How do you think it makes people who write ("generate" cheapens it) the interesting responses feel? Answering people's questions has two main rewards to the writer: it feels good to help someone else, and it boosts your ego to pontificate on something you know that others might not. Discovering that you're replying to a bot makes you feel like you've been fooled.

Anyway, I'm more aware than ever now that the people we interact with in text, online, are gradually being diluted by bots, and I don't want to participate in a community of bots.

Maybe the comment isn't generated by an LLM, and I didn't make any direct accusations. But it is a weird first comment. You expect first comments by fresh new accounts to show evidence of having been motivated to create an account because they had something to say - it requires non-zero activation energy. Meanwhile, there's plenty of incentive to try and sway what gets attention here on HN.

Accounts like these can be used later on to boost topics.

It doesn't sound human to me. Yet. See the other comments about portability in sibling threads.

I wonder if someone here is talking to themselves? Asking open questions with the trash account and answering them with the real account.

The way hn karma works, you’re incentivized to accumulate a set of bots that meet the threshold for flagging and downvoting. Barring effective anti-bot/brigading measures (some of which I’m sure exist), such a team of bots could manipulate front page content. That’s a valuable capability for a variety of nefarious aims in this space.

A straightforward one would be either subtly or dramatically tilting sentiment here negative against some mid-cap public tech company and profiting from a short position.

(Assuming you think investors care what gets upvoted on hn…)

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