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All sorts of reasons! One is that when you reach 1000 karma, you gain the ability to downvote comments.
You seem like a smart person. I'm sure you can think of some reasons why that might be useful.
People make farming HN a part of their business model.
Engagement farming works on social media platforms that reward engagement. Posting engagement bait in HN comments would just result in downvotes.
Why do you think all engagement farming would result in downvotes? You think HN posters are so keen at sniffing out bad actors that they would never reward them by accident?
It feels like you're being willfully dense about this. I can see why the other person accused you of being AI.
Here's one that I think sums it up pretty well:
"Engagement farming refers to a range of deceptive practices on social media designed to artificially inflate engagement metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and followers."
"Engagement farming employs various tactics to exploit social media algorithms, with the intent to appear more popular than actual user interest would warrant. Examples include posting controversial content to provoke emotional responses, repurposing successful posts without originality, and using automated systems for mass liking or following." [1]
If you don't think this is happening on HN (especially to mass downvote posts) you're naive.
[1] https://www.isme.in/engagement-farming-prof-sriram-prabhakar...
"Engagement" has a specific meaning. It's different from "like farming" or "karma farming". Some platforms specifically reward engagement, making it a reasonable thing to farm on those platforms.
> using automated systems for mass liking or following
Clearly the author was clueless, this has nothing whatsoever to do with engagement farming.