Ask HN: What is up with all the glitchy and off-topic comments?

I've noticed a fairly sharp increase in junk comments lately. Often new accounts, making posts that are very low quality or sometimes completely incoherent.

I see glitch comments like this on a fairly regular basis:

> 13 60 well and t6ctctfuvuh7hguhuig8h88gd to f6gug7h8j8h6fzbuvubt GB I be cugttc fav uhz cb ibub8vgxgvzdrc to bubuvtxfh tf d xxx h z j gj uxomoxtububonjbk P.l.kvh cb hug tf 6 go k7gtcv8j9j7gimpiiuh7i 8ubg

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068948#47117224

or this:

> 1662476506

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47121737

or this:

> Аё

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47126475

Sometimes it's coherent, but completely off topic, like this

> when is fivetran coming?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47130567

Is clawd running amok, or is someone running botnet C&C via https://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments or what gives?

9 points | by marginalia_nu 1 day ago

3 comments

  • gus_massa 8 hours ago
    Flag them, enough flags kill the comments. After a while, the account/user is banned. If you see too many that are undetected after a few days, you can email dang/tomhow hn@ycombinator.com

    For the obviously stupid comment I'd not worry to send an email, until there are too many.

    For the last one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47130567 perhaps you can send an email just in case.

  • austin-cheney 15 hours ago
    It completely depends on the subject. Some subjects are easier for bots to provide commentary. I just suspect most of the AI related threads are started by bots and populated with commentary by bots.

    Some of the junk comments really do come from people. I can remember a thread about what Linux somebody should adopt for a child’s computer. Most of the genuine suggestions just received hate. It seems the younger generation of parents didn’t want to actually teach their children anything, as in spend time with their kids, but at the same time could not bring themselves to admit this obvious realization. It was bizarre and irrationally emotional in ways that looked like embarrassment and hostility for a subject that was never about adults in the first place.

  • verdverm 1 day ago
    Some of it is definitely "clawd" spam, there was a good post recently called "No Skill. No Talent." (ns;nt)

    You can see it more in /new and /show than comments, some of them also comment to look "real" and not all of it is directly "clawd", but new accounts with human operators that heavily use things like "clawd"