Comment by nequo
1 year ago
What are those engagement bots for? Are they farming followers and turn into disinformation machines later? Or is that only to drive engagement to cultivate ad revenue for Twitter, or for some “brand” that is adjacent to their topic?
The way hn karma works, you’re incentivized to accumulate a set of bots that meet the threshold for flagging and downvoting. Barring effective anti-bot/brigading measures (some of which I’m sure exist), such a team of bots could manipulate front page content. That’s a valuable capability for a variety of nefarious aims in this space.
A straightforward one would be either subtly or dramatically tilting sentiment here negative against some mid-cap public tech company and profiting from a short position.
(Assuming you think investors care what gets upvoted on hn…)