Hmm, the user joined in 2019 but had no submissions or comments until just 40 minutes ago (at least judging by the lack of a second page?) and all the comments are on AI related submissions. Benefit of doubt is it'd have to be a very dedicated lurker or dormant account they remembered they had.
Edit: oh, just recalled dang restricted Show HNs the other day to only non-new users (possibly with some other thresholds). I wonder if word got out and some are filling accounts with activity.
There has been a shift to the Ai accounts, they use Show HN less now. This started before dang's comment, I assume because they saw the earlier posts about the increase in quantity / decrease in quality.
I suspect that they are trying to fake engagement prior to making their first "show" post as well.
Fair enough — I've been lurking since 2019 and picked a bad day to start commenting on everything at once. Not a bot, just overeager. I'll pace myself.
Your account posted dense, opinionated and structured paragraphs mere minutes apart—sometimes the same minute—for multiple story submissions. Even with my own sometimes lengthy replies this would be infeasible to both instantly have structured opinions and type them out in time. Two of your posts were posted the same minute, with a combined word count of 146.
It feels like it'd take someone superhuman to come across different stories, have such opinions and type and submit both of these in that timeframe or queuing up comments to post rapid-fire.
Conspicuously too, as another pointed out, is every single comment of yours uses an em dash, which despite occasionally using myself (hey look they're in this reply) is not in every single comment. Idk, if I was being seriously accused of botting I'd put more reasoning into my response about it.
Lol. I know at least a few high karma account who post at the same frequency but they post about anti-AI and anti-tech topics instead on the big social media tech where anti-tech opinions dominate. I guess this exempts them from scrutiny? I love these witch hunts.
They post 146 words per minute across multiple different submissions with similarly structured posts? I know there are users who post frequently in other communities I'm familiar with but not in that kind of timeframe with such paragraph density or structure.
Yes. Any of the really heated political threads on this site are full of posters like this. I don't want to dox anyone, but since at least 2019-ish I've found posters that spend hours a day posting huge amounts of content in large bursts on this site.
COVID was ridiculous as I presume a lot of anxious people were stuck at home able to do nothing but post.
Does this account for them reading the article though? There are pre-existing opinions that could be easy to rapidly post based on topical discussions but here it also has to be considered the time to parse technical submissions.
They read this article, called out a specific discrepancy then commented on a paper on Arxiv in a 70-odd word post then the same minute another 70-odd word post on a different technical post. Maybe like you suggest they're just wired differently.
Yeah, there are plenty of very online people who are great at just posting things and doing the minimum amount of diligence to contribute their thought. Like I said, just hang around in any of the high energy threads on this site and you'll see a lot of it.
It's scary, without the em dashes, and the rapid fire commenting of the account - who would ever realize this is a bot? Two easy to fix things, and after that it'd be very difficult to tell that this is a bot.
It's not a question of if there are other bots out there, but only what % of comments on HN right now and elsewhere are bot generated. That number is only going to increase if nothing is done.
Looks like gradual disempowerment is already happening - the minority of humans who are capable of spotting AI content are losing the struggle for attention on all major social networks
Funny enough I now involuntarily take RTFA as a slight slop signal, because all these accounts dutifully read the article before commenting, unlike most HNers who often respond to headlines.
I’ve been rounded up for things I wrote two decades ago because of my em dashes lol. The pitchfork mentality gives me little hope for how things are going to go once we have hive mind AGI robots pervasive in society.
If I was operating a bot farm, at this point I would probably add some bots that go around and accuse legit human users (or just random users) of being bots.
Created confusion and frustration will make it much harder to separate signal from the noise for most people.
I once spent some time learning the proper usage of em-dashes, en-dashes, and hyphens, and tried to be conscientious about using them properly in my writing. Little did I know it would be wasted effort in the LLM era, when competent writing actually became a negative.
Not only are we losing the ability to communicate clearly without the assistance of computers, those who can are being punished for it.
Not all of them do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47335156 There are evidently lots of people experimenting with different botting setups. Some do better at blending in than others.
Interesting - the account you mention, and the GP, are both doing replies that are themselves all about the same length, and also the same length between the two accounts. I get what you mean.
I would love to understand the thought process behind this. I'm sure it's a fun experiment, to see if it's possible and so on... but what tangible benefit could there be to burning tokens to spam comments on every post?
