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

5 pointsposted 5 hours ago
by elar_verole

Item id: 49362305

8 Comments

michael-lehn

3 hours ago

To get some upvote, to increase karma

AnimalMuppet

3 hours ago

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

cesargstn

5 hours ago

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

krapp

4 hours ago

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

AnimalMuppet

3 hours ago

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.

krapp

2 hours ago

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.

smt88

5 hours ago

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.

vuggamie

5 hours ago

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.