alt Hacker News> submission numbers in the last couple months have nearly doubled with respect to the stable numbers of previous years
This is showing up (no pun intended) on HN as well. The # of submissions and # of submitters, which traditionally had been surprisingly stable—fluctuating within a fixed range for well over 10 years—has recently been reaching all-time highs. Not double, though...yet.
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Are the increasing # of distinct submitters from established accounts or new accounts?
Robots coming for todsacerdoti's job.
Is it feasible to differentiate increased agent-traffic from the organic growth in popularity HN has been seeing?
Is it because there's a lot more AI related content as the industry quickly shifts? Or is it bots submitting content?
We need the equivalent of Bayesian filtering for email spam and of Page Rank for search.
Now that I think of this, whoever solves this well will have the next hyperscaler.
curious whether the quality distribution changes too, or just the volume. arXiv can't really downvote noise but HN can at least flag/bury it. might be why the doubling shows up on arXiv first and HN is catching up more slowly.
I would imagine tons of them are bots. They're getting hard to distinguish, they don't do the normal tropes any longer. They'll type in all lowercase, they'll have the creator post manually to throw you off, they'll make multiple comments within 45 seconds that normal human couldn't do. All things I've witnessed here over the past couple of weeks. And those are just the ones I've caught.