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> but the recent one about "I love coding at 60 now because of Claude Code!" by a new user with "cc" I immediately guessed that's what prompted this thread whe
by _zagj 7mo ago
> but the recent one about "I love coding at 60 now because of Claude Code!" by a new user with "cc"
I immediately guessed that's what prompted this thread when I saw the title.
> I'm not trying to spark a controversy here, but I'm wondering if others feel the same or if I'm just overreacting.
No, you're not. Besides the OP and its abundance of upvotes and all of the green accounts shilling CC and AI, even more disturbing was the older accounts, some created more than a decade ago, posting in a similar bot-like cadence, shilling just as enthusiastically, and in some cases, freely interacting with the obvious bots. (And I say this as someone who's generally preferred to do throwaway posting on HN, so I feel uneasy automatically impugning green names.)
I can only guess there's a black market for HN accounts (as there is for reddit accounts), or perhaps some entities have been seeding bot accounts for years.
- overgard 7mo agoHonestly they might also just be super hackable. I don’t even know my password on this site but given I set it like 15 years ago it almost assuredly sucks (I will fix!) I had no idea there was a black market for Reddit accounts. Count me naive!
- _zagj 7mo agoI doubt Big AI is mass violating the CFAA just to shill, but maybe some other entity did the dirty work and is now reselling the accounts or indirect access to them, similar to the residential IP proxy business they use to disgusie their scraping. As an aside, letting us easily view the flagged comments of a user would be an easy way of wading out corporate shillposters, since they shy away from posting anything controversial or offensive.