The people behind these bots most certainly found that many engaging, authentic comments follow this clever pattern. It is also worth noting that such comments are remarkably digestible – due to their brevity and decomposition into even smaller logical and lexical parts – and swiftly read, requiring only a very short attention span and little intellectual investment from the reader.

This makes me very curious about the statistics on how HackerNews comments are structured and how well different formats of comments perform in the community. I would be thrilled to dive into the data and might write a neat program to analyze this sharing the results with the community.