I'm noticing a lot of posts and comments around AI seem like industry plants. Look, I recognize that people are excited about AI and want to share their perspectives, and I'm not trying to accuse people that disagree with me of being industry plants, but the recent one about "I love coding at 60 now because of Claude Code!" by a new user with "cc" at the end of their name seems a LITTLE suspicious. As is the number of upvotes -- I can understand how a new model gets a lot of excitement, but a stranger on the internet enjoying the new model doesn't seem like 800 points worthy?
I'm not trying to spark a controversy here, but I'm wondering if others feel the same or if I'm just overreacting.
I upvoted it by mistake, it looked genuine at first. However the comments contain a lot of "everything is awesome" responses without backing up their claims. The poster does not participate in the discussion at all.
I like HN but it seems to be getting spammed with hidden ads.
If a title resonates ("coding at 60 again") people often upvote before even reading the post.
That alone can create these huge spikes.
With so many mechanisms for creating users and posting en masse, I find it really hard to believe the contents of any comment or post I read that goes past a paragraph or two. And of course I am still skeptical even if it is less than 2 paragraphs of text.
I find the contents of that specific post hard to believe. Specially since the user hasn't participated in the conversation at all.
I like this place a lot and it saddens me we are just going to see more of this.
I'd say the bigger problem would be AI posters/commentors, though I've not seen as much of them versus certain subreddits which are just probably more bots than human...
It spent a good bit of time on the front page yesterday and is still there today.
For this one - it's tough. It definitely started a conversation. The 'cc' part of the name is sus, but on the internet, its impossible to verify the truth of any post. But the counterpoint is - if for some reason Anthropic wanted to fund a large scale astroturfing op -- why make is so obvious with cc postfixes?
I don't know. It all feels quite unstable in a gaslighty way. All I can really is I suspect the world is not ready for llm advertising and the unintended consequences from the drift to it is going to be wild
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2020612 - Discussion from December 2010, for one example. Downvotes are used for a variety of reasons whether we like it or not, and without a substantial change to the way HN works that will continue to be the case.