I feel like I've started to see lots of weirdly anodyne comments like this on HN recently, with a kind of pointless summary of all or part of the article. Has this always happened and my LLM spider-sense is tingling too much, or are they written by real people whose purpose I don't get?
But do they really get upvoted for such pointless comments? I'd be really interested to see the numbers. I suppose it could be cargo culting, where they see others do it and think it must work, even if it doesn't.
I imagine some of them do since it's seen as a 'convenience' for the reader who might upvote the comment (and the article itself, if it's something they're interested in). And yes I think it does have some kind of social element - people do it in other places and it drifts back into HN. There's a whole bunch of such folklore some of which gets naturally misapplied to HN, 'don't downvote for disagreement' probably being the most famous-while-inaccurate.
