alt Hacker NewsI sleep better at night thinking it is just a battleground of astroturfing bots fighting each other (at least on the main pages).
Everything from massive Russian state-actor bot farms testing newly trained LLMs popping out AI-generated meme formats before deploying domestically unknowingly getting into arguments with Israeli bot farms trying to raise support for some new movie series that will enable them to raise money for their next missile strike competing for eyeballs/attention from some uni student in a dorm room paying mid-sized black market companies in India to post comments telling you that cast-iron pans are too hard to clean so you should buy the non-sticks you saw on instagram (which are just marketing dropshippers in the USA selling the QA rejected pans from established brands).
The online world is a wild place.
Hacker News is Reddit with a nuclear downvote button and tone policing.
It's not that much better in terms of "dead internet," the bots are just more eloquent. In some ways the HN flavor of gamified engagement actively encourages worse outcomes than Reddit.