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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

if you are selling user accounts to a spammer, they want to buy accounts that have been "aged" - that is, they have some comment history and weren't created on the same day they start spamming, so they're a bit less obvious.

but if that's what they're doing here, they aren't very good at it.

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You can actually see use of aged accounts in action: the recent storm of non-English spam submissions that was dumped into /newest (discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45956847) come from a mixture of newly created accounts but also some that have been around for several years with zero activity.

If the account is shadowbanned, it's not worth much to a spammer.

Myself, I suspect that it's people trying to tune or test drive their own personal LLMs.

How does voting work with shadowbanned accounts? Selling upvotes on stories is the real game, nobody cares about comments.

Admins can turn off voting influence per user. I imagine shadowban comes with nonfunctional voting.

It seems that newly registered accounts are currently shadowbanned by default. At least that's what I did.

For example, when I send my first post, I find that I cannot see it on another device that is not logged in.

It might not have been shut down Manually by the admins; HN has its own antispam system.

In my opinion, these may automatically get you tagged and shadowbanned.

- using a VPN - posting instead of comment immediately after registration - posts containing unusual links (like personal blogs)

What’s the going rate for an account on HN? Can’t imagine very much, no offense. There is no user-based algorithm or follower count here.

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