[maplethorpe]

> Why would anyone "engagement farm" on HN? That's crazy.

All sorts of reasons! One is that when you reach 1000 karma, you gain the ability to downvote comments.

You seem like a smart person. I'm sure you can think of some reasons why that might be useful.

[krapp]

I mean, this forum is run by a billion dollar startup incubator.

People make farming HN a part of their business model.

[l23k4]

This is just silly. HN rewards comments people agree with, not "engagement".

Engagement farming works on social media platforms that reward engagement. Posting engagement bait in HN comments would just result in downvotes.

[maplethorpe]

HN rewards engagement in the form of upvotes. If you make a post or comment with the intention of getting upvotes, you're engagement farming. I hate to break it to you, but there are many people doing that on this website.

Why do you think all engagement farming would result in downvotes? You think HN posters are so keen at sniffing out bad actors that they would never reward them by accident?

It feels like you're being willfully dense about this. I can see why the other person accused you of being AI.

[walletdrainer]

>It feels like you're being willfully dense about this. I can see why the other person accused you of being AI.

No, you fucking idiot. Not everybody who disagrees with you is AI.

"Engagement farming" is a term of art with a specific meaning, basically just the adult way of saying "ragebait". People engagement farming on IG or TikTok are typically doing so by posting deliberately controversial content designed to troll upset viewers into writing upset comments. It is inherent to the technique that it only works on platforms without downvotes.

You don't see anyone "engagement farming" on Reddit either, it's always specifically "karma farming" because farming karma requires positive engagement. Engagement farmers do not care if the engagement is positive or not, the required approaches are completely different.

[maplethorpe]

You're conflating engagement farming and rage-baiting. Engagement can be both positive and negative. I can't find any online sources that agree with your definition.

Here's one that I think sums it up pretty well:

"Engagement farming refers to a range of deceptive practices on social media designed to artificially inflate engagement metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and followers."

"Engagement farming employs various tactics to exploit social media algorithms, with the intent to appear more popular than actual user interest would warrant. Examples include posting controversial content to provoke emotional responses, repurposing successful posts without originality, and using automated systems for mass liking or following." [1]

If you don't think this is happening on HN (especially to mass downvote posts) you're naive.

[1] https://www.isme.in/engagement-farming-prof-sriram-prabhakar...

[walletdrainer]

Maybe look at how people actually use it? Not sure why the Indian blogspam is worth looking at.

"Engagement" has a specific meaning. It's different from "like farming" or "karma farming". Some platforms specifically reward engagement, making it a reasonable thing to farm on those platforms.

> using automated systems for mass liking or following

Clearly the author was clueless, this has nothing whatsoever to do with engagement farming.