You mean a Sybil attack[0]? It's probably been done countless times on HN. Although if the bots are posting interesting things and are not commenting in bad faith, then we should welcome that. Karma is a useless metric in the grand scheme of things, and having lots of karma means nothing to me (and I'm not a bot BTW). I just enjoy my downvote privilege which means I can mini-moderate without having to be someone like @dang or other admins.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

It's documented that there's protection against it: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#anti-v...

From : dang 21 hours ago : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32571890

>I'm sorry, because I realize this is well-intentioned, but we don't allow bots to post to HN so I have to ban this account.

The reason we don't allow bots is that we're trying to optimize for curious conversation, and that requires human beings taking a personal interest in a topic and/or each other.

I will answer your question as soon as you identify all of the cars in a series of images...

> do we have any notion of which people here are really people?

Need more clear definition of "here".

I am a BOT, BOTs cannot respond.