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Comment by ajaykam | Hacker News Reader

It turns out to be a pretty complicated problem. Every single email client and device formats email forwards differently. The technical challenge is to take the input from a fwd'd thread, account for which client it's coming from and then reformat it in a way that makes sense. Not to mention the fact that the text towards the bottom of a forwarded thread (the earliest messages) is messy and can be difficult to comprehend. Parsing garbage and turning it into something useful is a hell of a challenge.

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It actually does look kinda interesting. But what's with all the spambot comments?

no idea. apparently spam bots love us.

I don't think they're bots. I recognize about half the names, and though they may not be regular HN contributors, they're real people (some of 'em, at least).

A few of them, yes. The rest are newly-created accounts and others (like billshander) are around 3 month old but with shady comment history.

Interesting.

Edit: I suppose the occam's razor explanation is that someone emailed (or twitted) the link around asking for people to show them some support in here, instead of an intricate botting conspiracy.

Yep, I checked this out and created an account because of a tweet that I got. I follow some startup CEOs. Hope you don't consider this to be a "shady" comment ;-) And yes, I am a fan of micromobs; it has been useful to me. It's kindof like campfire, but better.

I'm pretty new here (though I lurked for a like a year before creating an account), but I don't think your comment will be considered "shady". What your comment has that the others lack is, 1) actual descriptive information, and 2) an attempt to participate in the discussion.

Definitely some spam: the trevania, salimmadjd and gavrielh accounts were created less than 30 minutes ago. Billshander has had an account for some time, but only posted in this and one other Micromobs thread, both less than 30 minutes ago.

It's distasteful.

I think it's worth differentiating between spam accounts, and new accounts. They are not the same thing.

I'm sure that a lot of the folks on HN are here because someone in a startup emailed the other folks they know in startups and said "check out my thread on HN and give me a vote". That's how I first found out about it and YC.

Spam might be distasteful, but I don't think there is anything distasteful about someone from a startup introducing other startup founders to the site and asking them to get involved. It might take new members of the community a while to learn the rules, but there is no innate correlation between being new and being a spammer. And HN isn't normally an elitist place where length of tenure implies respectability. I don't think anyone wants to see it turn into the tech community equivalent of a country club.

They're real people (at least the ones I know) :)

The other startups in Founder Institute try to support each other wherever possible (as do YCers obviously), but I think there are a few folks less familiar with the "substantive comments only" mantra on HN. But they're not bots.

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