A16z-backed Doublespeed hacked, revealing what its AI-generated accounts promote

Post by tomhow » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 10:21 PM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #149

tomhow wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: Fine! I found a way to get a16z in there and keep it to 80 chars. Both for length reasons and because it was clickbait. The original title doesn’t even have the actual company’s name in it, only the name of the investor, which is intended to elicit just the kind of ragey reaction you’re exhibiting in this comment. On HN, titles need to be more neutral and factual (I.e., include the name of the company the artic…

But the whole _point_ is "major VC funding spam outfit", surely? Like, who cares who the spam outfit is? There are lots of them. These phone farms are not exactly rare. The interesting bit is the involvement of a supposedly proper company.

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Dec 19, 2025, 12:22 AM UTC

kotaKat wrote: post #173

tomhow wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks you. For the record, I replied "Fine!" as a friendly acknowledgement of the community winning the argument. I collapsed some of the subthreads, because, at the time, these meta subthreads were taking up most of the main thread. However I deliberately left some uncollapsed – even though we would normally have collapsed all of them – so as not to hide the fact that there was debate about the title. I also turned…

Aaaand now I've been deliberately censored with a [flagged] here. 10/10, bravo.

Post by alsetmusic » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 9:58 PM UTC

sellmesoap wrote: post #171

bicepjai wrote: post #165

So this is the reality we're living in now, where bot farms have become normalized? I always associated bot farms with authoritarian regimes like Russia and China, but are we becoming the same thing? And VC funds are actually backing this? I hope I'm not the only one who finds this completely insane. I can't even listen to the a16z podcast anymore; my mind now permanently associates them with bot farms. These are the…

Gorilla marketing and bot farms have been around for a very long time. There are bot farms to amplify all sorts of messages. A friend who is a 'performance artest' paid almost nothing to have his linked-in account amplified by a large number of nonsense accounts on that platform. 'creators' frequently buy followers so 'the algorythm' will surface their 'content'. My first roommate 20 years ago almost got a job riding…

Post by thephyber » Sat, Dec 27, 2025, 10:28 AM UTC

thephyber wrote: post #36

ipython wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I agree with you. I think that great role models are sadly in short supply these days.

I don’t think they are in short supply, but the vast majority of them aren’t the super-successful so we don’t see their names often. They are the teachers, coaches, and engineers. The problem is the anti- role models are the ones who get all of the media: Andrew Tate (mysogenistic pyramid schemer and pimp / sex trafficker of high school girls), Joe Rogan (his mind is so open that his brains fell out), Jordan B Peters…