Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts
by ColinWright on 4/23/2026, 11:50:25 AM
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/04/sneaky-spam-in-conversational-replies-to-blog-posts/
Comments
by: hrunt
I subscribe to handful of investment-related YouTube channels. This pattern has been common for years. A bot will reply with a comment loosely related to the video and about how something worked for them. Another bot will reply asking how they did that. Another bot (not the original commenter) will reply that they worked with so-and-so or invested in such-and-such, and then there will be maybe four or five more comments responding to that. All obvious bot accounts.<p>It's obvious on the channels, because these reply sets usually don't contain a lot of replies to comments (if there are any comment replies, it's almost always from the channel owner). It's so obvious, in fact, that I'm surprised YouTube hasn't done something to address it.
4/23/2026, 12:53:09 PM
by: xyzal
Text generation is now cheap, so I expect this problem to worsen. I hate to write it, but I don't see any other solution on platforms, that aspire to be a modern agora, than identity verification ...
4/23/2026, 2:01:18 PM
by: keiferski
This has been a thing since blogs became a widespread thing 25+ years ago. Especially with the advent of Wordpress. It was even a “commonly accepted” SEO tactic for awhile.
4/23/2026, 1:24:24 PM
by: rozumem
Nice. I run a site that depends on user submitted content, and it's really interesting to observe how some people try to get around the guardrails. Not sure if your tool does this, but I would perform some additional checks for comments that have links in them.
4/23/2026, 12:37:02 PM
by: throwaway667555
This also is absolutely rampant on reddit in the past months.
4/23/2026, 1:00:13 PM
by: sublinear
I also see a ton of this here on HN as the political topics have ramped up.<p>Not enough people are flagging those when it aligns with their bias. It's even less likely to get flagged when it's a double whammy of politics and AI. Loosely being about AI should not give it a free pass.
4/23/2026, 1:49:28 PM