alt.hn

4/23/2026 at 11:50:25 AM

Spam in conversational replies to blog posts

 https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/04/sneaky-spam-in-conversational-replies-to-blog-posts/

by ColinWright

4/23/2026 at 12:53:09 PM

I subscribe to handful of investment-related YouTube channels. This pattern has been common for years. A bot will reply with a comment loosely related to the video and about how something worked for them. Another bot will reply asking how they did that. Another bot (not the original commenter) will reply that they worked with so-and-so or invested in such-and-such, and then there will be maybe four or five more comments responding to that. All obvious bot accounts.

It's obvious on the channels, because these reply sets usually don't contain a lot of replies to comments (if there are any comment replies, it's almost always from the channel owner). It's so obvious, in fact, that I'm surprised YouTube hasn't done something to address it.

by hrunt

4/23/2026 at 1:12:19 PM

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!”

by pinkmuffinere

4/23/2026 at 1:25:19 PM

I'd be careful with that. Sounds like you could be mistaken for a bot that is part of the scheme and get your Google account banned.

Then again, you should live under the assumption that your Google account could be banned at any time with no recourse. You do have local backups of all your Google account data and don't need your Gmail account to access anything important, right?

by basilikum

4/23/2026 at 1:51:09 PM

That makes me realize that banning is a punishment only usable on people who care about their account. Scammers don’t, a new bot account is a click away. But basilikum would be sad to lose his account.

by bombcar

4/23/2026 at 2:11:51 PM

For something like YouTube, there is a small monetary cost in order to verify a phone number.

by johnmaguire

4/24/2026 at 11:26:25 AM

you don't need to verify the phone number to comment

by efilife

4/24/2026 at 1:01:14 PM

Depends on how much Google dislikes your IP and browser.

by basilikum

4/23/2026 at 2:26:54 PM

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.

by giraffe_lady

4/23/2026 at 3:21:09 PM

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

by kelvinjps10

4/23/2026 at 2:28:02 PM

Dishonesty, meet dishonesty. (Legally, I think libel requires intent.)

by johnmaguire

4/23/2026 at 1:33:50 PM

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.

by lopis

4/23/2026 at 2:11:00 PM

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't wanted to put out there, but I've become increasingly suspicious that it's already been figured out anyhow, which is to limit a specific user account to a specific "persona" with plausible interests and posting rates.

And that's where I think the race may well end, victory spammers. If there's a winning move against that in general I haven't figured it out.

I know reddit is concerned about this at the corporate level but I'm not sure they realize this is possibly their #1 threat, towering above all others. Not that I have any specific suggestions about what to do about it either. And it's years before the masses realize this and stop visiting, and by the time that happens all the social media companies are going to be in trouble for the same reason. You can see the leading edge here on HN but it's still only an almost negligible fraction of the total userbase of something like Reddit today. But that will change.

by jerf

4/23/2026 at 2:24:39 PM

Considering reddit now allows you to hide your post history, I don't know if the admins consider bots to be the giant problem that they certainly are.

by chorkpop

4/23/2026 at 2:30:48 PM

I assumed this was meant to make the bot postings less obvious to normal users, to buy them time to "solve the problem."

But definitely, bots on reddit seem significantly more common in the past year or two.

by johnmaguire

4/23/2026 at 4:07:04 PM

Reddit's also famous for NSFW content. There are also stories about harrasing people who post in the "wrong" subreddit (e.g. political subreddits that are the opposite view).

I think there are non bot reasons to do that.

by bawolff

4/23/2026 at 6:12:16 PM

Reddit has a P/E ratio higher than Nvidia. Go ahead and think about that for a little while and then try and explain it with anything other than their value is being a bot-driven propaganda-pushing device for sale.

by SV_BubbleTime

4/23/2026 at 2:50:35 PM

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.

by ultratalk

4/23/2026 at 5:48:25 PM

Yes, they’re very identifiable. New or resurrected account makes multi-paragraph comments on random topics with “insights” that read like AI, even if they don’t have em-dashes or “it’s not X it’s Y” (and sometimes they do).

Fortunately and in fairness to this site, they’ve become rarer, and most seem to be flagged within hours. Usually I look at the comments to confirm, and most are already dead.

by armchairhacker

4/23/2026 at 5:55:06 PM

> Yes, they’re very identifiable.

It is safe to assume that you missed the ones that are not identifiable.

by brazukadev

4/23/2026 at 6:16:15 PM

That's the part that bothers me, definitely.

by jerf

4/23/2026 at 4:28:32 PM

I made a post here a bit ago where one of the few replies I got was one of these conversational ad-bots, albeit on the more obvious side. It was getting flagged which gives me hope that HN is good at filtering it, but I also mildly worry I'm (or we're) just missing it when it's subtle. I do suspect it's a huge volume in terms of comment count either way though.

by kartoffelsaft

4/23/2026 at 3:40:44 PM

I have suspicions but there's fewer signals on HN available to the general public so it's harder to tell.

Well... to be more precise... I'm abundantly positive there are bots and shills here in a general sense. But when it comes to identifying specific accounts as bots or shills, it gets difficult. Yeah, a lot of us have gotten pretty good at identifying the "default LLM voice", but it is trivial to kick it out of that.

I have done some formal writing with AI, and I always feed it a sample of my own writing to emulate. It doesn't do it perfectly. For instance, I'm a semi-colon kind of guy and it still em-dashes without more explicitly instructions to avoid them. But what comes out the other end would definitely pass most people's "default LLM voice" sniff test; it eliminates most of the tells [1] people look for. (I just checked. The resulting output may actually be "better" at avoiding the tells than my own actual text...)

The upshot of all of that is that we are approaching a point with the current AIs that with just a bit of clever prompting it may take many, many kilobytes of text for someone to form a justified (!) opinion that some set of posts is actually AI.

[1]: https://awnist.com/slop-cop

by jerf

4/23/2026 at 2:07:55 PM

> It's been well know to happen on reddit too for many years

"For many years" being around 20 years at this point. Not sure reddit is a great example, given the founders admitted to using sockpuppets almost since day 1 in order to generate fake activity on the platform.

by embedding-shape

4/23/2026 at 1:55:49 PM

Yes and what they do is use actual registered investment advisors names and set up scam websites for them. This way it's more legitimate because if you research that person you will find that they are actually registered in official databases.

by weird-eye-issue

4/23/2026 at 4:06:24 PM

If only Google had access to an AI service. That sounds like a snarky comment, but given how easy it would be for Google to use AI to zap those, I can only think there's something preventing them from using it.

by bachmeier

4/23/2026 at 2:12:10 PM

Have you seen the same chain pattern outside finance yet? Wonder whether investment scams are the most conspicuous because the payout per convert is high or whether it's seeded the widest on YouTube specifically.

by sebakubisz

4/23/2026 at 2:18:11 PM

I saw something like this for a book. It was under an Instagram reel where the person was describing ways to improve your self-esteem. In the comments section someone mentioned a book that worked for them and it had a few replies saying how it worked for them too. I searched for the book and it was a very new book from an unknown author and zero reviews everywhere.

by nibbleyou

4/23/2026 at 4:08:20 PM

Happens a lot in meditation/spiritual videos on YouTube, spam promoting some AI-generated "manifest riches with the power of your mind" type book.

by lewispollard

4/23/2026 at 1:24:52 PM

I’ve been seeing this kind of spam on forums all the way back in 2004. I wonder if it was a feature in Xrumer or whatever they used to post spam back then.

by Ralfp

4/23/2026 at 1:52:32 PM

If you have a forum and haven’t found a thread that is just one guy arguing with himself on twelve sock accounts; well then you haven’t been looking or only have one user.

by bombcar

4/23/2026 at 12:58:51 PM

They also talk like people in a national ad.

“Wow! Seems like it’s so easy to change over with savings like that!”

by Forgeties79

4/23/2026 at 1:16:04 PM

The bad ones seem like this, the scary part is not knowing if there are good ones

by sixhobbits

4/23/2026 at 1:59:40 PM

Generally when people start having a back and forth about a product I assume it’s astroturfing unless it makes sense in context and/or it’s just one of those brands people genuinely get excited about (they tend to be obvious ones you’ve seen a lot already).

Doesn’t mean I don’t ever get duped, but idk. You learn to spot the signs. I imagine most of us on HN catch most instances. Genuine-seeming referrals aren’t as easy to fake as one would think.

by Forgeties79

4/23/2026 at 2:25:00 PM

I’m putting together an AI presentation internally for my company, can anyone point to examples of this exact behavior? I’d like to use it as a reference.

by SV_BubbleTime

4/23/2026 at 4:09:13 PM

Just go to a popular YouTube retirement channel and check the comments on a new video. For instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awtflo0cU4o

Most of the creators delete those comments, but if you get in early, you'll see them.

by bachmeier

4/23/2026 at 6:23:58 PM

Thanks! I think I found one in that link.

@DeniseJ.Wilson 6 hours ago I believe that a 'hard economy' is actually the best time to build if you have discipline and the right strategy. Most people spend their time complaining, but I believe in execution over excuses. I made a smart move in early 2026, and because I believe in staying the course, I just hit $1M. The momentum is still building, and by the end of this year, it’s going to be massive.

And the replies start talking about a Coach Julia out of no where. To search set up an apt.

by SV_BubbleTime

4/23/2026 at 3:21:21 PM

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.

by smusamashah

4/23/2026 at 1:00:13 PM

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

by throwaway667555

4/23/2026 at 1:18:15 PM

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 comment history so they can do nothing but spam similar comments all over Reddit and walk the line where it’s not obvious if any single comment is spam or an one off comment from someone trying to be helpful.

Users are using Google and other services to find their other posts and post warnings, but it takes so much more effort now.

by Aurornis

4/23/2026 at 2:08:42 PM

I have noticed the same uptick in bot-like behaviour there. The part I struggle to square is, why so much of it is so useless?

It's maybe account laundering, but on any popular post you'll see at least half of the comments are tangential at best. They're not an expression of anything a person would express, like replying with just skull emojis to a random news post, or saying "he really said" with an exact word to word recreation of a throwaway quote from a video. No one ever replies to these posts, they get like 2 upvotes (if that), the platform doesn't reward them at all but they constantly appear in a very artificial looking way.

by chownie

4/23/2026 at 1:30:57 PM

Just a thought, but I wonder if Reddit are hiding this information deliberately to prevent anyone from publishing a study estimating what percentage of their traffic is driven by bots (anecdotally, it's a lot - and they used to be mostly organic even half a decade ago).

by AussieWog93

4/23/2026 at 1:49:43 PM

I agree, anecdotally I noticed a big uptick coincident with the comment hiding feature and with the Q4 2025 leap forward in LLM quality.

by throwaway667555

4/23/2026 at 1:55:09 PM

It's interesting that people are concerned about seeing ads in ChatGPT when it will happily regurgitate astroturf from Reddit right now

by walthamstow

4/23/2026 at 3:29:45 PM

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.

by mschuster91

4/23/2026 at 4:02:59 PM

It's definitely not as consistent as Reddit's official post histories, but from my experience you can still find a lot just by Googling site:reddit.com "username".

by yhvr

4/23/2026 at 1:05:18 PM

This has been rampant on reddit for years.

by 4chandaily

4/23/2026 at 4:04:25 PM

I wonder if people are finally catching on. I feel like I hear less of "I add 'reddit' to all my searches" than I used to.

The reliability of reddit comments has been questionable even before LLMs. Because people trying to push whatever they are interested in pushing realized that having organic-looking comments is the perfect way to sway people who don't trust professional publications and traditional ads. And now with LLMs in the mix, there's basically not even a cost to doing this and making it look like tons of people love your product and are sharing their friendly thoughts and advice.

by ziml77

4/23/2026 at 2:34:04 PM

This is a direct result of pretty much all of the LLMs using Reddit as a training tool. People are selling GEO services with reddit spam being a big part of that.

by SteveGerencser

4/23/2026 at 2:42:29 PM 

   "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 democracies which have a 0 probability of being adequate to the task (against the axioms of political science: it's like a perpetual motion machine which violates the first and second laws of thermodynamics and then the old professor chimes in and says it must violate the third too) and autocracies which might get lucky 10⁻¹² of the time; even if the tech fix [1] has a 10⁻³ chance of successfully kicking the can down the road I'd take that chance.

[1] say: liquid salt (not metal) fast breeder reactor with a supercritical CO2 powerset

by PaulHoule

4/23/2026 at 3:20:32 PM

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.

by keybored

4/23/2026 at 6:01:54 PM

It is a wicked problem that composes with other wicked problems to pose a wicked problem of a higher order.

Habermas in

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_Crisis_(book)

makes it clear you need expert decision making and democratic participation and without them no system is sustainable. Yet these can't really be reconciled: the public often doesn't know enough to have a worthwhile opinion.

The last defense of democracy is Winston Churchill's "democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried." What it promises is that you can depose bad leaders in an orderly way, not have good leadership. But today it fails to do even that and people are craving good leadership. In the US today it is not "make the trains run on time" but it is having trains at all -- so Xi's China can look a little appealing to some people, even myself on a bad day although I know better.

The argument that Trump represents a threat to democracy doesn't motivate most people in the US because our democracy lacks output legitimacy, whether it is really bad as people think it is an open question in my mind (I'm lucky enough to be a homeowner) but you just can't sell people on it -- the Schoolhouse Rock song and dance about How a bill becomes a law looks like tangled-up proceduralism and the last scene in the The Parallax View where a murdered politician careens on a golf cart through tables on the floor of a conference center is more how it feels

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1OmcMDFR0Y

It's easy to say that the path to Eudaimonia today would involve ignoring politics but Nader and Pericles would agree that "If you're not turned on to politics, then politics will turn on you"

by PaulHoule

4/23/2026 at 12:37:02 PM

Nice. I run a site that depends on user submitted content, and it's really interesting to observe how some people try to get around the guardrails. Not sure if your tool does this, but I would perform some additional checks for comments that have links in them.

by rozumem

4/23/2026 at 1:24:24 PM

This has been a thing since blogs became a widespread thing 25+ years ago. Especially with the advent of Wordpress. It was even a “commonly accepted” SEO tactic for awhile.

by keiferski

4/23/2026 at 2:28:30 PM

Ironically one reply to the blog post is.. spam

Jack Beagle @blog the ones in your screenshot are pretty good because they are a bit more conversational. I use <product> myself because generally these types of spam messages will be trying to promote something specific but outside of the second message in your example it might have still snuck through. As the LLMs get better the spam messages will certainly get better.

by lightbulbish

4/23/2026 at 3:17:55 PM

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.

by f311a

4/23/2026 at 2:05:56 PM

The post timing is the main giveaway. Surely it wouldn't be that hard to space out these spam posts. The amount of automated comments being spammed on all social platforms is not quite at tipping point, but has significantly increased.

by alansaber

4/23/2026 at 2:23:25 PM

Bots would win over all anti-spam, anti-slop measures. All blog posts and comments everywhere would be filled with spam and slop. That's when humanity turns it head away from screens, back towards other humans nearby and start talking to each other, while the ocean of slop and spam keep bubbling, infested bots.

by zkmon

4/23/2026 at 2:39:02 PM

The scariest part is that humans are starting to use AI to generate spam comments, which in turn get used to train the models. Will the language capabilities of these models just keep getting worse?

Sent via haiker.app — My handmade Hacker News app

by djyde

4/23/2026 at 2:01:18 PM

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 ...

by xyzal

4/23/2026 at 2:09:17 PM

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 proxying or replaying people's verifications to another service of your choice

by a2128

4/23/2026 at 3:08:56 PM

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.)

by jancsika

4/23/2026 at 3:32:38 PM

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

by mschuster91

4/24/2026 at 7:11:38 AM

I think there should be venues to speak anonymously, just not places where large-scale political discussion takes place.

by xyzal

4/23/2026 at 2:33:37 PM

It did solve the spam/russian bot problem on https://www.lide.cz/ . You have to verify yourself using a national ID and you discuss under your citizen name. The conversation is since somehow way more thoughtful and civic than say on FB.

Not that I am happy with it, it would be ideal to have my old internet back.

by xyzal

4/23/2026 at 6:01:30 PM

A better solution is web-of-trust

by armchairhacker

4/23/2026 at 2:07:50 PM

All roads lead to authoritarianism eh

by alansaber

4/23/2026 at 4:03:58 PM

Feels like we are getting closer and closer to https://xkcd.com/810/

by bawolff

4/23/2026 at 3:18:08 PM

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.

by keybored

4/23/2026 at 1:49:28 PM

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.

by sublinear

4/23/2026 at 1:53:02 PM

I haven't seen this. Can you give some examples?

by Permit

4/23/2026 at 1:56:25 PM

Oh you definitely have seen it

by weird-eye-issue

4/23/2026 at 1:53:56 PM

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.

by bombcar

4/23/2026 at 3:34:23 PM

> 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.

by mschuster91

4/23/2026 at 6:07:34 PM

Ironically purity testing is something we should police.

We police ourselves because it makes us look better to moderates and defectors as the other side fails to fulfill its promises.

If the other side doesn’t police themselves, it’s their loss, because they’ll alienate fence-sitters and (mispredicting due to groupthink) fail even harder.

by armchairhacker

4/23/2026 at 4:45:23 PM

It's not purity testing insofar as "you must support X if you support Y" but "we don't spam" purity testing.

And yes, nobody is going to do it, all politicians understand and support them spamming.

by bombcar