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Comment by tqwhite | Hacker News Reader

Congratulations on being the first person to do something with AI that will directly make my own, personal life worse. You are a monster.

You should not be showing this as if you are proud on HN. You should hide it and whimper in shame.

View on HN

Yo, I didn't invent it. I'm trying to warn others about it.

The user who posted this is perfectly legit, and not the person who created the site. As their follow-up comment makes clear -- they weren't doing this to promote the site, but to warn others of its existence:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40236860

As such the post is unfortunately all too relevant, and shouldn't have been flagged.

Pretty sure this has been happening for a long time now. Before AI/automation, they would just hire people in developing countries to manually promote products on the platform. You can take some steps to mitigate this: for example clicking on the username of people recommending products and seeing if they promote the products more than once or have a history of being active on other unrelated subs. Although they also manipulate that sometimes (purchasing old/actual user accounts), but there's not much else you can do at this point. Even the old word-of-mouth method is more unreliable these days because people just echo what they saw on social media.

This is the first for you?

> that will directly make my own, personal life worse.

Have you considered doing things that will make your life better? I use ReplyGuy to save myself like 30-60 hours monthly on each of my projects and it has made my life better.

Thanks buddy i agree with every word you said and will check this link out as well, thanks again! /s

At the expense of making everyone else's life slightly worse through bogus product recommendations and slowly degrading the quality of the medium you advertise in? Guys, have you considered taking from the commons? There's all free stuff there, it's benefited me personally.

> Guys, have you considered taking from the commons? There's all free stuff there, it's benefited me personally.

Classic Reddit joke: “Did you know that the ducks at the park are free? You can just take them!”

I actually had to ask myself whether this was written by a real person or by a bot like ReplyGuy. I've never felt the need to ask that before. I hate this.

I thought I was so obviously over-the-top mimicking the bot from the subject link that it would be obvious satire (and thus point out how easily something could be done on HN)… But I’m not so sure…

I had to go back and undownvote your first comment. You got me, at least.

I caught the downvote bat for replying with one of the replies from the "People love our replies, really" section from the TFA verbatim :)

Heh, I was so paranoid about the bot thing that I didn't even consider it could have been sarcasm. I even checked your last couple posts on HN after reading your comment just to see if your account had a history and if it was all shilling for products.

I'm convinced you're a real person. Sorry for not catching on to the sarcasm.

You sound like a mechanic who dumps his used motor oil down a storm drain to avoid the expense of proper disposal. Yeah, it's good for you, but it pollutes the environment for everyone.

You are polluting the digital commons. You should be ashamed of yourself.

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