[solatic]

Of course it's not real. This is Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation in practice. When you cannot tell the difference between a real person represented in the simulacra (i.e. a site like HN) and the simulacra being generated at will by a malicious actor (i.e. a simulation, fake accounts developing a history of posts, bots, guerilla marketing, etc.) then the smart person will recognize it for the un-reality that it truly is.

Just because it isn't real, though, doesn't mean that it can't be fun :)

[Zababa]

I don't really see how this is specific to the internet. Sure, automated bots makes this worse, but is there a big difference between a bot and someone parroting opinions that they've heard and don't really understand? I guess you can have a conversation with that person, but it's often as fruitful as replying to a bot. These people exists in the meatspace, that doesn't make it less real.

[solatic]

> I guess you can have a conversation with that person, but it's often as fruitful as replying to a bot.

That's precisely one of the reasons why it's not real. Conversing in "meatspace" makes it more difficult to just tune out the other side, a "real" conversation is one where leaving the conversation is either tacitly permitted by the other side (by not following the person leaving) and at least bookended by simple social ritual ("I gotta go", "Nice meeting you", etc.). Baudrillard's point is that the simulacra (the discussion online) is no longer showing you that reality, but that too many people have lost the ability to differentiate between reality and what is a convincing simulation of reality.