It's a scary thought. Does the immediate link clicking reveal them to be bots, though? It could be that the shills have scripts in place that do automated posting, while it's still primarily a human that makes the comments. It could be that they use software that simply clicks links for analytical purposes.

To what degree do you guys think this is going on here? Are some of the shills, such as Chipit, actually bots? I'm looking at his comments a little bit. He resorts to personal attacks, and refrains from refuting anything. His comments are very similar to each other, especially the personal attacks he makes. And when he gets called out for anything, he never defends himself properly. His commenting really is of a level that AIs must be capable of.

Comments are more telling than posts, but we can infer things from posts as well. Chipit is guilty of voatification, posting headlines that this site's userbase would welcome, but it's always the most polarizing stuff, and he makes it more polarizing on top of that through deceptive titles. Here's a recent example. Unto itself, the title seems to follow his trend of first giving the actual title of an article he's linking to, and then giving a short summary. When you click it, you discover that it's just a short entertainment video that invites you to laugh at a protester, instead of having actual content. The title isn't an appropriate description at all. So where does it come from? It turns out to be assembled from the video title, the first line of its description, and a random comment to the video, all concatenated. Who comes up with that idea? It really is bot-like behavior.

I've posted another example 5 months ago here.

It's starting to make sense to me. Why would adversaries pay people to comment on sites like these full time when they can just pay devs once to write and train AIs to do then do it for free?