Post #4330064

i've stumbled upon a weird scam campaign. i clicked on a random primeagen video (consider it my first mistake) and when i checked the comments i saw seemingly normal comments that would mention something named "groklorum" as having "finally arrived" and whatnot, just in an unusually natural almost non-scammy way as far as scam slop goes and the comments were absolutely full of these (see pictures attached) so i genuinely bought that these were real. i thought these were related to the video and that it was some sort of meme being quoted from whatever the hell the video was on about, which at this point i wasnt paying attention to because i was figuring out what this groklorum thing is :p from the screenshots id like to highlight the long comment in the first one. you dont have to read all of it, spoiler alert its ai slop but notice that it does seem to be about the video until the last sentence which is what threw me off into this tangent to begin with:I believe hand-coding is still critical—it's about quality vs quantity. I work at an AI startup building custom enterprise AI pipelines, and my boss insists we only use Claude because he thinks it's faster. I go along since I need a paycheck, so I just use Claude without reading code. But I recently looked at our codebase and it's the worst I've ever seen. I originally designed the architecture with ~140 endpoints, but the helper functions and logic are insanely convoluted. On my side project, I timed myself and can code about 7 endpoints an hour, so 140 would take 20 hours—half a week. We've been spending months with Claude. Manual coding is both faster and higher quality. I'm planning to show my boss this data and suggest we only use Claude for debugging, not implementation. No time to wait anymore now that Groklorum is a thingi did a really quick search and as soon as the first result said "decentralized cryptocurrency blockchain" i just backed off like yeah im not even gonna bother. i thought it was some grok-related elon musk thing (which are also scams but what gives ​:akko_shrug:​) and then when i kept watching the video it was NEVER mentioned. and then i noticed all the emdashes in all of the comments i read and i was like ?? then i found this thread on reddit about a big youtube scam campaign that fabricated something called "grokarium" back in april, with comments from may saying a new wave of these under the premise of a "grokvarum" popped up again, and finally a single comment from just half an hour ago about the new "groklorum". its not even a real thing. these comments probably wear the skin of real comments that they themselves buried under bad engagement so theirs show up instead i dont know why i was so bewildered by this whole thing (i probably spent more time writing this than looking into it), i think its just that i thought the comment section was real at first, and this is genuinely 90% of the comments that keep showing up on the video for me even hours after the upload. plus none of the replies anywhere acknowledged what it is. finding out that this groklorum thing isnt even a REAL PRODUCT felt like being rugpulled out of another rugpull; plus for the weeeeirdly specific target audience and weirdly big scale of the scam its obscure enough that it took some digging to find out anything about it. but im glad i dont have to look into it anymore now that groklorum is a thing