I'm noticing a lot of posts and comments around AI seem like industry plants. Look, I recognize that people are excited about AI and want to share their perspectives, and I'm not trying to accuse people that disagree with me of being industry plants, but the recent one about "I love coding at 60 now because of Claude Code!" by a new user with "cc" at the end of their name seems a LITTLE suspicious. As is the number of upvotes -- I can understand how a new model gets a lot of excitement, but a stranger on the internet enjoying the new model doesn't seem like 800 points worthy?
I'm not trying to spark a controversy here, but I'm wondering if others feel the same or if I'm just overreacting.
I upvoted it by mistake, it looked genuine at first. However the comments contain a lot of "everything is awesome" responses without backing up their claims. The poster does not participate in the discussion at all.
I like HN but it seems to be getting spammed with hidden ads.
> I upvoted it by mistake
You can unvote stuff. Not sure for how long though.With so many mechanisms for creating users and posting en masse, I find it really hard to believe the contents of any comment or post I read that goes past a paragraph or two. And of course I am still skeptical even if it is less than 2 paragraphs of text.
I find the contents of that specific post hard to believe. Specially since the user hasn't participated in the conversation at all.
I like this place a lot and it saddens me we are just going to see more of this.
I highly doubt there are as many people terminally online as we think there are.
I'm not sure this is good advice. dang and the rest of the HN braintrust are very opaque about how your own flagging and voting affects your account, and I wouldn't be surprised if flagging or downvoting something like that increases the likelihood of you having some negative weight put on your subsequent votes/flags.
I haven’t thought about it, but I just feel that the topic of ai might hit someone my age differently than someone who is building their career rather than coming to the close of it. To someone who is genuinely threatened by the advent of ai (and I don’t say they are wrong) anyone like me who is enjoying the experience of learning how to use it may be mystifying. But at least in my view it’s understandable,
Not sure if there is a real solution to the Eternal September problem, other than moving to a more niche space that the marketers and bots don't care about.
I'd say the bigger problem would be AI posters/commentors, though I've not seen as much of them versus certain subreddits which are just probably more bots than human...
It spent a good bit of time on the front page yesterday and is still there today.
For this one - it's tough. It definitely started a conversation. The 'cc' part of the name is sus, but on the internet, its impossible to verify the truth of any post. But the counterpoint is - if for some reason Anthropic wanted to fund a large scale astroturfing op -- why make is so obvious with cc postfixes?
I don't know. It all feels quite unstable in a gaslighty way. All I can really is I suspect the world is not ready for llm advertising and the unintended consequences from the drift to it is going to be wild
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2020612 - Discussion from December 2010, for one example. Downvotes are used for a variety of reasons whether we like it or not, and without a substantial change to the way HN works that will continue to be the case.
I immediately guessed that's what prompted this thread when I saw the title.
> I'm not trying to spark a controversy here, but I'm wondering if others feel the same or if I'm just overreacting.
No, you're not. Besides the OP and its abundance of upvotes and all of the green accounts shilling CC and AI, even more disturbing was the older accounts, some created more than a decade ago, posting in a similar bot-like cadence, shilling just as enthusiastically, and in some cases, freely interacting with the obvious bots. (And I say this as someone who's generally preferred to do throwaway posting on HN, so I feel uneasy automatically impugning green names.)
I can only guess there's a black market for HN accounts (as there is for reddit accounts), or perhaps some entities have been seeding bot accounts for years.
I had no idea there was a black market for Reddit accounts. Count me naive!
As an aside, letting us easily view the flagged comments of a user would be an easy way of wading out corporate shillposters, since they shy away from posting anything controversial or offensive.