If you can increase your reach, why not do it? Also, HN has better reputation among tech circles than Reddit and is less niche than other resources. Modern marketing hits everything.

HN is enormously influential for programmers and employees within the tech industry. Who happen to be exactly who Anthropic, and other AI companies, desperately need adoption from...

I think HN has an outsized influence in the industry, for its size. There are a lot of big tech employees and startup founders reading it. Account purchasing absolutely happens, I've discovered and gotten banned at least a dozen years-old accounts that were blatantly sold and puppeteered by bots in the past. The comments aren't obviously bot-written this time around, so I can't conclusively prove it happened in this case, but it is a thing that happens in general and something to be aware of. There's also vote selling to promote things onto the front page. Given how cheap shilling on HN is, and the fact that many will perceive it to be organic while always viewing straightforwards ads skeptically, I wouldn't be surprised if the cost:effectiveness ratio probably beats any other form of advertising.

hn appears in google news now