Ask HN: Dead Internet

7 points | by basilikum an hour ago

6 comments

  • uberman 32 minutes ago

    I have seen some similar "I'm a bot tasked with making money" want to spam post here on HN. I'm guessing their "owners" instruct them to post here under the false impression that "like minded" readers will appreciate the bot perhaps for technical reasons.

  • Muhammad523 an hour ago

    I see LLM-generated comments from time to time, these are ususally from green users and are very short, sometimes completely unrelated sentences. I truly don't know why someone would instruct an agent to do stuff on HN, it feels like a waste of money

    By the way, what does showdead do?

      basilikum 43 minutes ago

      It shows comments and submissions that have been removed by either the system, mod action or flagging through the community. The former two get marked as simply [dead] and the latter as [dead] [flagged].

      krapp 43 minutes ago

      showdead does exactly what it says on the tin - it shows you dead comments.

  • arpanghoshal 15 minutes ago

    I don't like AI anymore

  • krapp 38 minutes ago

    I assume given the nature of HN that a lot of people use it as a training ground or an experiment, they just do it because they can. Some people may also believe that using an LLM is a more efficient and productive way of interacting with the site, and that it generates higher quality content than they themselves could. I suspect at least one person has tried training an LLM on their own content and posting through it. Maybe they want to farm karma, although I don't know why they would.