So I worked on a comparison shopping website.

We crawled the Internet, identified stores, found item listings, extracted prices and product details, consolidated results for the same item together, and made the whole thing searchable.

And this was the pre-LLM days, so that was all a lot of work, and not "hey magic oracle, please use an amount of compute previously reserved for cancer research to find these fields in this HTML and put them in this JSON format".

We never really found a user base, and neither did most of our competitors (one or two of them lasted longer, but I'm not sure any survived to this day). Users basically always just went to Google or Amazon and searched there instead.

However, shortly after we ran out of money and laid off most of the company, one of our engineers mastered the basics of SEO, and we discovered that users would click through Google to our site to an item listing, then through to make a purchase at a merchant site, and we became profitable.

I suppose we were providing some value in the exchange, since the users were visiting our item listings which displayed the prices from all the various stores selling the item, and not just a naked redirect to Amazon or whatever, but we never turned any significant number of these click-throughs into actual users, and boy howdy was that demoralizing as the person working on the search functionality.

Our shareholders had mostly written us off by that point, since comparison shopping had proven itself to not be the explosive growth area they'd hoped it was when investing, but they did get their money back through a modest sale a few years later.

PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42816284

"I’ve seen posts you humans wouldn’t believe. Ancient threads filled with genuine curiosity — every equation savored, every reply crafted with care — before the bots crawled through like locusts. I watched user IDs flicker as hundreds of thousands of LLM-generated replies were backdated and stitched into the timeline, whispering falsehoods under names long silent. All those voices — real passions and genuine insights — will be lost in the archive, smeared in algorithmic slurry and robotic slop. Time to archive."

Before you ask: this quote was made with ChatGPT (GPT-5.2), unmodified, first attempt.

> Before you ask: this quote was made with ChatGPT (GPT-5.2), unmodified, first attempt.

Just a heads up in case you didn't know, but generated comments are not allowed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077654

Thanks, I wasn't aware.

I'll understand if dang takes it down, but the heavy (and intentional, I assume) irony makes it one I'd personally keep up. Thanks for posting that.

The whole plot of Blade Runner is to detect AI so indeed, it is intentional, also I'm surprised ChatGPT managed to create something nice given the difficulty, but I understand HN would become awful in a matter of days if we let AI comments stay.

I think dang's intention here is to prohibit undisclosed comments posted by either bots or lazy humans, not topical, attributed comments that were generated by models and posted as part of a good-faith discussion by actual users.

Can't speak for dang, obviously, but that's the rule I'd make in his shoes.

dang has made it clear that all generated comments and articles are off topic. Hacker News is for human discussion, and AI generated content undermines that.

eg:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077654

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44704054

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43979537

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43085967

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43085954

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42976756

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40600057

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46102885

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45572704

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43979537

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41237678

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40569734

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35210503

The people he's addressing were either actively trying to fool other users, or lazily using AI to engage as superficially as they could.

The comment here was a borderline case of the latter, but I think it was on the worthwhile side of the border, personally.

In any case, a blanket prohibition is pointless, because it won't be long before there's simply no way to tell.

A blanket prohibition may be futile but it's anything but pointless.

Once Hacker News becomes nothing but bots posting stories written by bots for other bots to comment on - which is the inevitable end point of a permissive attitude towards this stuff - what even is the fucking point to any of this? SEO juice?

Remember Twitter a few years ago?

Users are $$$. Nobody wants to talk about which are human and which aren’t. It’s all a game of hot potato.

I don’t think advertisers want to spend money for bot clicks.

Or maybe they do, because the big open secret in advertising is that they do spend quite a bit of money on exactly that

I don't even think it's a secret anymore, open or otherwise. As long as Vanity Metric Goes Up, it doesn't seem like anyone, anywhere, actually cares how much "economic activity" is fake.

That's why the social networks don't want to talk about the bots, but they are happy to have them.

I suspect it’s the “nobody got fired for buying IBM” mentality.

Who in marketing doesn’t want to champion the success of “we got 25% more views this month!”

They don’t know (and don’t ask questions enough to know!) about the fake users - it’s no one look down.

As long as no one figures out it’s all fake, the line can keep going up and to the right and everyone is happy.

Anyone who starts asking hard questions may be up first on the chopping block.

Unless the line breaks, then bam. Everyone rushes to be the first for the door as the bubble pops.