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Just browsing around right now, I already found these [0] [1] [2], the format is identical to those I've been seeing. This one [0] even seems somewhat successfu
by pona-a 2y ago
Just browsing around right now, I already found these [0] [1] [2], the format is identical to those I've been seeing. This one [0] even seems somewhat successful at blending into a discussion, even getting a human to reply once.
I found about 5 of such accounts just today, often several per a new thread. A lot of them operate in eastern time now. At some hours, every third front page post has a few of these. It's surreal to see the dead internet hypothesis come true in real-time.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=oslis https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=oslis
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pljldos https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pljldos
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whjkh https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whjkh
- mtmail 2y agoExcellent examples. I agree those are very suspicious and a bit more evolved than the ones I found in the past. I'll have a look for those types/patterns of comments in the future, too.
- pona-a 2y agoAnd... they're gone. While I'm glad it must have gotten someone's attention, hopefully the moderators and not the spammers themselves (does HN allow one to delete 2 day old comments?), now there's no reference point. I pray LLM output detection can get back on track so that this doesn't keep getting worse. It's certainly doable; we humans already spotted a few ones and distilled them into a fuzzy pattern, so a good classifier might have a chance. False positives are a risk, but depending on the spam volume, may be well worth it.
- pvg 2y agoThey aren't gone, just banned, turn on 'showdead' in your profile to see them. You can just mail hn@ycombinator.com to get someone's attention, chances are someone did as a result of this post.