> > They likely have other bots that remain undetected.
> Why is this 'likely'?
Is it more likely that a person that didn’t make the first bot also has a second that they didn’t make, or less likely? Is it more likely that a known bot user who has a working successful bot might make multiple bots in order to arrive at the working one we see, or less likely? I don’t think it’s likely that fully formed organisms would appear, but it could happen. I think evolution is more likely.
Of course it’s possible that they have been detected, and the acts simply attributed to others, or allowed under the same reasoning as the first.
We don’t need further evidence of generalities to determine that there was a distinct negative impact in this specific case. OP posted their original content and the automated poster got the karma. We don’t even need to understand how we got here to see that where we are isn’t where we thought we were or where we’d intended to end up.
Where do we go from here? To continue doing this would be walking in circles. Surely the users of HN deserve better. Bot posters ought to mark their accounts or posts as such, and HN should expose that information to the community, when definitively known, as in this case. Anything less would be a disservice to the community, although I’m open to being convinced otherwise. I just felt for OP, and one silver lining is that this post at least came good.
I don’t think that HN is hurting for posts or posters. In the same vein of fairness, I’d rather 100 bots banned than a single human poster sidelined by an automated system. We’re talking about a specific post and poster being scooped by a bot, and it’s happened before, and apparently will happen again, from the same automated poster.
Why is this 'likely'?