Ask HN: Can we talk about AI Astroturfing?

The referenced post has a very high change of being planted. The upvote count is an anomaly for a brand new account, few sentences, no link, Tell HN post.

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.

To me this is another sign the written word is dead.

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.

Hide, flag, or ignore. We've always had hype content (cryptocurrency content, for instance) and spam content on this site. Just flag it (to drop its ranking, especially if you think it is spam or doesn't belong here), hide it (if you think it could belong here but are uninterested in it), or ignore it (same as hiding, but you'll still have to scroll past it).

It’s not a huge leap to imagine it’s happening here too. AI companies are offering huge sums to influencers to promote their products across a bunch of social channels - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/google-microsoft-pay-creator...

I never even thought about that post being anything but legit, why? Because I agree with it, and no matter WHAT my wife and kids might occasionally say, I am no AI :)

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,

Astroturfing was already a thing 20 years ago with fake comments on blogs. AI is no different, except now it's much easier to both create content and upvote that content.

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'm guilty of upvoting that and in fact I did not even read it. Here is the thing though. I'm older, not 60 but older for a coder and the sentiment in the title alone resonates with me. If I upvoted it then I can see many others doing so. Is it worth 600 points? I dont know but it was worth 1 from me.

Do you have links to examples? I normally lurk HN, but I can't say I've seen much of this popup to the front page at least.

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's one of those things where I feel the same thing but at the same time also question whether I'm overreacting to. Sort of in a similar way where there is so much stuff that feels like it's ai written (with little or no attempt to even tweak it from the immediate ai output) out in the real world Internet spaces.

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

What means Astroturfing?

One of the things that I've noticed more the last year is the use of downvotes for disagreement. I believed downvotes were more about flagging for disruptions. I rarely upvote other for something that I truly agree (I equate it to full applause from me) and I downvoted (even rarer) things that derails the thread.

> but the recent one about "I love coding at 60 now because of Claude Code!" by a new user with "cc"

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.