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All the labs astroturf all the social media, HN is not unique and OpenAI wouldn't be the only ones. I even receive offers sometimes on my email put in my HN profile, asking me to post about their project in exchange for money.

Be skeptical of anything you read online, not just what you think is "obvious astroturf".

[WarmWash]

I don't think Google does, they are way too massive, disorganized, and "by the book" for something like that. Also AI isn't life or death for them.

Besides they own 15% of Anthropic and cutting massive compute deals with them. On top of that they also have compute deals with OAI.

Google is positioning itself to win no matter what happens, Gemini is almost looking like a side project next to their cloud business.

[svachalek]

Wait so you're countering an accusation of astroturfing with an actual confession? That's new.

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Lacking reading comprehension, you can imagine me doing, confessing and saying all sorts of things :)

[Imustaskforhelp]

Wait what? Why don't I get emails like this too? /s

(on a serious note, do you feel comfortable naming and shaming such companies, this is sort of a serious accusation imo and if not then how much money they are trying to give. It would be an interesting discussion and feel free to mail me if its confidential, waiting for your response and have a nice day :-D)

[embedding-shape]

Nah, maybe one day I do a collective public post of it, for now I just try to get their company and/or name first, then forward it to HN themselves so they can ban them and keep an eye out for them.

[Imustaskforhelp]

Could you give us how many companies are trying to do this and also if any of the companies are YC companies themselves or not, I imagine not but still.

and what is the metric for companies sending you messages, like I have never gotten a single message (aside from one/two companies here and there and I even made a HN post about one of the companies)

and what do these companies really have a metric for in terms of sending spam for? karma points, I mean emsh I remember we both had close enough about the same karmas not too long ago, surprised to see you at 13k+ karma, so good to see that but is the metric karma, hype (you had made the rust browser ..) or what exactly? I would be curious to hear your thoughts on that!

I do understand the point of these companies sending mail though, I mean I can't say that if I had a company at the moment I might not do the same either, but I think that you might get frustrated too with it, so what would your recommendation be to people sending you mails in general?

I would be curious to know that too!

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So far just 3-4 at this point, some I guess figure out what I try to do when I ask for their company name and HN username, none of them been YC companies so far AFAIK. I don't know why they send specifically me emails, I guess either some automated system or they themselves see I spend way too much time on HN already, maybe just based on the amount of comments, I do have quite a bit of free-time :)