A16z-backed Doublespeed hacked, revealing what its AI-generated accounts promote

Business model and operations

• Doublespeed is seen as a “phone farm” that mass-creates AI influencer accounts to generate engagement on TikTok and similar platforms.
• Commenters infer monetization via familiar gray/black-hat tactics: affiliate and referral links, paid campaigns, CPA lead-gen arbitrage, product seeding, and selling fake engagement to creators and brands.
• It’s compared to long-standing viewbotting on Twitch and other platforms, where “fake it until you make it” is used to game algorithms.
• Many note the company’s own marketing copy (“never pay a human again”, “spawn variation”) openly frames it as content ripping and bot farming; some see this candor as refreshingly honest, others as calculated ragebait.

Ethical and societal concerns

• Strong revulsion toward the idea of “accelerating the dead Internet” and industrial-scale astroturfing of public spaces.
• Some frame it as pure greed and a deliberate enshitification of the commons; others speculate the founder is young, chasing status, and shaped by bad role models.
• There’s concern that such tools will inevitably be turned against their creators and used for political or extremist propaganda, likened to coordinated fanbases boosting controversial figures.
• A few call for boycotts, protests, and even prison terms for those financing or directing such schemes.

VCs, platforms, and legality

• Heavy criticism of the VC backer: funding “toxic fungi on the face of society,” normalizing businesses that look like spam/ad-fraud-as-a-service.
• Some argue large platforms have weak incentives to fight this because bots inflate engagement metrics; spam reports already feel ignored.
• Debate over why this isn’t prosecuted under computer fraud/abuse: one side warns against weaponizing CFAA; others say prosecutors prioritize wins over ethics and well-connected firms often evade consequences.

AI, “dead Internet,” and community decline

• Many fold this into a broader “dead Internet” narrative: AI-generated slop on top of an already bot- and shill-infested social media ecosystem.
• Nostalgia for earlier, smaller communities (Usenet, forums, Gemini, niche Discords) and skepticism that massive global, anonymous platforms can ever be healthy, especially with recommendation engines optimized for anger.

HN meta: title controversy

• Significant side-discussion about HN mods changing the original title (which foregrounded the VC) as “clickbait” and then partially restoring it after user pushback, prompting accusations of protecting investors.