[garganzol]

The user [1] you've mentioned has 160 points being a poster of total four bland messages. This goes against a normal statistical distribution. And this gives away why they do it: the long-term aim is to cultivate voting rings to influence the narratives and rankings in the future. For now, this is only my theory but it may be a real monetization strategy for them.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=snowhale

[yorwba]

I gather that you do not have showdead on. The account has a lot more posts than that, but most were flagged.

EDIT to correct: most are not [flagged], but [dead] anyway, so probably manual moderator action or an automated anti-bot measure.

[afavour]

I'd be interested to know why those comments were flagged actually. They don't scream AI and no-one has replied calling them out as AI, etc. But the vast majority are dead.

[bugufu8f83]

>And this gives away why they do it: the long-term aim is to cultivate voting rings to influence the narratives and rankings in the future. For now, this is only my theory but it may be a real monetization strategy for them.

I don't think it's clear at all why people do this. I suspect a large amount of it, at least on a site like HN, is just hapless morons who think it's "cool".