Ask HN: What's the endgame of the AI comments buried in every post? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the endgame of the AI comments buried in every post?

17 pointselar_verole11 comments

A lot of submissions nowadays have a few LLM comments (whether directly written by an agent, or human with a LLM I don't know), often downvoted and sitting at the end of the comment section. No-one even bothers to call them out anymore, it's just part of the landscape. Just wondering why ? What's the point for these people ?

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Account “seasoning,” similar to reddit.

They create an account and give it as human-like a history as possible (a few comments, enough time since registration that it doesn’t look brand new).

Then they sell it to whoever will buy it. This could be content marketers who want to promote a product, nation-states who want to influence Western voters, etc.

I hope I never run across any of those sketchy websites that buy user accounts. Can you give me a list so I can add them to my blocked domains? Opsec is key.

Any articles or docs in which I can learn more about this industry?

I think that to generate activity and make the post go viral

Go viral where? Hacker News doesn't feed into any other social media systems.

On HN itself. More activity makes a post look like more people are interested in it. The algorithm that chooses what appears on the front page does take notice of the number of comments.

Mind you, I'm not claiming that's what's actually going on. But that could be the intent.

Sure but if there are more comments than upvotes it triggers the flamewar detector and the thread gets weighted down. This forum interprets virality as damage and routes around it.

Then again I suppose the bots could also be upvoting, but I would assume that would be detectable to the voting ring detectors.

I don't know. Hacker News is supposed to be a place where human beings enjoy each other's company and conversation about common interests and intellectual pursuits but it seems like a lot of people here want to optimize the humanity out entirely.

To get some upvote, to increase karma

But if, as OP said, they're getting downvotes, then it isn't working.

But why? having a high karma doesn't really get you anything.

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