Ask HN: Can we talk about AI Astroturfing? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can we talk about AI Astroturfing?

49 pointsovergard39 comments

Well first, I don't mean this as a shot at the mods that do a great job.

I'm noticing a lot of posts and comments around AI seem like industry plants. Look, I recognize that people are excited about AI and want to share their perspectives, and I'm not trying to accuse people that disagree with me of being industry plants, but the recent one about "I love coding at 60 now because of Claude Code!" by a new user with "cc" at the end of their name seems a LITTLE suspicious. As is the number of upvotes -- I can understand how a new model gets a lot of excitement, but a stranger on the internet enjoying the new model doesn't seem like 800 points worthy?

I'm not trying to spark a controversy here, but I'm wondering if others feel the same or if I'm just overreacting.

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The referenced post has a very high change of being planted. The upvote count is an anomaly for a brand new account, few sentences, no link, Tell HN post.

I upvoted it by mistake, it looked genuine at first. However the comments contain a lot of "everything is awesome" responses without backing up their claims. The poster does not participate in the discussion at all.

I like HN but it seems to be getting spammed with hidden ads.

  > I upvoted it by mistake

You can unvote stuff. Not sure for how long though.

Two hours, I believe.

To me this is another sign the written word is dead.

With so many mechanisms for creating users and posting en masse, I find it really hard to believe the contents of any comment or post I read that goes past a paragraph or two. And of course I am still skeptical even if it is less than 2 paragraphs of text.

I find the contents of that specific post hard to believe. Specially since the user hasn't participated in the conversation at all.

I like this place a lot and it saddens me we are just going to see more of this.

I’m almost wondering if in a few years people are going to have to sign everything they write with a private key or something. I think anonymity is extremely important for society and the internet but bots are only going to get better

What's going to happen is we'll get a couple of generations born natively to a world in which AI is ubiquitous, and they simply won't care. Content generated by an LLM will have no more or less value than content generated by a human, and social and emotional bonds with LLMs will be seen as no different than with human beings.

I believe in dead internet theory.

I highly doubt there are as many people terminally online as we think there are.

Hide, flag, or ignore. We've always had hype content (cryptocurrency content, for instance) and spam content on this site. Just flag it (to drop its ranking, especially if you think it is spam or doesn't belong here), hide it (if you think it could belong here but are uninterested in it), or ignore it (same as hiding, but you'll still have to scroll past it).

I did flag it. But I feel like if we don’t speak out we’re just going to get more of this.

> flag

I'm not sure this is good advice. dang and the rest of the HN braintrust are very opaque about how your own flagging and voting affects your account, and I wouldn't be surprised if flagging or downvoting something like that increases the likelihood of you having some negative weight put on your subsequent votes/flags.

What a strange thing to worry about. If they didn't want users to flag off-topic and spam content, we wouldn't have that capability.

If the mods think your definition of "off-topic" and "spam" is too broad they will remove your flagging rights and your flags will simply stop working.

Upvote the wrong things too often and your upvotes will stop voting.

Downvote the wrong things too often and your downvotes will stop working.

Vouch for the wrong things and your vouches will stop working.

Everything you can do here is a privilege contingent on moderator assessment. Go against the flow at your own peril.

So then never upvote, downvote, flag, or vouch because you might lose the privilege to upvote, downvote, flag, or vouch. Still strange, but you do you.

Do what you want regardless, but just be aware that Hacker News is not and has never been a free speech zone.

Why the non sequitur? I never said it was a free speech zone nor was it implied by my other comments.

I'm just pointing out that it's a weird paranoia to be worried about how your votes, flags, and vouches get interpreted by the mods. "Oh no," you and the other guy say, "they might take away my flagging privileges if I use them." Ok, so out of paranoia you don't use them, which amounts to the same thing. The fear is in your head, get over it.

You asked upthread why we would have the ability to flag off-topic and spam content if the mods didn't want use to use it, and I'm giving you the answer. The mods only want us to use it in ways that reinforce the site's cultural norms.

It isn't something to worry about, but it is something to be aware of.

> worry about

I don't "worry" about it, as I don't care about karma and almost never flag anything, but most other users care greatly about their internet points (it is orange reddit, after all), and as krapp pointed out, it's long been suspected that using votes, flags, vouches in ways the site algorithmically dislikes or that moderators find adverse results in the equivalent of "hellbanning" of those functions.

For example, I still upvote or vouch comments that I feel were unfairly downvoted or flagged, and at least for vouching, it certainly seems like mine don't work anymore. I guess I vouched too many no-no things, and now I'm on the naughty list.

The fact that dang and the other mods engage in what's effectively a form of low-level gaslighting and deny doing so ought to be reason enough for any HN to dislike them, and yet all I see is fawning praise for the work they do.

It’s not a huge leap to imagine it’s happening here too. AI companies are offering huge sums to influencers to promote their products across a bunch of social channels - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/google-microsoft-pay-creator...

Thanks! Link is much appreciated. I think the rare cases where things are reported should be recorded

I never even thought about that post being anything but legit, why? Because I agree with it, and no matter WHAT my wife and kids might occasionally say, I am no AI :)

I haven’t thought about it, but I just feel that the topic of ai might hit someone my age differently than someone who is building their career rather than coming to the close of it. To someone who is genuinely threatened by the advent of ai (and I don’t say they are wrong) anyone like me who is enjoying the experience of learning how to use it may be mystifying. But at least in my view it’s understandable,

Astroturfing was already a thing 20 years ago with fake comments on blogs. AI is no different, except now it's much easier to both create content and upvote that content.

Not sure if there is a real solution to the Eternal September problem, other than moving to a more niche space that the marketers and bots don't care about.

Maybe we ask for drawings of pelicans riding bicycles. (Btw im still amazed how bad chatgpt is at making svgs)

I'm guilty of upvoting that and in fact I did not even read it. Here is the thing though. I'm older, not 60 but older for a coder and the sentiment in the title alone resonates with me. If I upvoted it then I can see many others doing so. Is it worth 600 points? I dont know but it was worth 1 from me.

Fair. I’m not trying to tell people they’re wrong to upvote it, I’m just feeling like I’m just reading ads for OpenAI and Anthropic at this point

Do you have links to examples? I normally lurk HN, but I can't say I've seen much of this popup to the front page at least.

I'd say the bigger problem would be AI posters/commentors, though I've not seen as much of them versus certain subreddits which are just probably more bots than human...

They're referencing the current top link under Ask HN right now, easy to find but here's the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282777

It spent a good bit of time on the front page yesterday and is still there today.

Ah yeah I just found it too! I'm a couple days OOTL!

For this one - it's tough. It definitely started a conversation. The 'cc' part of the name is sus, but on the internet, its impossible to verify the truth of any post. But the counterpoint is - if for some reason Anthropic wanted to fund a large scale astroturfing op -- why make is so obvious with cc postfixes?

Yeah, the weirdly obvious nature of it gave me pause, but I think that might be a sign of a bot. Like “hey Claude come up with a username”.

To me, it would almost be shocking if these companies weren’t using bots or paid posters on HN. I mean, they show zero restraint around using the press to manipulate markets when they want to scrounge up investment dollars by either creating fear or ridiculous promises they have no way of keeping. I just want there to be a bit more awareness so people realize to be skeptical here. Like others, I’m almost feeling gaslit daily and it’s making me avoid this site a lot

It's one of those things where I feel the same thing but at the same time also question whether I'm overreacting to. Sort of in a similar way where there is so much stuff that feels like it's ai written (with little or no attempt to even tweak it from the immediate ai output) out in the real world Internet spaces.

I don't know. It all feels quite unstable in a gaslighty way. All I can really is I suspect the world is not ready for llm advertising and the unintended consequences from the drift to it is going to be wild

What means Astroturfing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

You're responding to a bot

I think gitoweic’s human, they’ve been posting like this since 2020 (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24979595)

One of the things that I've noticed more the last year is the use of downvotes for disagreement. I believed downvotes were more about flagging for disruptions. I rarely upvote other for something that I truly agree (I equate it to full applause from me) and I downvoted (even rarer) things that derails the thread.

"Downvotes for disagreement" have been a hot topic of discussion and complaint on HN for a very long time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2020612 - Discussion from December 2010, for one example. Downvotes are used for a variety of reasons whether we like it or not, and without a substantial change to the way HN works that will continue to be the case.

> but the recent one about "I love coding at 60 now because of Claude Code!" by a new user with "cc"

I immediately guessed that's what prompted this thread when I saw the title.

> I'm not trying to spark a controversy here, but I'm wondering if others feel the same or if I'm just overreacting.

No, you're not. Besides the OP and its abundance of upvotes and all of the green accounts shilling CC and AI, even more disturbing was the older accounts, some created more than a decade ago, posting in a similar bot-like cadence, shilling just as enthusiastically, and in some cases, freely interacting with the obvious bots. (And I say this as someone who's generally preferred to do throwaway posting on HN, so I feel uneasy automatically impugning green names.)

I can only guess there's a black market for HN accounts (as there is for reddit accounts), or perhaps some entities have been seeding bot accounts for years.

Honestly they might also just be super hackable. I don’t even know my password on this site but given I set it like 15 years ago it almost assuredly sucks (I will fix!)

I had no idea there was a black market for Reddit accounts. Count me naive!

I doubt Big AI is mass violating the CFAA just to shill, but maybe some other entity did the dirty work and is now reselling the accounts or indirect access to them, similar to the residential IP proxy business they use to disgusie their scraping.

As an aside, letting us easily view the flagged comments of a user would be an easy way of wading out corporate shillposters, since they shy away from posting anything controversial or offensive.

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