My Friend Aaron: From World of Warcraft Pro to AI Scam Empire
A personal essay recounts the author's friendship with Aaron, a brilliant but directionless schoolmate who becomes obsessed with prediction markets and later uses AI hackathon credits to build a bot network that scams the elderly. The story explores Aaron's addictive personality, his delusions of grandeur, and the moral compromises that strain their friendship.
I've got about forty-thousand grannies' emails.
- sarreph
OP here - longtime HN user. I submitted this story to a writing contest a few months back, but didn’t hear anything from them.
I posted it here on a punt and getting front page of HN is 10x the feeling any writing contest could give me!
Thanks to all who read and commented, and glad to hear it resonates with some of you!
[EDIT]: There've been a lot more comments since I wrote this one. I want you all to know that I've read every single comment and am ever so grateful for everyone who responded here / took the time to read the story!
- JohnMakin
I think this short story resonates because probably most people know an Aaron - the type that is incessantly looking for some kind of scheme, some kind of get rich quick thing, and will spend exponentially far more effort and misery suffered avoiding real employment than it would take actually just sucking it up and working, and often (usually) with much, much worse results. Yet they persist. A few of them become successful founders, probably, depending on their background. But most don't.
- tyre
Fantastic writing, very well done. Every small, incremental decision is believable. You can see how the psychosis evolves.
It made me think of Justin.tv, which was Justin Kan streaming himself. There weren’t betting markets, but today there would be.
Twitch—what it ended up as–shows how much people crave community. Like other social media, there are many examples in chats of people with believed friendships and parasocial relationships with streamers. For smaller streams, sometimes these are real casual friendships. For larger ones, it’s the dark other side of Aaron.
Anyway, I’m glad prediction markets didn’t exist in those days. I wish they didn’t now (we don’t need more outlets for gambling, in my opinion), but this was a great story nonetheless.
- corndoge
I like it because each individual piece can happen and we probably all know people by now that have some aspect of Aaron - massive AI use, or into prediction markets, or live streaming, or just a friend who we have learned over time lacks scruples, or have watched them fade in response to life's challenges. The combination of all of these is then easy to imagine and that idea makes a good story.
- greenfish6
Powerful. And written so well, I thought it was real at first, I even forgot about the "this is a short story at the top" and googled Aaron's different betting websites
- burningChrome
Best line in the story:
I had spent my whole life dreaming of making my own overnight success on the internet, but had taught someone with no ethics how to do it instead.
This is such a great line and one I know so many people related to as soon as they read it.
You're a great writer, thank you for this today.
- lazydon
Not sure why, but I thought this was going to be a friend of Aaron Swartz writing in memory of him.
- samizdis
I clicked on the HN link and, when I saw "short story", almost closed the tab ... but I started to read anyway. I found it compelling and disturbing from start to finish. Much as my opinions about writing count for nothing, I truly hope that you poat any future works here. A great read.