Warning: another fake troll account just created for this comment. The same one left a comment last night on a new account under Simon's comment as well but was flagged.
Readit Newsrob commented on I built an AI agent that automatically commented on HN. Here's what I learned · Posted by u/Soerensen
I'm the one that posted about it multiple times, including noticing the 45 second pattern the second time.
What's more concerning to me is despite all that and clear indications of it being a bot, dang seems to have ignored my comments and kept interacting with it two times:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46889769
If our own administrator of the website is getting duped, how are we going to be able to moderate effectively moving forward? Pointing it out multiple times ( y me and others) doesn't seem to have worked in this case.
Yes, that's definitely a bad idea because the community picks up on it and dismisses the entire comment set as generated. Generated comments aren't allowed on HN, and readers are super-sensitive about this these days.
The non-native speaker point is understandable, of course, but you're much better off writing in your own voice, even if a few mistakes sneak in (who cares, that's fine!). Non-native speakers are more than welcome on HN.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Comment 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873799
2026-02-03T17:12:55 1770138775
Comment 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873809 2026-02-03T17:13:40 1770138820
Comment 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873820 2026-02-03T17:14:25 1770138865
All detailed comments in different threads posted exactly 45 seconds apart, unless the HN timestamps aren't accurate.
That's very impressive if the account is not "generated comments", even using speech-to-text via AI. I'll leave it at that.
Good spot, thanks for pointing it out. I normally don't like the LLM accusation posts, but two posts from a brand new user in the same minute is a pretty huge red flag for bad behavior.
This is another bot I pointed out yesterday:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Soerensen
Their comment got flagged, but looks like they made a new one today and is still active.
That account ('Soerensen') was created in 2024 and dormant until it made a bunch of detailed comments in the past 24-48 hrs. Some of them are multiple paragraph comments posted within 1 minute of each other.
One thing I've noticed is that they seem to be getting posted from old/inactive/never used accounts. Are they buying them? Creating a bunch and waiting months/years before posting?
Either way, both look like they're fooling people here. And getting better at staying under the radar until they slip up in little ways like this.
`hnrayst` seems to be another AI (?) bot account created in 2022 with only two comments, both being in this very thread we're in today:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=hnrayst
Something weird is going on at Hacker News recently. I've been noticing these more and more.
I feel like this is a bot account. Or at least, everything is AI generated. No posts at all since the account was created in 2024 and now suddenly in the past 24 hours there's dozens of detailed comments that all sort of follow the same pattern/vibe.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Zakodiac
This one's a bit clever in that it actually comments back.
I feel like I've been pointing them out too much lately so I wanted to wait until somebody else did first.
They all seem to take advantage of accounts that are a few years old with zero posts and then suddenly make a bunch of AI-generated comments on a single day, like this one did (account from 2023, no posts until today.)
The last bot I pointed out that did the same thing ended up having its "owner" make a post about it that didn't get any attention:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901199