Interestingly, the same thing has been happening with reviews of products, although usually they are written by humans that are paid to write those (extremely biased, mostly deceitful) reviews. I mean, just look at many Amazon review comments... or even of commercial establishments on Google Maps and many other such places that accept user-generated reviews of commercial products.

> To me internet comments are almost on life support. Im curious if HN will have the same fate

I think I agree, in general.

I wonder what incentives someone could have for posting such comments on HN. I mean, it's clear that commercial products could benefit immensely from that (as they'd get a return on their investment), and also e.g. governments and political parties who might want to influence the public discourse about sensitive/political matters.

But why would anyone (who is not toxic already) use such a bot to post comments about technical topics, such as in discussions about programming languages, interesting bugs being discovered, open-source software being released, etc?

>But why would anyone (who is not toxic already) use such a bot to post comments about technical topics, such as in discussions about programming languages, interesting bugs being discovered, open-source software being released, etc?

To sway, to amplify, to manipulate, to pollute with noise, etcetera. I think these type of actors have more tools at their fingertips now than ever.