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Comment by readitalready | Hacker News Reader

Is it because there's a lot more AI related content as the industry quickly shifts? Or is it bots submitting content?

I've noticed a pretty significant uptick in new accounts posting complete garbage. I don't mean the comments are bad, they're not even words in many cases.

I collected a few of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47130684

But it also seems some topics (in particular AI) attract a lot of accounts that post incredibly low quality comments, far below the quality you'd expect from HN. Ofte it's in reasonable English, but it's just inane reddit-level drivel. Unclear if these topics attract low quality posters, or if these are bot accounts.

Also looking at the three first pages of /noobcomments, we find 28 comments with EM-dashes in them. That's not proof of AI, but if you compare with /newcomments, you find exactly one EM-dash going back as far. That's a bit of a statistical aberration.

I've witnessed bots here on accounts that are years old with no history that start posting multiple times in a short timeframe suddenly after being dormant forever. Makes you wonder how they're getting these old accounts. It's not just new ones.

Black market accounts. Some human made them years ago for a price, they are sat on by some black market / grey market guy and now he's selling the accounts for a profit.

Old accounts from multiple social media platforms has a $$$$$ value.

Account takeover is a thing that happens. I doubt HN has the best measures against credential stuffing.

I would wager the vast majority are alt accounts of existing users. People who don't want to risk their karma or reputation but who do want to go mask off for certain subjects. After that it's bound to be bots run by HN users. I just don't think HN is so popular that the rush of green accounts popping up actually represents new users. Maybe I'm wrong , though.

Reddit has been shedding its techy enthusiast crowd for the past few years with the combination of policy changes and insufficient moderation against LLM bots. I wonder if that’s contributing.

It's likely people with mediocre ideas but access to free LLM tools are able to get over the care-risk-reward activation energy and consequently submit their ideas with the help of LLMs.

I believe it's the former, which of course does not exclude the latter.

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