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Comment by malfist | Hacker News Reader

I have to wonder if HN is astroturfed. Anthropic and OpenAI can post about a new model and it gets over to HN instantly and is full of glowing reviews of supposedly real people who supposedly have had prior access to it who supposedly think it's the best model yet.

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Feels doubly so for Anthropic. There's just unbelievable level of glaze, and insane upvote velocity for "blog posts" that are essentially fluffed up feature documentation.

Somehow everything boris says has become the word of God. The dude is just an engineer, like you and me, who gets unlimited tokens for free.

Yeah, I sometimes catch these posts minutes after they were submitted and they're full of highly upvoted glowing reviews that maintain their momentum on the top of the page.

And this is hacker news. A place where famously the most upvoted comment is the one critical of the post.

Upvoter here. Nothing special -- I like Claude a lot. I found it more ergonomic to work with, and I think its models are state of the art. I believe I'm more productive especially in legacy crufty codebases.

I may not be representative of the universe or have a controlled, randomized study to back it up, but that's not what upvotes are for are they?

That's a fair point. To play devils advocate to myself, it's possible that the huge upvote share is due to a much bigger marketshare among our community.

Yeah, that was my guess too. Still a little disappointing to see fellow HNers reflexively fanboying a company that's the overwhelming dominate player in LLM coding.

I try to reserve my reflexive fanboy company/project votes for underdogs who need and deserve the help.

HN is astroturfed. Not just AI and also before AI took off. It's so easy and so valuable to astroturf HN

The tech field has always been full of naive technology boosters. HN might be heavily astroturfed for all I know but I am sure there are many real people in a state of constant excitement over the progress of AI.

Heavily. There’s an amount of true believers who actually think RSI is going to happen any day now, but you can spot patterns amongst brand new booster accounts…

I real life I meet people who like AI and people who hate it, but nobody who’s on a personal mission to defend Anthropic from anyone that dares to question their hyperbolic marketing.

HN is probably astroturfed, but it is also one of those places where a lot of actual subject experts frequent. I don't find it unusual that a new model gets instantly posted here. It is also not unexpected that the most recently released model is the best model.

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