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Comment by trueno | Hacker News Reader

i think a lot of people don't realize how far not just nation-states are willing to go, but bajillionaire entities are willing to go to control any given narrative now that AI is so accessible. ig comments, tiktok comments, reddit comments, hn comments, on seemingly innocuous and harmless content, just out there trying to look real and game the perception. these entities are well aware that people go to comments and discussion for "the real tea" and yeah. marketing behemoths offer "social media engagement" packages to entities like disney to push trailer hype. flood youtube and other socials with fake content engagement. i remember within the first like minute disney dropped the latest tron trailer on youtube, it was absolutely flooded with "i'm not ready" "omggggg" caliber comments from seemingly real looking youtube profiles.

bring back lan parties, aol instant messenger and throw the current platforms into the sun

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I am, for some reason, quite active commenting on Reddit. And lately the number of comments I see that are obviously Claude has skyrocketed. These are just engaging in normal innocuous comment threads about the day to day stuff I care about (tech, my local region, stuff like that). But obviously they are building organic-looking profiles that can then be exploited to push manipulative content later.

This scares me because the stuff that screams "THIS COMMENT WAS WRITTEN BY CLAUDE" has gotta be the tip of the iceberg. There must be much more of these comments that are better-prompted and using better-tuned model pipelines to make them less detectable. (Probably even just the lazy garbage is harder for me personally to detect if you just pass the prompt to GPT instead of Claude, it's just that I've read so much Claude output that I'm attuned to it).

So yeah suddenly dead internet theory is seeming a lot more real today than it did just a couple of months ago.

It's funny how so many of the Reddit bots - and actually the bots on X as well - are so bad at their job of looking real. When it's a short comment, they're so often using the "The real X is Y" format, or else "X really said Y", and just kind of repeating whatever the post was about.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying but on this point:

> i remember within the first like minute disney dropped the latest tron trailer on youtube, it was absolutely flooded with "i'm not ready" "omggggg" caliber comments from seemingly real looking youtube profiles.

Disney is too much of a faceless corporation to both with something like that. Especially since, why would anyone be convinced a trailer is good from an astroturfed comment? You're looking at the same content. It's different from a HN comment from an apparent expert who's supposedly verifying that an article is true.

The final nail in the coffin is that I've met plenty of people who really who react like that to a new Disney video.

i mean maybe? i wouldn't put it past them personally. producers allocate kind of a lot of budget to the marketing channels and late night talk shows for the cast to try and generate buzz, i think i'd be zero percent surprised disney was willing to burn money engaging in fake content if that's what "the industry" showed to be effective. there was a smaller budget film and by small i mean not disney-wallet that did terribly because it's marketing firm shit the bed on the social media engagement it promised, and that led to a lawsuit. basically all their bots only engaged with themselves on the movies instagram page. this stuff absolutely exists, and on the tron trailer point: sure, again maybe. but the vid was up for like.. literally a minute, like im not even certain any of the commenters would have finished the trailer by the time they had commented. and it was an early morning drop iirc.

Yeah it’s safe to assume that marketing across businesses big and small are not above generating some buzz through fake comments and such.

The only pushback I would see within a fairly well-run place like Disney is that they might question whether different forms of fake buzz are effective, and worth the potential risk of being exposed if they do it too much.

On the one hand I want to agree with you, but on the other hand hn is (rightfully so in my opinion) so anti billionaires, so anti VC, somewhat in the middle on AI, even anti pg recently, that if there are higher forces at work on hn I can only say they're doing a bad job at steering the populace's opinion.

Even reddit is all these things but it's harder to tell because everything is siloed to the point we don't share the same reddit experience, which is not the case of hn as far as I'm aware.

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