I'm halfway through coding a tool to mention brands in social media discussions

This is an abomination and I very sincerely hope it fails. It's a "good idea" in the same way that scamming old people is - you might be able to make some money off it if your sense of ethics is so twisted that you can convince yourself you aren't a horrible person for doing it.

No description of how it works or what it does. Sounds like a bot. Dodgy ethics. Not yet launched.

This is just an idea, and possibly a bad one at that.

Regardless of morality, if it's a bot posting AI messages based on brand mentions or keyword mentions on set platforms then those platforms likely already have guidelines for bots. Maybe you could get away with an automated workflow? Send the user alerts for the mentions, along with 1-3 suggested responses, and let them post the comments themselves? That might be a better product.

Also brand mention tools are quite hard to scale, since you are essentially crawling the web for them. The AI response part is the easy bit.

As people on HN have said before, mentioning your product uses AI is not a selling point or USP. It's a feature or drawback. Your USP is whether or not you can quickly and accurately spot mentions and then make it easier for people to respond to them than your competitors.

Your main competitor btw - https://www.brandwatch.com/p/demo-social-listening/

Please clearly label the posts as being from your bot. Some bot posts are useful, like when someone asks what product solves X. If yours are clearly labeled, people will upvote posts that are actually contributing to the discussion and you'll be able to optimize for that and be useful. The majority of bots make the world worse, though.

This is like the jump to conclusions map in Office Space. This is a horrible idea at the expense of users.

Thank you guys for the comments - I will probably archive this project, since you had such a bad reaction. Appreciate the feedback

I could really use help with validating that this is a good idea. I have 200 sign ups, but I will appreciate it if you could share the link with startups struggling to grow and/or micro-SaaS products.

The tool works by naturally name-dropping your brand in the right conversations using keywords, or alternative keywords - and it does this across Twitter (X), Reddit, and other platforms soon.

Will appreciate general feedback also if you have any. Thanks :)