I wish it was that obvious. I think it's like criminals - the obvious ones get caught, and people go "criminals are pretty dumb", but there are plenty of smart ones too.
I posted this example earlier today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40208741 of a reddit account shilling Sourcegraph. They flat-out deny that this's a bot, but it's clear to Me.
Can't trust anything or anyone any more. Pretty sad.
Hi, head of community at Sourcegraph here. We don't use bots. u/Prolacticus is a Pro user, we do not pay him/her, and they are not sponsored. In fact, I offered them swag a month ago, and they refused.
We do give free/sponsored accounts to our Discord mods, open source maintainers, and folks who write guest blog posts for us. u/Prolacticus is not one of those accounts.
I fully believe that you aren't paying him directly to do this, but I don't believe that any human would shill so hard (and always mentioning the price and the same gist of 'it's fantastic' etc). Any chance it's a replyguy or similar test, either by someone else in your org without your knowledge or just by the creator themselves as I guess they need to do some 'live testing' before charging real 'customers'.
It seems to me that the concept of shill is slowly eating the concept of enthusiast or fanboy in the public perception. They are similar and hard to discern from one another. I'm not sure if one is more trustworthy than the other.
I trust you, so I will take you at your word that you didn't commission ReplyGuy or anyone similar to do this.
But did you read the link? Because I'm not convinced by "This is not an instance of what you're talking about." I have never seen a real person behave like that before.
Are either of the following possible?
- Someone on your team purchased ReplyGuy or similar, or is trialing it without your knowledge?
- ReplyGuy or similar is doing this as a test, maybe without informing you?
Hi there, I run the Developer Advocacy and Community team at Sourcegraph and am very involved with our user community.
To answer your questions.
- No, we do not engage in buying any comments, bots, or similar. Any time we've done any sort of external promotion, it is always correctly attributed as such.
- We can't control what other people do but we have no relationship with ReplyGuy or any similar service.
We can theorize all day and go down the rabbit hole of "was this a competitor trying to make us look bad?", "is this HN post stealth marketing for ReplyGuy", etc, but I don't think that would really lead anywhere productive.
I do fully agree that people need to be wary of anything posted on the Internet and take it with a grain of salt and whenever possible verify the facts themselves.
I posted this example earlier today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40208741 of a reddit account shilling Sourcegraph. They flat-out deny that this's a bot, but it's clear to Me.
Can't trust anything or anyone any more. Pretty sad.