accounts all about the same age with few or no prior contributions. We spend a
lot of time on anti-abuse software to catch these as well.

