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Comment by hrunt | Hacker News Reader

I subscribe to handful of investment-related YouTube channels. This pattern has been common for years. A bot will reply with a comment loosely related to the video and about how something worked for them. Another bot will reply asking how they did that. Another bot (not the original commenter) will reply that they worked with so-and-so or invested in such-and-such, and then there will be maybe four or five more comments responding to that. All obvious bot accounts.

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.

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Oh I love these comment threads! I like to add another reply saying something like “oh my goodness, I used Elizabeth Ferguson for my investing too!! She went to my college, so I thought I could trust her. But then I found out she was cheating on me with my wife! We got a divorce and i lost half my assets in the separation. Elizabeth Ferguson probably is enjoying them now :(. Just one experience, but buyer beware!”

I'd be careful with that. Sounds like you could be mistaken for a bot that is part of the scheme and get your Google account banned.

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?

That makes me realize that banning is a punishment only usable on people who care about their account. Scammers don’t, a new bot account is a click away. But basilikum would be sad to lose his account.

For something like YouTube, there is a small monetary cost in order to verify a phone number.

you don't need to verify the phone number to comment

Depends on how much Google dislikes your IP and browser.

Fun until that's a real person using a paid bot service to promote their business and you just libeled them in a perfectly preserved medium.

Dishonesty, meet dishonesty. (Legally, I think libel requires intent.)

they're scamming, no way the can get those invesment results the bots say, I don't think a real person doing normal stuff would use those bots services

It's been well know to happen on reddit too for many years. Whole posts and comment threads copied verbatim with new accounts. Nowadays with AI you can make it way more dynamic.

> It's been well know to happen on reddit too for many years

"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.

AI has been awful on Reddit.

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.

Considering reddit now allows you to hide your post history, I don't know if the admins consider bots to be the giant problem that they certainly are.

I assumed this was meant to make the bot postings less obvious to normal users, to buy them time to "solve the problem."

But definitely, bots on reddit seem significantly more common in the past year or two.

Reddit's also famous for NSFW content. There are also stories about harrasing people who post in the "wrong" subreddit (e.g. political subreddits that are the opposite view).

I think there are non bot reasons to do that.

Reddit has a P/E ratio higher than Nvidia. Go ahead and think about that for a little while and then try and explain it with anything other than their value is being a bot-driven propaganda-pushing device for sale.

Out of curiosity, has anyone noticed a non-negligible presence of bots in threads on HN? I haven't, but I'm not sure if that's because I'm bad at spotting them or because HN is good at getting rid of them or because HN is a niche platform.

I have suspicions but there's fewer signals on HN available to the general public so it's harder to tell.

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.

[1]: https://awnist.com/slop-cop

I made a post here a bit ago where one of the few replies I got was one of these conversational ad-bots, albeit on the more obvious side. It was getting flagged which gives me hope that HN is good at filtering it, but I also mildly worry I'm (or we're) just missing it when it's subtle. I do suspect it's a huge volume in terms of comment count either way though.

Yes, they’re very identifiable. New or resurrected account makes multi-paragraph comments on random topics with “insights” that read like AI, even if they don’t have em-dashes or “it’s not X it’s Y” (and sometimes they do).

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.

> Yes, they’re very identifiable.

It is safe to assume that you missed the ones that are not identifiable.

That's the part that bothers me, definitely.

They also talk like people in a national ad.

“Wow! Seems like it’s so easy to change over with savings like that!”

The bad ones seem like this, the scary part is not knowing if there are good ones

Generally when people start having a back and forth about a product I assume it’s astroturfing unless it makes sense in context and/or it’s just one of those brands people genuinely get excited about (they tend to be obvious ones you’ve seen a lot already).

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.

Most elaborate scam (illegally run by SF entrepreneur?)

https://claimyr.com/government-services/irs/I-filed-my-2021-...

Yes and what they do is use actual registered investment advisors names and set up scam websites for them. This way it's more legitimate because if you research that person you will find that they are actually registered in official databases.

Have you seen the same chain pattern outside finance yet? Wonder whether investment scams are the most conspicuous because the payout per convert is high or whether it's seeded the widest on YouTube specifically.

I saw something like this for a book. It was under an Instagram reel where the person was describing ways to improve your self-esteem. In the comments section someone mentioned a book that worked for them and it had a few replies saying how it worked for them too. I searched for the book and it was a very new book from an unknown author and zero reviews everywhere.

Happens a lot in meditation/spiritual videos on YouTube, spam promoting some AI-generated "manifest riches with the power of your mind" type book.

If only Google had access to an AI service. That sounds like a snarky comment, but given how easy it would be for Google to use AI to zap those, I can only think there's something preventing them from using it.

I’ve been seeing this kind of spam on forums all the way back in 2004. I wonder if it was a feature in Xrumer or whatever they used to post spam back then.

If you have a forum and haven’t found a thread that is just one guy arguing with himself on twelve sock accounts; well then you haven’t been looking or only have one user.

I’m putting together an AI presentation internally for my company, can anyone point to examples of this exact behavior? I’d like to use it as a reference.

Just go to a popular YouTube retirement channel and check the comments on a new video. For instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awtflo0cU4o

Most of the creators delete those comments, but if you get in early, you'll see them.

Thanks! I think I found one in that link.

@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.

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