It's already happening. For years now, but it's obviously accelerated. Look at how certain posts and announcements somehow get tens if not hundreds of upvotes in the span of a few minutes, with random comments full of praise which read as AI slop. Every Anthropic press release shoots up to the top instantly. And the mods are mostly interested in banning accounts who speak out against it. It's likely this will get me shadow banned but I don't care. Like you, I doubt HN will be around much longer.