Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts
shkspr.mobi
shkspr.mobi
It's obvious on the channels, because these reply sets usually don't contain a lot of replies to comments (if there are any comment replies, it's almost always from the channel owner). It's so obvious, in fact, that I'm surprised YouTube hasn't done something to address it.
“Wow! Seems like it’s so easy to change over with savings like that!”
Doesn’t mean I don’t ever get duped, but idk. You learn to spot the signs. I imagine most of us on HN catch most instances. Genuine-seeming referrals aren’t as easy to fake as one would think.
Then again, you should live under the assumption that your Google account could be banned at any time with no recourse. You do have local backups of all your Google account data and don't need your Gmail account to access anything important, right?
"For many years" being around 20 years at this point. Not sure reddit is a great example, given the founders admitted to using sockpuppets almost since day 1 in order to generate fake activity on the platform.
I've acquired a sense for at least some of the bots. There's this set of bots that post a high-engagement post about once a day to an implausibly large range of subreddits, with implausible regularity. I can tell by the way I remove them and the way that the other subs are mostly not that most subs have not figured this out yet.
There is an obvious solution to that problem, which I haven't wanted to put out there, but I've become increasingly suspicious that it's already been figured out anyhow, which is to limit a specific user account to a specific "persona" with plausible interests and posting rates.
And that's where I think the race may well end, victory spammers. If there's a winning move against that in general I haven't figured it out.
I know reddit is concerned about this at the corporate level but I'm not sure they realize this is possibly their #1 threat, towering above all others. Not that I have any specific suggestions about what to do about it either. And it's years before the masses realize this and stop visiting, and by the time that happens all the social media companies are going to be in trouble for the same reason. You can see the leading edge here on HN but it's still only an almost negligible fraction of the total userbase of something like Reddit today. But that will change.
But definitely, bots on reddit seem significantly more common in the past year or two.
I think there are non bot reasons to do that.
Well... to be more precise... I'm abundantly positive there are bots and shills here in a general sense. But when it comes to identifying specific accounts as bots or shills, it gets difficult. Yeah, a lot of us have gotten pretty good at identifying the "default LLM voice", but it is trivial to kick it out of that.
I have done some formal writing with AI, and I always feed it a sample of my own writing to emulate. It doesn't do it perfectly. For instance, I'm a semi-colon kind of guy and it still em-dashes without more explicitly instructions to avoid them. But what comes out the other end would definitely pass most people's "default LLM voice" sniff test; it eliminates most of the tells [1] people look for. (I just checked. The resulting output may actually be "better" at avoiding the tells than my own actual text...)
The upshot of all of that is that we are approaching a point with the current AIs that with just a bit of clever prompting it may take many, many kilobytes of text for someone to form a justified (!) opinion that some set of posts is actually AI.
Fortunately and in fairness to this site, they’ve become rarer, and most seem to be flagged within hours. Usually I look at the comments to confirm, and most are already dead.
It is safe to assume that you missed the ones that are not identifiable.
Most of the creators delete those comments, but if you get in early, you'll see them.
@DeniseJ.Wilson 6 hours ago I believe that a 'hard economy' is actually the best time to build if you have discipline and the right strategy. Most people spend their time complaining, but I believe in execution over excuses. I made a smart move in early 2026, and because I believe in staying the course, I just hit $1M. The momentum is still building, and by the end of this year, it’s going to be massive.
And the replies start talking about a Coach Julia out of no where. To search set up an apt.
https://claimyr.com/government-services/irs/I-filed-my-2021-...
Don't remember a lot. Just reminded me of my time doing this. I don't remember actually posting much links myself because it was too boring and lots of manual work for not much benefit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRumer
which was a lot better than other products on the market and solved difficult problems like CAPTCHAs and email verification links and was famous for a "conversational" advertising campaign which generated results like
https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/threads/give-me-link-to-...
The reliability of reddit comments has been questionable even before LLMs. Because people trying to push whatever they are interested in pushing realized that having organic-looking comments is the perfect way to sway people who don't trust professional publications and traditional ads. And now with LLMs in the mix, there's basically not even a cost to doing this and making it look like tons of people love your product and are sharing their friendly thoughts and advice.
I think the turning point was when they allowed accounts to hide their comment history. Before, when you could click on an account and read all of their other comments it was easy to tell when an account only existed for fake conversations about a product they were spamming.
Now the spam accounts hide their comment history so they can do nothing but spam similar comments all over Reddit and walk the line where it’s not obvious if any single comment is spam or an one off comment from someone trying to be helpful.
Users are using Google and other services to find their other posts and post warnings, but it takes so much more effort now.
It's maybe account laundering, but on any popular post you'll see at least half of the comments are tangential at best. They're not an expression of anything a person would express, like replying with just skull emojis to a random news post, or saying "he really said" with an exact word to word recreation of a throwaway quote from a video. No one ever replies to these posts, they get like 2 upvotes (if that), the platform doesn't reward them at all but they constantly appear in a very artificial looking way.
The advantage of hiding one's comments is precisely that they do not show up as easy as before on Google, discussions don't get derailed because of comment muckrakers going through their opponent's post and accuse them of being anti-zionist or pro-zionist, and actual stalkers have a far more difficult time tracking down victims.
"Remember, there are no technological solutions to social problems."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
would be difficult enough to solve in a socially cohesive society run by philosopher kings. Practically you have a choice between democracies which have a 0 probability of being adequate to the task (against the axioms of political science: it's like a perpetual motion machine which violates the first and second laws of thermodynamics and then the old professor chimes in and says it must violate the third too) and autocracies which might get lucky 10⁻¹² of the time; even if the tech fix [1] has a 10⁻³ chance of successfully kicking the can down the road I'd take that chance.
[1] say: liquid salt (not metal) fast breeder reactor with a supercritical CO2 powerset
Habermas in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_Crisis_(book)
makes it clear you need expert decision making and democratic participation and without them no system is sustainable. Yet these can't really be reconciled: the public often doesn't know enough to have a worthwhile opinion.
The last defense of democracy is Winston Churchill's "democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried." What it promises is that you can depose bad leaders in an orderly way, not have good leadership. But today it fails to do even that and people are craving good leadership. In the US today it is not "make the trains run on time" but it is having trains at all -- so Xi's China can look a little appealing to some people, even myself on a bad day although I know better.
The argument that Trump represents a threat to democracy doesn't motivate most people in the US because our democracy lacks output legitimacy, whether it is really bad as people think it is an open question in my mind (I'm lucky enough to be a homeowner) but you just can't sell people on it -- the Schoolhouse Rock song and dance about How a bill becomes a law looks like tangled-up proceduralism and the last scene in the The Parallax View where a murdered politician careens on a golf cart through tables on the floor of a conference center is more how it feels
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1OmcMDFR0Y
It's easy to say that the path to Eudaimonia today would involve ignoring politics but Nader and Pericles would agree that "If you're not turned on to politics, then politics will turn on you"
Repeat dismissive tone.
> Habermas in
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_Crisis_(book)
> makes it clear you need expert decision making and democratic participation and without them no system is sustainable. Yet these can't really be reconciled: the public often doesn't know enough to have a worthwhile opinion.
The last I read in passing about Habermas (I could never in a hundred years read Habermas) was that he was one of the ringleaders of deliberative democratic theory or whatever it was called. A very elitist theory according to that author.
And from reading some of that piece it made sense. The world is run by sadistic child molesters (for posteriety: Epstein Class). That positions of power actively attracts sociopaths seems to be scientifically backed and not just hearsay coming from relatively normal people. So what are the democratic theorists doing?
What are they doing?
They’re doing schoolroom hazing rituals; testing whether the public has big enough brains for the responsibility of governing their own communities and lives (c.f. pedophilic sociopaths).
The reason why the public “often doesn’t know enough to have a worthwhile opinion” is pretty fucking obvious! Their opinion doesn’t matter! It is irrelevant! See R. Dahl, democratic elitism.
Someone else from the Frankfurt School wrote about the post-WWII irrational mindset. Yeah, well, not that I can recall any of that right now, but my own synthesis is that people rationally took to their own devices and pursued whatever their alienated selves fancied and had good use of; liberal democratic society is not a classroom writ large where Habermas and people like him rule intellectually and the commoners follow along with their curriculum. That would have been authoritarian in a very nerdy way. But even that would have been an improvement over actually existing liberal democracy. A society where people are irrational because it doesn’t matter. We are by and large not part of the body politic, like 98% of the time.
... so why don’t people know things. Very strange (says Habermas).
The idea seems to be that the commoners need to first prove themselves worthy to Habermas and his ilk. They do that by, of course, going back to school (extra-curricular). Then they rack up however many hours in subjects that matter to politics and whatever. Not because it will help them politically. They are still politically impotent. But! Once they have worked up the hours, maybe the theoreticians will find them worthy. Relief!
Then their studying will be for naught since these theorists just acted as gatekeepers anyway. Because the next obstacle is, I dunno, think tank merchants who will discredit the theoreticians who are holding up the impotent and knowledgable commoners.
> The last defense of democracy is Winston Churchill's "democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried."
Okay.
> The argument that Trump represents a threat to democracy doesn't motivate most people in the US because our democracy lacks output legitimacy, whether it is really bad as people think it is an open question in my mind (I'm lucky enough to be a homeowner) but you just can't sell people on it
You are a homeowner and therefore what?
Not that I am happy with it, it would be ideal to have my old internet back.
You could probably have a workable social network just with the following properties:
1. Use combination of digital friend-of-a-friend invite chains as well as sign-ups at physical 3rd spaces to build out the social network
2. If a user's account is found to be abusing the network, kick the user that invited that account plus everyone in that branch of the invite tree
3. To re-enable an account from a kicked branch, each user has to visit one of your 3rd spaces (and temporarily lose their invite privileges after re-enabling).
4. Security engineers do what they normally do at social media companies, except you now incentivize them to publicize efforts to reveal attackers so that you generate foot traffic at the 3rd spaces.
Now instead of hiding a report that grandma is friends with a Russian bot, your giddy security team does a publicity stunt to kick 100,000 users on Thursday.
And that will generate record drink sales at your 3rd spaces on Friday. (Senior citizen's discount applies.)
We already "self censor" ourselves with "algospeak" [1], I'm not too fond of forcibly breaking anonymity even more than that, especially not by private companies.
Jack Beagle @blog the ones in your screenshot are pretty good because they are a bit more conversational. I use <product> myself because generally these types of spam messages will be trying to promote something specific but outside of the second message in your example it might have still snuck through. As the LLMs get better the spam messages will certainly get better.
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Not enough people are flagging those when it aligns with their bias. It's even less likely to get flagged when it's a double whammy of politics and AI. Loosely being about AI should not give it a free pass.
If we don’t police our side nobody will.
The problem is, the other side definitely does not play by the rules and has no intention to. Why should we "police our side" and weaken ourselves? The endless purity testing on the progressive side of politics is a large part of why the far-right is so damn powerful worldwide.
And yes, nobody is going to do it, all politicians understand and support them spamming.
We police ourselves because it makes us look better to moderates and defectors as the other side fails to fulfill its promises.
If the other side doesn’t police themselves, it’s their loss, because they’ll alienate fence-sitters and (mispredicting due to groupthink) fail even harder.