[suhputt]

There were no comments in this thread besides the author's when this made it to the front page. This was very obviously artificially promoted (probably via bots) to the front page - this has become a very noticeable pattern in recent times.

[ericpaulsen]

If you have any evidence of artificial promotion, please share.

[suhputt]

already have :)

[rob]

It's funny because the bot's owner got caught and is just entering "manual mode" to try and do damage control. You'll probably never see another post from "eric" again.

Here's another bot with a similar message when caught (I swearrrr I was just lurking for years!):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46936477

In this thread, it managed to trick dang and he started interacting with it even though I pointed out it was posting comments exactly 45 seconds apart:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46886719

And of course the last post where the bot's owner admits everything:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901199

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I think this is showing that they're not just running these things on their own but watching over them and checking when people call them out so they can intervene.