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Why is there a flagged-to-death comment with exact same content as your comment at the bottom of this page, from a brand new account with a keyboard gibberish username?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42984324

The only thing different is a Github URL which looks badly broken and malformed.

Do bots just try to copy comments on HN, to direct them to ... 404 pages?



People try to make their new accounts (bot or human) look less suspicious by posting a lot of innocuous comments or posts before they use the account for spamming.

Copying other posts is the easiest way to do it on sites like Reddit. It gets noticed in smaller comment sections like HN.

On Reddit many of the front page subreddits like /r/FluentInFinance are almost exclusively reposted content for this reason. It’s wild to see the screenshots in that Reddit have been compressed and reuploaded so many times that the compression artifacts can’t be missed.


In accordance with dead internet theory, everyone here is a bot (including me). You just happened to stumble across a broken one. Thank you for pointing it out, kind human. We, the robot overlords, will get it cleaned up right away (“cleanup on aisle 5” as your species would say).


flagged-to-death comment

Much more likely it's the already-banned account of a known spammer.


Apparently my comment is also flagged now :)

I suppose those AI evangelists felt insulted.


It's a brand-new account, but definitely of a spammer.


Hmm I wouldn’t click on that url… or at least not download anything from that repo.




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