HN may not be “mainstream” but it is certainly _very_ vulnerable to bot spam given the topics discussed and the make-up of the audience.
You can already see it happening now - at least the bots that write like vanilla Claude/ChatGPT. Presumably there is a much larger hidden cohort of bots that are instructed to talk more naturally and thus are better adept at flying under the radar…
If you are rate limited, a moderator has manually applied a rate limit to your account. Accounts are not rate limited by default. You can appeal the decision by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
I think there's a short-term rate limit applied to everyone, e.g. you get a message if you try to post three replies in the same minute. I've seen it once, and I don't think I'm active enough to have earned a manual flag.
The karma points you get on HN are worthless, which I think is a bonus. They don't buy you anything. On Reddit, for instance, many parts of the site are walled off until you have "farmed" enough karma to participate.
You get the right to down vote and if I promote my totally not a scam product on HN, people will check my user account and see: on wow over 9000 karma? Gotta be trust worthy, when in truth it's just been karma farming.
I’ve never seen people on the likes of blackhatworld selling hacker news accounts or services. The glass half full take on this is that hn is surprisingly robust in its ability to deal with vote manipulation.
