alt Hacker NewsThanks - this was a good catch, and it makes steam come out my ears to see any account abusing HN like that.
You don't have to email us, of course! But please understand that we're on the same side. We don't want to see HN overrun by generated comments (a form of spam) any more than you, or other users do. Remember that tomhow and I were avid users of HN for many years before we became mods.
All: generated comments and bots aren't allowed here. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... If you notice an account that appears to be consistently pattern-matching to this, and have a minute to let us know, we'd appreciate a heads-up at [email protected]. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here, but we do monitor the inbox closely (including fishing through the spam bin for real users) and we take these reports seriously.
As someone very engaged in reading HackerNews comments I observed that your comment and the comment you are replying to have that exact same format of three short paragraphs.
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.