That's really interesting... and sad. For what it's worth, I've noticed comment bots dramatically increase over the last year too. They have always been there, but looking at Reddit, YouTube, etc, now there seem to be 10x more than there were a few years earlier. Even on HN it has gotten worse.
On two occasions I’ve read one of my comments here on HN copied and posted on Reddit. The user profiles that copied my comments in seemed like they were run by a real person but the rest of their posts might have all been scraped as well.
I only found out because I just so happened to be looking at the comments on a related news story and quickly realized the post sounded strangely familiar. I’m sure most of us here have had our comments copied without our knowledge.
