The only thing that can be laid at the door of hackernews todsacerdoti is that they’re not transparent that they’re using their account to repost entries from lobste.rs[1] - something that is apparently not against the rules on HN in any case.
Otherwise I don’t take the charged terms “parasitic” and “botfly” very seriously. This is behavior that is only possible in the lobste.rs -> HN direction, because lobste.rs moderation is such that anything on topic here is also on topic on HN. The reverse is not true. And the account in question is in competition with other accounts that can attempt to post the same link first, HN does have link duplication detection.
Reposting stuff from lobste.rs to HN is arguably a service for those on HN who do not have an account here, or do not want an account, or who prefer the HN community to discuss submissions.
So it devolves down to the fact that the account in question has found a way to get fake internet points more efficiently than other accounts on HN.
[1] the source is presumably the lobste.rs public RSS feed. Otherwise the data here is available in JSON format and writing a simple scanner that checks for new entries is trivial.
in case you are curious about whether this post has been cross-posted to HN by the example botfly discussed in the blog—it has been. 🙃
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43249197
The only thing that can be laid at the door of hackernews todsacerdoti is that they’re not transparent that they’re using their account to repost entries from lobste.rs[1] - something that is apparently not against the rules on HN in any case.
Otherwise I don’t take the charged terms “parasitic” and “botfly” very seriously. This is behavior that is only possible in the lobste.rs -> HN direction, because lobste.rs moderation is such that anything on topic here is also on topic on HN. The reverse is not true. And the account in question is in competition with other accounts that can attempt to post the same link first, HN does have link duplication detection.
Reposting stuff from lobste.rs to HN is arguably a service for those on HN who do not have an account here, or do not want an account, or who prefer the HN community to discuss submissions.
So it devolves down to the fact that the account in question has found a way to get fake internet points more efficiently than other accounts on HN.
[1] the source is presumably the lobste.rs public RSS feed. Otherwise the data here is available in JSON format and writing a simple scanner that checks for new entries is trivial.
Don’t even need to poll RSS and deduplicate, get emails for each post and it’s a one line “for each email, send this POST + extracted url”