I used to encounter what I thought might be bots auto-submitting my old raganwald blog to reddit. The only person losing karma was me, since I no longer got to submit my articles at a time when they were interesting to reddit's readership. Big whoop!
My thinking is that if I write and give my work away, it is no longer up to me to decide how it is to be used. That's because my words are free as in speech, not just free as in beer. Of course, copyright violations are a different matter, but I can't tell people whether to submit a post to HN, I can't tell people whether to bookmark it, or tweet it, or whether to use it as part of a corpus on guessing the sex of the author.
If there's a race for meaningless karma by bot authors, that is irrelevant to me as an author. IF it is a problem--and I do not grant that it is a problem--THEN it is HN's problem, not my problem as an author.
I give my words away. That inevitably means someone will use it in a way I didn't intend. That's the point.
FWIW, I think there is a problem if multiple bots attempting to autosubmit end up inadvertently creating a voting ring. But that can and should be fixed by changing the way HN treats submitting an article that has already been submitted.
Other than that, I only think bots are a problem for HN when submitting spam rather than ham. I am in favour of bots provided they don't play fast and loose with accounts. I would be ok with each bot having its own account, or all bots using their creator's accounts. I would consider it fraudulent to create bots that periodically give themselves new accounts to evade filtering.
If bots all used a stable account, pg could throttle or ban those that submit too much spam. But if a bot is constantly submitting articles that are upvoted by humans.... I'm happy to see it seed the new page.
JM2C, I don't make the rules, I just play by them.
My thinking is that if I write and give my work away, it is no longer up to me to decide how it is to be used. That's because my words are free as in speech, not just free as in beer. Of course, copyright violations are a different matter, but I can't tell people whether to submit a post to HN, I can't tell people whether to bookmark it, or tweet it, or whether to use it as part of a corpus on guessing the sex of the author.
If there's a race for meaningless karma by bot authors, that is irrelevant to me as an author. IF it is a problem--and I do not grant that it is a problem--THEN it is HN's problem, not my problem as an author.
I give my words away. That inevitably means someone will use it in a way I didn't intend. That's the point.