Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts • Hacker News Board

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#51

Post by ultratalk » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 2:50 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #33

lopis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been well know to happen on reddit too for many years. Whole posts and comment threads copied verbatim with new accounts. Nowadays with AI you can make it way more dynamic.

AI has been awful on Reddit. I've acquired a sense for at least some of the bots. There's this set of bots that post a high-engagement post about once a day to an implausibly large range of subreddits, with implausible regularity. I can tell by the way I remove them and the way that the other subs are mostly not that most subs have not figured this out yet. There is an obvious solution to that problem, which I haven'…

Out of curiosity, has anyone noticed a non-negligible presence of bots in threads on HN? I haven't, but I'm not sure if that's because I'm bad at spotting them or because HN is good at getting rid of them or because HN is a niche platform.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#52

Post by jancsika » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 3:08 PM UTC

a2128 wrote: post #32

xyzal wrote: post #26

Text generation is now cheap, so I expect this problem to worsen. I hate to write it, but I don't see any other solution on platforms, that aspire to be a modern agora, than identity verification ...

Why would identity verification solve this? The spammer can just verify himself, or if he doesn't want to or it's at a bigger scale than individual, then there will be services where you can get identity verifications on the cheap and they'll work either by paying people in a poor country to verify themselves all day, or, even more cheaply, sketchy age verification services on sketchy porn sites will be actually prox…

We're probably close to the point for social networks where authenticity/transparency is more valuable than network effect.

You could probably have a workable social network just with the following properties:

1. Use combination of digital friend-of-a-friend invite chains as well as sign-ups at physical 3rd spaces to build out the social network

2. If a user's account is found to be abusing the network, kick the user that invited that account plus everyone in that branch of the invite tree

3. To re-enable an account from a kicked branch, each user has to visit one of your 3rd spaces (and temporarily lose their invite privileges after re-enabling).

4. Security engineers do what they normally do at social media companies, except you now incentivize them to publicize efforts to reveal attackers so that you generate foot traffic at the 3rd spaces.

Now instead of hiding a report that grandma is friends with a Russian bot, your giddy security team does a publicity stunt to kick 100,000 users on Thursday.

And that will generate record drink sales at your 3rd spaces on Friday. (Senior citizen's discount applies.)

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#53

Post by f311a » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 3:17 PM UTC

This is a big problem for wordpress, but custom engines with a simple client-side checks (js based) get close to zero spam. All those spammers use technology fingerprinting services to obtain a list of blogs and they look for popular blog engines only.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#54

Post by keybored » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 3:18 PM UTC

All replies that just pads out the comment with a summary about TFA look like spam. There is no inkling of any excuse to make the comment so it just has to regurgitate what TFA is about.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#55

Post by keybored » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 3:20 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #49

"Remember, there are no technological solutions to social problems." is something I want to counterpoint with "there are no social solutions to technological problems", like how the looming situation pointed out by the Club of Rome in 1973 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth would be difficult enough to solve in a socially cohesive society run by philosopher kings. Practically you have a choice between…

Yeah, I’ve heard that there is some very axiomatic math to being anti-democratic for some reason. Unlike the mathematically sound benevolent and also omniscient philosopher kings.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#56

Post by kelvinjps10 » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 3:21 PM UTC

giraffe_lady wrote: post #40

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I love these comment threads! I like to add another reply saying something like “oh my goodness, I used Elizabeth Ferguson for my investing too!! She went to my college, so I thought I could trust her. But then I found out she was cheating on me with my wife! We got a divorce and i lost half my assets in the separation. Elizabeth Ferguson probably is enjoying them now :(. Just one experience, but buyer beware!”

Fun until that's a real person using a paid bot service to promote their business and you just libeled them in a perfectly preserved medium.

they're scamming, no way the can get those invesment results the bots say, I don't think a real person doing normal stuff would use those bots services

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#57

Post by smusamashah » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 3:21 PM UTC

About 20 years ago when I was in university, I was looking for anything to do part time and posting links on random blogs in replies was one of the jobs that could get you some money. The job came with excel sheets containing where to post those links and what to post. I was more interested in automating this process. There was a captcha involved in this process to somewhere. We didn't see it as spamming. It was 'ad posting' job or something.

Don't remember a lot. Just reminded me of my time doing this. I don't remember actually posting much links myself because it was too boring and lots of manual work for not much benefit.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#58

Post by mschuster91 » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 3:29 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #10

throwaway667555 wrote: post #5

This also is absolutely rampant on reddit in the past months.

I’m not a heavy Reddit user but I’ve noticed a sharp increase in comment spam disguised as real discussion. I think the turning point was when they allowed accounts to hide their comment history. Before, when you could click on an account and read all of their other comments it was easy to tell when an account only existed for fake conversations about a product they were spamming. Now the spam accounts hide their com…

Moderators can still see the full comment history.

The advantage of hiding one's comments is precisely that they do not show up as easy as before on Google, discussions don't get derailed because of comment muckrakers going through their opponent's post and accuse them of being anti-zionist or pro-zionist, and actual stalkers have a far more difficult time tracking down victims.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#59

Post by mschuster91 » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 3:32 PM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #52

a2128 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would identity verification solve this? The spammer can just verify himself, or if he doesn't want to or it's at a bigger scale than individual, then there will be services where you can get identity verifications on the cheap and they'll work either by paying people in a poor country to verify themselves all day, or, even more cheaply, sketchy age verification services on sketchy porn sites will be actually prox…

We're probably close to the point for social networks where authenticity/transparency is more valuable than network effect. You could probably have a workable social network just with the following properties: 1. Use combination of digital friend-of-a-friend invite chains as well as sign-ups at physical 3rd spaces to build out the social network 2. If a user's account is found to be abusing the network, kick the user…

Anonymity is valuable on the Internet, particularly when it comes to contentious political topics (think Israel/Palestine, Trump, ...).

We already "self censor" ourselves with "algospeak" [1], I'm not too fond of forcibly breaking anonymity even more than that, especially not by private companies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algospeak

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#60

Post by mschuster91 » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 3:34 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #21

sublinear wrote: post #16

I also see a ton of this here on HN as the political topics have ramped up. Not enough people are flagging those when it aligns with their bias. It's even less likely to get flagged when it's a double whammy of politics and AI. Loosely being about AI should not give it a free pass.

I rarely downvote anything; but I’ll unholster the downvote for obvious political spam when it agrees with me . If we don’t police our side nobody will.

> If we don’t police our side nobody will.

The problem is, the other side definitely does not play by the rules and has no intention to. Why should we "police our side" and weaken ourselves? The endless purity testing on the progressive side of politics is a large part of why the far-right is so damn powerful worldwide.