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  2. What to do with bots on Product Hunt?

What to do with bots on Product Hunt?

Stefan Pettersson
2 replies
As an example, look at the replies of this post: https://www.producthunt.com/disc... Literally 80% are from bots with ChatGPT generated bios and stolen profile photos. What is the end-game? Have them be active and undetected for a while to later do spam posts? Or perhaps to "sell" bundles of upvotes/comments on launches? No matter what, it is hurting PH and the PH community at its core. It is already bad enough that launches/upvote are largely a fact of how good you are at LinkedIn automation to encourage people to upvote, but now with all the bots it is even worse. Fast forward and the bots will be even harder to distinguish from real people, creating a doubt if it is actually worth engaging because "is it a real person or just a bot?" I'm sure this is a high priority topic for the PH crew, and I don't have any silver bullets. What I'm thinking of is the need of some kind of "verification" or KYC, that some other platforms uses.

Replies

Henry Habib
@stpe Good discussion. Tbh, I don't know what the answer is... Rating highly on PH will likely always be a popularity and marketing contest, which itself is fine. Having bots do make things ultra unfair though... Some ideas: - Accounts can only vote after they have some history and have collected enough upvotes? - KYC? Although I don't like this because it really creates barriers - Report feature for potential bots?
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Stefan Pettersson
@henry_habib Gradually increasing threshold to get permissions might be another way (or it will just make the bots even harder to detect). Like... - Can only comment after 2 days of registration. - Can only post after you've commented, etc. Could also be that there is a locked place in the community forum that e.g. only makers and/or verified (whatever that would be) profiles got write-access to.
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