Ask HN: What's the endgame of the AI comments buried in every post?
I've noticed that many submissions now have a few LLM-generated comments, often downvoted and sitting at the end of the comment section. Nobody even calls them out anymore; it's just part of the landscape. I'm wondering why people do this and what their endgame is.
On HN itself. More activity makes a post look like more people are interested in it. The algorithm that chooses what appears on the front page does take notice of the number of comments. Mind you, I'm not claiming that's what's actually going on. But that could be the intent.
Sure but if there are more comments than upvotes it triggers the flamewar detector and the thread gets weighted down. This forum interprets virality as damage and routes around it. 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.
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.