alt Hacker NewsThere's no evidence of astroturfing. The comments you’re referring to are from accounts with established history and in different locations, without any evidence of being linked to OpenAI. They just seem excited about the models and the pricing.
On the other hand, you have previously written: I'll gladly admit I think what these companies are doing is unethical, and I'm sure that biases my thinking toward skepticism. [1]
You have now posted accusations/assumptions of astroturfing and manipulation at least 15 times, without ever providing any evidence. This is in breach of the guidelines, because comments like this poison discussions far more than the comments they're complaining about.
We – of course – want all comments and posts on HN to be authentic. HN is only a place where anyone wants to participate because since the beginning, we've had software mechanisms and moderation practices that detect and weed out inauthentic commenting and voting. We're identifying and dealing with it every day, continually improving the software to detect and remove it. Most of that happens quietly and efficiently in the background without anyone having to see it. When users see evidence of manipulation and report it to us via email, we happily and thoroughly investigate it.
Most of the time, what we find is simply that people are authentically excited and passionate about the topic, which is what is happening here. I understand it can be hard to accept that if you're skeptical about the topic.
It's fine to be skeptical about the topic and you're welcome to express your skeptical views on the topic. People do that every day on HN, about AI-related topics and countless others. Healthy debate is what we're here for.
But you can't keep poisoning HN, by (1) continually posting these unfounded claims, then (2) when users and moderators simply uphold the guidelines, staging a protest by demanding your account be deleted. This is not what people do when they care about a forum's health.
Hopefully it is clear from my other comments that I do try to provide value too.
> You have now posted accusations/assumptions of astroturfing and manipulation at least 15 times, without ever providing any evidence.
I tried to point out the upvote speed and age-to-comment ratio for this thread look anomalous to me, and that it being posted within the Opus 5.5 release hour was further reason for skepticism. Circumstantial, sure, but I see very little ways to gather hard evidence of astroturfing without being a mod.
> when users and moderators simply uphold the guidelines, staging a protest by demanding your account be deleted.
You're right this was a little dramatic. I think it is just annoying though when two times that I have posted about astroturfing, it has been the most upvoted comment only to get flagged. I guess this is a self-fulfilling prophecy though, as you are right that other human commenters are abound and tend to flag people complaining about astroturfing.
Anyway thanks for the reply. If your read of my account is that I'm more-often-than-not a bad actor, then I will stop commenting here. Seems like it is for the best. :)