Comment by contr-error
10 hours ago
This is amazing, especially if it helps facilitate astroturfing, such as these comments made by fresh users, all with AI-generated responses from frabonacci:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=SkylerJi
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=zwenbo
It's not intentional - it's YC founders excitedly telling their friends (and especially their YC batchmates) that they launched on HN. They didn't ask anyone to vote or comment, and the responses were not AI-generated. (That last point should be obvious btw; no one needs AI to write "Thank you - we appreciate it", and frabonacci was obviously just being polite.)
Here's what you guys need to understand:
(1) Not everyone spends hours on Hacker News—many casual users have no idea about the culture of this place re voting rings, booster comments, and so on.
(2) Many people enjoy congratulating their friends when they reach a major milestone.
(3) Other sites have a culture where this kind of thing is fine.
HN is different, of course, and we tell founders to stop this from happening. In fact, I basically yell it at them in the Launch HN guide: https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html#noboost. I also yell it at them in person every chance I get—I do my best to scare them! But if you think that including something in a list of rules plus repeating it over and over in person is sufficient to get a message across, may I introduce you to the Measure Zero Effect: no matter how often you repeat something, the set of users who receive the message has measure zero (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
As it happens, I saw those comments in the thread (mostly the same ones you listed), marked them offtopic, and emailed the founders as soon as I could:
"Btw, did you send a message to batchmates/friends about this thread? I"m seeing a lot of booster comments in there now. This is not good for you! (See https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html.)
Fortunately though, there are a lot of organic comments as well so I can just move the booster ones lower down and they shouldn't harm anything. Still, if you have a way to tell your friends not to do that, it would be good. Send them to https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html as well, if you like :) - the text about that is repeated and in a bold font for a reason!"
They replied that their Discord was probably spreading word of the launch and they'd add a message asking people to stop. After that, it mostly stopped.
The dead internet is real.
Seriously though, this kind of behavior should be considered a violation of the social contract.