About whether forums like HN could quietly fill up with polite, human-seeming bots.
Has this happened?
Yes 88 (68%)Not sure 23 (18%)No 18 (14%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether forums like HN could quietly fill up with polite, human-seeming bots.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
but really they're robots that are mindlessly striving towards being the perfect neighbor
Once conversational algorithms reliably pass the Turing test, I guarantee this will happen. State actors may be doing it already. A non-conversational version of this has existed in online gaming for decades.
The catch-22 in starting any new forum or social network is that to attract new users, there must be old users. Some social networks (notoriously dating sites and reddit) started out with employees acting as many users to make the network seem less empty.
It's already possible to pay humans to do this, but it's likely prohibitively expensive. If machines can do it, suddenly you can have thousands or millions of "users" for almost no cost.