Comment by mutagen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mutagen | Hacker News Reader

In the early 2000s someone (drunkmenworkhere is what I remember) made a blog post generator that you could sign up for, add some names, some interests, and it would generate blog posts with Markov chains and some other magic. I signed up, not fully understanding how it worked, added some friends and family as names, played around with it, it wasn't what I thought it was and moved on. Meanwhile it kept generating entries about me and my family doing fantastic things.

At some point my then ex-wife (we've since reconciled) was google-stalking me and came across these entries. At some point they became outlandish enough that she contacted me to ask what was going on in my life. There was a very confused conversation where I had no idea what she was talking about and she was somewhat concerned about my health and safety. It wasn't until I talked to a relative and started googling myself with some specific terms that I came across the entries and was able to figure out what was happening. I emailed the individual running the project and asked to end the entries and if possible remove them from the internet to avoid further confusion.

I'm pretty confident there's a big "long tail" of the internet that has auto generated blogs like this with some ads on that generate some money. I wonder if Google or whichever ad provider you pick will penalize you for this.

I run a legitimate website with actual people publishing content... sometimes, and I get offers from advertisers for sponsored content. If I didn't earn a living on a day job, auto-generated content farming might be something I'd go into. Morally objectionable, but it's a living.

Secondary would be to just take content from Reddit and add some low effort captions to it, then target old people on Facebook or whatever. Again morally objectionable, but there's a LOT of people who really browse the internet uncritically.

The “long tail” you mention reminds me of the “dead internet” conspiracy theory.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-...

I wonder if anyone can quantify and keep trends through time of an estimated percentage of auto-generated/bot content, at least for major domains.

I run one, with ads for betting sites (which give you lifetime earnings for a % of what the person bets). Runs on autopilot basically, generating 80k/yr and growing by 20k every year. Google never penalized me.

I see these a lot, often seeded with exact copies of posts from reddit, stackoverflow, or github issues. I have not seen one that (to my knowledge) was seeded with fake content, but you absolutely could make them.

There is a subreddit called SubSimulatorGPT2 [0] where the author runs GPT2 on 130 subreddits and uploads posts from each of them. I'm subscribed to the subreddit and often get posts from there that I don't realize are fake until something small is off and I check the username.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/btfhks/wh...

I know that there's a technical point to your post, but all I took away was that you reconciled with a stalker :-)

We've both matured quite a bit since then :)

I'm curious, what sort of fantastic things are we talking about here?

"It has been some time since I wrote. A lot of the time. Having people around me. In a way that fits my needs for communication. The feeling to have a daughter has not lived a life of honor. After some struggling, B’elanna has a near d"

Not OP, but this is the fun stuff that a markov chain text generator comes up with.

Going from memory, I had added some real people in my life like friends and family to the generator parameters. It was describing some implausible situations between these people and then posting as me being depressed. From a certain distance it could seem alarming, although the whole situation provided me a great deal of amusement as well.

> At some point my then ex-wife (we've since reconciled)

Did you marry twice?

It reads like he married the same person twice.

I imagine it can make the second wedding a bit awkward.

Yes, I did! Second wedding didn't have any of the awkward people present, they're gone from our lives.

One old geezer's reading of this:

He & his ex were on definitely non-friendly terms at the time. Later, they got over their hostilities. No implication that they are now friends, let alone in a relationship.

His ex may have been inquiring about the odd blog posts mostly because she'd have to tell the kids "your father is [in jail|dead|etc.]", rather than because she cared about him.

Thanks for reminding me of http://drunkmenworkhere.org/200 I also had a blog there.

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