Ask HN: What's the endgame of the AI comments buried in every post?
5•elar_verole•2h ago
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 ?
Comments
smt88•1h 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•1h 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.
cesargstn•1h ago
I think that to generate activity and make the post go viral
krapp•43m ago
Go viral where? Hacker News doesn't feed into any other social media systems.
smt88•1h ago
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•1h ago