The amount of astroturfing around R1 is absolutely wild to see. Full scale propaganda war.
If anything, the other half good fully closed non ChatGPT models are astroturfing.
I made a post in december 2023 whining about the non hype for Deep Seek.
There’s a lot of astroturfing from a lot of different parties for a few different reasons. Which is all very interesting.
Some obvious astroturf posts on HN seem to be on the template "Watch we did boring coorparate SaaS thing X noone cares about!" and then a disappropiate amount of comments and upvotes and 'this is a great idea', 'I used it, it is good' or congratz posts, compared to the usual cynical computer nerd everything sucks especially some minute detail about the CSS of your website mindset you'd expect.
This is not a serious place
Of course it isn’t all botted. You don’t put astroturf muscle behind things that are worthless. You wait until you have something genuinely good and then give as big of a push as you can. The better it genuinely is the more you artificially push as hard as you can.
Go read a bunch of AI related subreddits and tell me you honestly believe all the comments and upvotes are just from normal people living their normal life.
Don’t be so naive.