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Comment by elbenshira | Hacker News Reader

What's up with all the spammy comments from fake users?

I hate to jump to conclusions without any proof, but it looks a lot like someone trying to "bump" up their own article by upping it and posting fake comments.

We sent out some tweets with links to this hacker news posts. So we are introducing some people to hacker news for the first time.

Notice the names on some of these "fake users" match authors on the slideshow :-). Why is it bad to comment on and be excited about something they've contributed to?

It's not, but when the comments read like they're from impressed third parties, it smells a bit. Imagine if coauthors of a book posted reviews on Amazon along the lines of "Wow! This book is amazing and has a great design" without disclosing their authorship, it looks weird. Instead, they should have gone with something more natural like "Just wanted to say I was involved with one of the slides in this project and I think it's turned out great!" I doubt such comments would have been voted down to oblivion.

Yeah. The comments like that deserve to be voted down for sure. I agree they don't really add anything.

But I do think they are genuine. Since these are all people who just replied to an email that we then compiled into a site, they sorta (kinda) qualify as "impressed 3rd parties".

If you haven't been around here, you may not have noticed that there aren't a whole lot of "Me too" or "First post!" type of comments.

Some of the comments on HN could pass for short essays with subsequent panel discussions. That's why we read it.

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