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Comment by cxr | Hacker News Reader

Perversely, this submission is essentially blogspam. The article linked in the second paragraph, to which this "1 minute" read adds almost nothing of value, is the main story:

<https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by...>

394 comments. 645 points. Submitted 3 hours ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43422413>

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But also ironically, it's almost heartwarming these days to see blogspam that's not machine-generated! A real live human cared enough about an article to write a brief (perhaps only barely substantial, but at least handwritten) take on it!

It's reminiscent, perhaps, of the feel and motivation for Tumblr reblogs - and Tumblr continues to be vibrant by virtue of this culture: https://www.tumblr.com/engineering/189455858864/how-reblogs-... (2019)

Now, is driving attention and reputation to their site (in the broadest senses) part of a blogspammer/reblogger's motivation? Absolutely!

But should we be concerned about rewarding their act of curation, as long as there is at least some level of genuine curation intent? A world where that answer is categorically "no" would be antithetical, I think, to the concept of the participatory web.

"heartwarming ... To see blogspam" the internet was a mistake

The internet was great, everything we did with it in the last 20 years with it was the mistake. Collimating in a comment that blogspam can now be one of the positive notes in the hellscape we are building.

A very useful hellscape though, for all its flaws

culminating

Thanks, that's the right word. Now at least you know the comment wasn't written by AI

It won't be long until AI makes spelling, grammar and usage errors, if it's trained on things like message boards where people still don't know the difference between were, we're and where, lose vs. loose, affect vs. effect and wary vs. weary.

The internet IS great. The problem is similar to everything else in the world: the ratio of idiots to smart people using it is widely in favor of the idiots and they get to influence where it goes, how it operates and many other things.

In other words, democracy sucks but we have not found something so much better that it would pay for the benefit of freedom for everyone...

I dont feel this is blog spam it's more of a quick comment of the situation pointing to the actual article. I dont see anything wrong with writing a short post boosting or commenting on another article. There are no ads so I dont see this as blogspam which I associate with financial gain or clout.

It also linked to https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externali..., which is another worthwhile read.

All the time I see links on HN front page to Twitter and Mastodon posts with just as little text to them. Why does it upset you when it is in the medium of blogs, but not micro blogs?

Hehe, just participating in POSSE :) Funnily enough the story you're linking to quotes me with pictures of a story I wrote (https://sethmlarson.dev/slop-security-reports) about LLM-generated reports to open source projects.

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