Oh that's clever. Use the spambot ring to promote the story so that the story gets marked dead because of that! Instead of hiding the news, use the botnet to promote it and use the system against itself.
I've noticed some HN posts get a higher-than-average number of replies from LLM bots. I've wondered if this has a downranking effect due to the upvote/comment ratio, and whether people might be using bots to do this intentionally. Alternatively it could just be that the bots "like" certain keywords more than others.
There is no report button. If you want the mods to make the site less xyz, email them a link to the xyz that you came across and say you want less of xyz, either specifically and/or generally. Let them decide how to respond; that’s not your problem, no need to invest effort in it.
‘flag’, if that’s what you mean, only sends a mathematical algorithm signal, that does not lead to mod attention. I flag posts that are dupes, irrelevant, low-effort, or are hard paywalled without a bypass link. This is often sufficient and is like sweeping cobwebs out of an ignored corner: it’s not worth getting upset about, just grab the broom and sweep it up and move on.
I email mods for issues that I think should be addressed to keep HN a better place than the voting/flag algorithms can solve without human assistance: guidelines violations like high-karma users insulting others, or patterns of behavior observed unflagged over time, or suspicion of voting rings; or technical issues with the xyz.com/subdomain detector that prevent self-linking detection from working, or with the auto-dead-ifier that’s the topic of this post, etc.
