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Comment by stymaar | Hacker News Reader

I'm 95% sure the account you're replying to is a karma-farming bot (15k karma in just 8 month is a lot), which makes its comment spectacularly ironic.

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Lol, thanks if nothing else, I suppose, I do have quite some freetime at my hands. Mind pointing out comments by me seems non-humanly written? 95% is high confidence so assuming you have some examples at hand here.

After reading through several pages of their comments, I'm roughly 100% certain that the user you're referring to is not a bot and is not karma farming. They just post a lot.

Thanks for independently confirming I actually seem human, I had my own doubts about it at times too so helps a lot :)

I'm just wondering - what is the benefit of a karma-farming bot? I mean I get the benefits of bots on bluesky and twitter and Instagram etc. because you can turn high engagement into money!!

I figured bots here were because people maybe were trying out AI tools, scripts, or because keeping their business visible to people who might be interested.

But what benefit can you derive from the Karma.I have pretty good Karma and it hasn't done anything for me that I'm aware of?

You can influence the general sentiment in the thread, have the last word everywhere when terms/companies and so on are mentioned. Manipulation goes way beyond just "score goes up", sometimes introducing a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt is enough to derail entire submissions.

OK, but does the Karma help those goals?

Yes, apparently some people (like stymaar) do look at user's profile and look at those numbers to decide how they feel about things. Sometimes high karma can be a sign of trust or a established profile, sometimes (like in this case coupled with relatively recent registration date) it comes of as a signal of suspicion.

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