Don't do it anywhere. He's a jerk for doing it on reddit.

Can’t make it worse than Huffman already has. After the API nonsense most mods who are still there should’ve left. I don’t know how most continue to do Reddit’s work for free after the way Huffman talked about us all. He made it clear how much he despises the community and the complete lack of respect he has for the people who run all the subs

People are definitely trying to make HN bots because I have seen several get flagged. No idea to what end though.

the suits or suit minded people have realised that HN is good for advertising to the kind of demographic that'll give them free labour and is easily swayed by whatever the latest trend is

That's why we all love the MIT license.

I think permissive licenses are fine in some cases (particularly if you're trying to standardise something. X11, LLVM, and BSD are good examples), but generally at least weak (LGPL or MPL) copyleft are preferred.

I'm still torn on what kind of license is best for operating systems, though (the GPL has forced companies to actually contribute to Linux but they also try and get around it in so many ways I have to wonder if a weaker license would be better)

In some cases, yes. It has to be used judiciously. The free software pioneers understood this, and wrote a little essay about it (LGPL vs GPL): https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html In short, it depends on the market situation: if you created something new and exciting, you should use GPL (nowadays that would be AGPL) to encourage lock-in. If you created something that is supposed to displace an existing proprietary product, you should use LGPL to encourage switching. These days it'd be MIT, but MIT is exactly the same as proprietary as far as user freedom is concerned.

People still see HN as a valuable place for promoting their businesses. Usually some poorly thought out SaaS.

If you look at what people outside HN talk about HN, it's not uncommon to see wannabe tech entrepreneurs talking about how to promote their products via Show HNs and how to stay HN front page. It's honestly a little sad considering that HN has a tendency to rip these projects apart.

People (and bots) who think HN is the place to “promote their products” don't understand HN (though, as you note, that belief is is widespread and is having an acute effect on our inbox!)

Show HN is for showing a cool project you've built. To warrant front page placement, it has to “gratify intellectual curiosity”, just like everything else. There needs to be some kind of novel breakthrough or something for others to learn from. Or, sure, some way it can help others with their work or life.

And yes, a byproduct of all this may be that some people buy a license or subscription. But submitters who are just trying to get attention and sales for a commercial product don't belong in Show HN.

Possibly to test reactions to a bot they plan to build a startup around.

I've seen some claim they do it to avoid stylometry or being fingerprinted, or because of social anxiety problems.

Some people just have a compulsive need to optimize everything, and HN's guidelines and tone policing are more easily followed by a bot than a human.

> HN's guidelines and tone policing are more easily followed by a bot than a human.

HN's guidelines aren't that strict and the mod hammer is a plushie. It's not difficult to get by here. It's also kind of useful for critical reflection/self-regulation to hear the occasional "you came in too hot" or "don't be boring" from a moderator.

Seems better to me to just try to be sort of reasonable and let the mods nudge you if they need to and let your comments be downvoted from time to time. What is the goal of these people, to never experience correction in their lives? To never write an unpopular comment?

> What is the goal of these people, to never experience correction in their lives?

Look at all the people who complain about cancel culture. There's a huge swath of people who don't ever want to hear "that was mean/bad/shitty".

>What is the goal of these people, to never experience correction in their lives? To never write an unpopular comment?

Yes?

That seems like a really extreme goal to me. I should hope there's a better way to address the anxiety or whatever it is that's motivating it.

Why would reddit bots exist? (In)organic advertising, same concept here.

I didn’t say that people weren’t doing it. I was asking this person not to do that here since it sort of sounds like they have plans to

The ones you see flagged are the very obvious bots. What about the more sophisticated ones? How do I know skupig isn't a bot?

He's stating a fact. Turn on showed in your options and scroll to the bottom of the comments on any popular story. There are so many agentic users here.

Having to turn on showdead (which I have turned on by default) demonstrates that’s it’s not much of a problem in practice.

I generally disagree, because the level of discourse here has always been very high, curious and intellectual.

Maybe 1:100 comments match any one of those attributes.

Most comments are just grammatically "correct". Not a high bar.

The comments that aren't grammatically correct get pedantically corrected by those HNers too, so that's nice.

It has, and the well prompted agents still give that. It's very weird.

I just don’t even understand the appeal of having a bot interact on forums for you unless you’re astroturfing for your company or personal brand or whatever