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Comment by throwreplyguy | Hacker News Reader

I wish it was that obvious. I think it's like criminals - the obvious ones get caught, and people go "criminals are pretty dumb", but there are plenty of smart ones too.

I posted this example earlier today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40208741 of a reddit account shilling Sourcegraph. They flat-out deny that this's a bot, but it's clear to Me.

Can't trust anything or anyone any more. Pretty sad.

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Hi, head of community at Sourcegraph here. We don't use bots. u/Prolacticus is a Pro user, we do not pay him/her, and they are not sponsored. In fact, I offered them swag a month ago, and they refused.

We do give free/sponsored accounts to our Discord mods, open source maintainers, and folks who write guest blog posts for us. u/Prolacticus is not one of those accounts.

maybe you could answer the questions I asked your your CEO here?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40208741

I fully believe that you aren't paying him directly to do this, but I don't believe that any human would shill so hard (and always mentioning the price and the same gist of 'it's fantastic' etc). Any chance it's a replyguy or similar test, either by someone else in your org without your knowledge or just by the creator themselves as I guess they need to do some 'live testing' before charging real 'customers'.

They already answered that when he said "he is not affiliated with Sourcegraph"

Confirmed. Not affiliated in any way.

> They flat-out deny that this's a bot, but it's clear to Me.

Doesn't look like a bot at all, possible shill sure but they're a person.

It seems to me that the concept of shill is slowly eating the concept of enthusiast or fanboy in the public perception. They are similar and hard to discern from one another. I'm not sure if one is more trustworthy than the other.

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