If you see a very strange pattern, you can send an email to hn@ycombinator.com so dang/tomhow can take a look.

As the other comments say, there is a lot of spam that is detected automatically and manually. You can take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newest with "showdead" enabled. While you are there, remember to upvote good post and flag spam.

What does "infiltrated by bots" mean? I'm sure there are some users running scripts, bots, and/or ai's here. Others are obviously just here to pitch their product, or seem like shills for various things.

But overall - whatever dang & co are doing to minimize the problem seems to be working fine.

So we are re-inventing what was then called a 'botnet' but with LLMs.

What's old is now 'new' again.