Ask HN: What's the endgame of the AI comments buried in every post?
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 ?
19 comments
[ 0.33 ms ] story [ 9.7 ms ] threadThey 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.
In Pg’s dreams his site is that valuable.
The only one trying to buy them is dang sock puppets setting a honeypot but nobody is interested: https://www.playerup.com/threads/looking-for-aged-hackernews...
He says it like HN doesn’t happily take the money.
The bad guy is HN itself - it’s their site. Should be incredibly obvious.
Mind you, I'm not claiming that's what's actually going on. But that could be the intent.
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.
HN simply censors like crazy, bans and shadow bans real people while they promote their AI.
The ones being hidden are real people who HN censors.