[mancerayder]

What motivation is there to use AI to astroturf (if that's what this is) like this?

Is it ideological?

Is it product marketing in those relevant threads where someone is showcasing?

Or is it pure technical testing, playing around?

[ceejayoz]

In some cases, it's probably to establish aged accounts that are more trusted by users and spam algorithms. There's a market for old Reddit accounts, for example.

[surgical_fire]

Interesting.

Incidentally, how much do they pay for a HN account that is a few years old and accumulated a few thousand Internet points?

Asking for a friend.

[duxup]

Yup, reddit is awash in established accounts that suddenly start spamming. Whole pools of them working to the same goal at times.

[rcarmo]

Yep. Like I said elsewhere on the thread, some of them already have enough karma to downvote.

[kelseyfrog]

I went through a phase where I milled responses through grinding plates of LLMs. Whether my reasons are shared with others remains unknown.

My relationship with writing, while improved, has been a difficult one. Part of me has always felt that there was a gap in my writing education. The choices other writers seem to make intuitively - sentence structure, word choice, and expression of ideas - do not come naturally to me. It feels like everyone else received the instructions and I missed that lesson.

The result was a sense of unequal skill. Not because my ideas are any less deserving, but because my ability to articulate them doesn't do them justice. The conceit is that, "If I was able to write better, more people would agree with me." It's entirely based on ego and fear of rejection.

Eventually, I learned that no matter how polished my writing is, even restructured by LLMs, it won't give me what I craved. At that moment, the separation of writer and words widened to a point where it wasn't about me anymore and more about them, the readers. This distance made all the difference and now I write with my own voice however awkward that may be.

[elzbardico]

Did you use AI for this answer?

Because it looks completely adequate for me. Maybe you're not the bad writer you think you are.

[Ithildin]

This was super relatable. Thank you for sharing. You're definitely not alone in this.

[tokyobreakfast]

Same as Reddit. Accumulate enough points via posting shallow and uninteresting—yet popular—dialogue to earn down voting and flagging abilities, which can be used (via automation) to manipulate discussions and suppress viewpoints.

Slashdot's system was superior because mod points were finite and randomly dispensed. This entropy discouraged abuse by design—as opposed to making it a key feature of the site.

It's the Achilles' heel of Reddit and every site that attempts to emulate it.

[ryandrake]

Critically, Slashdot also had a meta-moderation system, where users were asked to judge moderation activity to confirm whether it was sensible, fair, and so on. I'd like to believe that system played a vital role in stopping abuse of the moderation system. It was way ahead of its time.

I've been advocating for a while now that HN could use meta-moderation at least on flagging activity, so it can stop giving flagging powers to users who are using it for reasons other than flagging rulebreaking.

[ulrikrasmussen]

Reddit awards one karma for a comment if it doesn't get downvoted. I noticed the other day that I got a pretty random and only tangentially relevant comment on a one month old post I made. I checked out the user, and they were only commenting on old posts to slowly accumulate karma. Only the poster will be notified about such a comment, and as long as it is made to be made of platitudes, most people will not bother downvoting.

[mancerayder]

I understand the technical angle that everyone is explaining - enough karma to showcase or downvote or flag.

No one's really described the main piece - the strategical motivation. I suggested politics/ideology, product marketing or just technical testing of sock puppet creation.

In reddit people spam referral links. And here?

[kakacik]

I'd expect everything. HN ain't some local forum but place where opinions form and spread, and these reach many influential and powerful (now or in future) people. Heck there are sometimes major articles in general news about whats happening here.

To reverse the argument - it would be amateurish and plain stupid to ignore it. Barrier to entry is very low. Politics, ads, swaying mildly opinions of some recent clusterfuck by popular megacorp XYZ, just spying on people, you have it all here.

I dont know how dang and crew protects against this, I'd expect some level of success but 100% seems unrealistic. Slow and steady mild infiltration, either by AI bots or humans from GRU and similar orgs who have this literally in their job description.

[energy123]

Scams (romance scams or convincing people to run some code on their machine), influence operations by an intelligence agency, or advertising a product.

[mghackerlady]

The same case that ruins most good things, greed. The tragedy of the commons does not discriminate

[Aurornis]

Some of the AI comments end with a link to something they're plugging. "If you'd like to learn more about this I have a free guide at my website here". Those get flagged quickly.

Other accounts might be trying to age accounts and dilute their eventual coordinated voting or commenting rings. It's harder to identify sockpuppet accounts when they've been dutifully commenting slop for months before they start astroturfing for the chosen topic.

[reconnecting]

tirreno guy here, we develop an open-source fraud prevention / security platform (1).

Sometimes there is no clear explanation for fake account registration. Perhaps they were registered to be actively used in the future, as most fraud prevention techniques target new account registration and therefore old, aged accounts won't raise suspicion.

Slightly off-topic, but there are relatively new `services` that offer native brand mentions in reddit comments. Perhaps this will soon be available for HN as well, and warming up accounts might be needed for this purpose.

1. https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno

[sumeno]

Others have covered some of the incentives, but sometimes the answer is simply "because they're pathetic"

They don't have anything worth saying but want people to think they do