Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham stated that X has marked a large number of suspected AI-generated replies as potential spam. In one of his posts with 59 replies, 34 were hidden, mostly for this reason.

He expects this ratio to only increase, with most replies being default folded in the future. The post has approximately 156,000 views, about 1,500 likes, and over 300 replies. He has previously described the same phenomenon for several months: in March, he mentioned that reporting spam was too cumbersome and switched to muting; in April, he stated that he still manually blocked a few generated accounts per post, likening it to picking up trash on the street; in July, he explained that blocking a dissenting reply was due to the text being written by a model, not the viewpoint itself.

In May 2025, he asked whether filtering could solve the problem or make the model of public replies obsolete. In February 2026, he stated that cheerful, hollow generated replies are more dangerous than past public opinion attacks. In May, he noted that founder emails featured an unprecedented "hard news" style, which felt deceptive upon reading. He also expressed an open attitude towards YC portfolio companies using models, distinguishing between "using correctly" and ghostwriting.

The platform has already introduced measures like limiting reply chains to reduce bot spam. Graham co-founded Y Combinator with Jessica Livingston, previously created Viaweb, and sold it to Yahoo. His essays have long influenced Silicon Valley's views on writing and growth. YC was one of the early investors in OpenAI.

The public reply layer is shifting from "default visible discussion" to "default folded, click to expand." High-follower accounts become priority targets for generated content, transferring the cost of human reading to authors and platform classifiers.

In market mechanisms, the buyers are automated reply accounts seeking visibility, while the sellers are social platforms that fold layers using classifiers. The driving force is that the cost of generation approaches zero, while the cost of human reading remains unchanged. Traffic is shifting from expanded dialogues to folded inventory; authors reduce interaction, and bots lose display positions. Beneficiaries are filtering systems and paid verification tiers, while those under pressure are accounts that treat public replies as customer acquisition funnels and readers who still wish to encounter real people in the threads.

Source: Public Information