Reddit Moderators Brace for a ChatGPT Spam Apocalypse | Hacker News Reader

Reddit Moderators Brace for a ChatGPT Spam Apocalypse

vice.com

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> For now though, the job is falling mostly to moderators. “It's going to require a lot of human labor, which is no fun,” said Gilbert. “We all do this as a volunteer activity.” But Reddit, along with other social media platforms, has a huge incentive to get a handle on this now, before the problem gets worse. “They want people to read their ads, right?” pointed out Gilbert. “It’s not like [Google’s AI chatbot] Bard is going to buy anything.”

Well... their history of dealing with crises is not promising.

Also, as long as the chatbot is loading the ad, do they really care? In fact, have incentive to not shine a light on just what fraction of their userbase is an automated llm.

Advertisers get paid for conversions. When users click an and and then buy something.

Sometimes they also het paid for clicks only, which is more prone to fraud.

Almost nobody gets paid for impressions.

People don’t like this idea but the simplest answer is to have a government owned and maintained authentication system which is backed by cryptography and used for official business. Basically, a National Digital ID. Sure Reddit will remain a dumpster fire, but you won’t have to worry about an AI impersonating your voice to a bank teller.

The potential for abuse is high, but such an ID would solve many real problems.

Europeans don’t have this aversion IIUC, but this will never happen in America because historically such systems were used by racists to prevent people from voting. Which, obviously that’s bad. But even mentioning a mandatory national ID is like some sort of cultural taboo here which will get rocks thrown at you.

I think it’s time we try again and work on applying what we’ve learned from past mistakes to make a better future.

I mean maybe. Until it becomes yet another secret number (ie: Social Security) that suddenly isnt really all that secret at all.

Changing anything with the government, and especially ID related is never easy. In fact thats why I have balked at using direct deposit with the IRS. What if i want to change banks, or even simply login to my account without having to subject myself to id.me and their hardline requirements for information with no real oversight in how its handled.

I just prefer the "mail me a check" option that i will never have to update since my address is always a part of the tax filing anyway.

>“but I'd bet the farm that traditional social media has a finite lifespan, largely because inauthentic content is becoming so realistic and cheap to make that we're going to struggle to find who's real and who's a bot.”

A simple solution would be a physical hardware (human) authenticator, that observes you in visual + IR wavelengths + audio + LiDAR, and functions as a sort of "I am not a robot" check. But then most users would have a ChatGPT template with: "consider the following thread link and compose a response for me that would make me dunk on everyone"

Could we incorporate some sort of verification beverage?

it might be enough if we stood up, formed our arms into a t-pose, and yelled the sponsor's name into the mic

>A simple solution would be a physical hardware (human) authenticator, that observes you in visual + IR wavelengths + audio + LiDAR, and functions as a sort of "I am not a robot" check.

The privacy implications alone would relegate me to not using that thing.

I'm not even a huge fan of FaceID, and the only reason I have used it is because the details of its implementation being public.

I was clearly being facetious, but can totally imagine a company coming out with this "solution". Maybe even governments.

Sorry I didn’t pick up on it. And there have been govt types that have floated such proposals including expanding the RealID program into something like this. I seem to recall the Brits also voicing the want to try something like this, and they tend to be quite ahead of the curve on the domestic surveillance and privacy invasive policy front.

wonder if there's an incentive structure that could work?

AI should be able to spot spam I would think. What if you got bots to downvote spam. not sure how that would work.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a real supporter of LLM's but it's fair to say that not all text which is generated by an AI is spam. Depending on the effort put into prompting and preparation it is quite possible that it is valuable , useful and original content but that the author has used an AI to polish the language.

The problem is of course how to distinguish the one from the other. Just using the "AI detection" tools is however not going to get the answer we need. Most probably the usual upvoting schemes will continue to be the best way.

I'm going to be quite happy if the quality of the grammar, and in some cases the language, improves. Better quality text makes it easier to concentrate on the real thing I'm interested in: the content and ideas!

but let's say I post something and there's 10,000 comments in the first 10 minutes of the post. your going to need something to filter it out.

the only other options is pay to post. but even then it's way more lucrative to post spam then real comments.

I see what you mean. But that's not a new problem caused by AI's, which I think was the original point.

I'm sure that all (useful) social media sites have a way to flag, or down vote such massive influxes.

Bot recognition of some sort of rate-limit transgression is another issue entirely, and not what I was trying to comment about (content based spam labelling based on "AI" authorship).

Perhaps I missed the point of the OP, in which case please ignore me ;-)

I consider reddit comments quality to be like a age- and exposure- ladder and not everyone needs to read everything. By that I mean all age groups and expert levels (and now bots) are at one place making it hard to know what is relevant for my context. LLMs will help us navigate the reddit comments on client side. LLMs will prepare a summary report of the reddit discussion and highlight those which need our attention.

there are other forms of filtering/ rate limiting like by reputation, HN does this already to some extent for new users < 500 .

Recency of reputation changes can be factors so historical accounts don't accrue a lot of value for bots to buy.

We will downvote spam or low quality content anyway . Accounts (users or bots) with poor rep can be more harshly restricted.

Ultimately does it matter if a human is actually posting if the post is insightful / useful ?

An incentive structure for original human-made content, maybe. AI detection seems like a futile fight, thought. Even if you employed the best AI detection algorithms on the market, you'd still have to deal with false positives, missed spam and rapidly-evolving models that can be fine-tuned to adversarial data.

I’m fascinated by what automated posting is going to do to these “communities” based on nothing but a desire to type and be seen typing. Was there ever anything worth anything on a Reddit thread, besides advertising that was supposed to look like Reddit? Knowledge, information, learning, wisdom, comedy, tragedy, humanity? Anything that a mindless chat bot combined with targeted marketing couldn’t have generated?

Reddit used to be good gathering spots for niche topics, where users reveled in each other's enthusiasm for said topic and could generally trust that marketing wasn't the poster's goal.

A mindless chatbot:

- Isn't actually there to be enthusiastic, hence isn't fun to chat about a topic for long.

- Cannot practically keep up with new developments in the topic like regulars do.

You arent totally wrong though. A bot isnt that different from a karma farmer, and TBH GPT4's confident nonsense rate is lower than many humans.

NSFW communities seem fine. IDC about true exhibitionism as it's all long gone and much is a lead magnet for OFs, Twitter, whatever.

Presumably that will be happening here too, no? And everywhere else that allows anonymous-ish comments.

It's anyone's guess what will happen in the long run (or rather, the medium run) but for now the approach that seems to be working is for users to flag the comments that they guess are bot-generated. That's actually the approach we've always taken—it's just that the bots, as everyone knows, have taken a quantum leap recently.

Probably, there's little reason it wouldn't. The profit (karma, attention) is too high for the cost (time, effort).

I believe I've seen some comments that may have been LLM-generated. Typically they're top-level, short (1-3 sentences), somewhat on topic, but barely relevant to the conversations happening.

Like, for example, on a post of a blog post about a malicious package found in NPM is I'll sometimes see a post like; "NPM is a godsend for developers. Problems can occur, but it has helped developers move more quickly and has made sharing code a breeze."

I never report it since I'm not quite sure if it's generated by a program, or merely just a low-effort comment from a human. Which is tricky.

I was thinking the real profit was in "shaping the narrative". But yeah, I can see karma and attention being competitive.

Wouldn’t Captcha prevent this, just as it always has?

I'm sure it would protect us as well as it always has. I.E. it hasn't. Too easy to offload en masse to turks, and AI itself is getting better at solving it.

Reddit has become absolutely garbage. I gave up my account from ~2008 and not looked back.

- Clearly astroturfed to hell and back by CCP, Iranian trolls, Russian trolls.

- Clearly bloated with viral marketing for various corporations "Look at how quirky my Coke Bottle(tm) is!", "Look at how weirdly my boyfriend eats his Jimmy John's(c) Sandwich!"

- The UX is garbage - you need to use Apollo for iOS or old.reddit.com to make it even halfway viewable without the ad spam, UX antipatterns, hard login required locks, etc.

- Unpaid mods with massive egos either struggling to maintain the quality of their sub (watch r/art become a porn sub) or completely power tripping (try to complain about homelessness in SF in that sub)

- Out of touch management looking to bleed as much money as they can out of the stone, shilling NFTs, Awards, live streaming nonsense, etc while neglecting core features of the site.

- The userbase is at a really annoying intersection of smug and ignorant. Everyone is an armchair general, everyone "well actually"s each other, everyone's an expert. To paraphrase someone... you read people's comments, get irate, argue with them, discuss, etc, then you look at their post history and realize you've been arguing with someone who drinks their own piss.

And to the point in this article:

- Unrestricted use of bots, which makes some whole subreddits just noise, or reposted comments from the last time XYZ was posted.

> astroturfed to hell and back

...which is still less astroturfed than news (of any kind), google results, review sites, and so on. It's one of the only places left on the entire internet where you can find real users talking about real problems with real products.

It's really easy to complain if you don't force yourself to identify a better alternative.

This is incredibly dismissive.

That's like saying if your house is on fire and don't have a place to go to you might as well continue hang out while your house burns around you.

Even if you can't provide solutions or alternatives to a problem it's important to acknowledge the problem.

"Knowing where the trap is—that's the first step in evading it."

"Outside the house" is a straightforward better alternative to the inside of a burning house.

> This is incredibly dismissive.

I wish I could make it even more so. Over and over, I have seen people throw away the best solution they had because they ruminated on its shortcomings without actually finding or building something better. Tearing is easy, building is hard. They toss away what they have, the situation fails to fix itself (why would it?) and instead gets even worse.

It's a social media website. There's no cost to the users to switch away, we saw that with the Digg migration. And Reddit has been top dog in this kind of social media for at least a decade, we aren't talking about jumping ship on out of whimsy, maybe it's time for Reddit to die?

Like, honestly, who gives a shit about conde naste's social media site?

What was better than slashdot? HN.

What was better than Digg? Reddit.

What is better than Reddit?

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Believe me, I really wish you had an answer, but I don't think you do.

My friends and I have been pretty satisfied with the federated matrix server that I've been running for several years now.

I imagine that the future of social media will look something like that and mastodon.

Small silos of people connected through an adhoc trust network seems to be a pretty good mitigation strategy for the issues of AI generated spam.

we sure don't see any corporate spam in our rooms.

HN would be if we could clone @dang 1000 times and make some sub-HNs.

Useful niche sites still exist (like HN, I would argue).

But if you can't find the niche you are looking for... yeah, you are doomed.

My better alternative is touching grass.

Shoutout to Clearspace (YC23), which I saw posted here and helped me finally break off from Reddit. I'm not entirely free of it yet, but I hardly ever browse it on my phone and the improvement for my mental health has been astronomical.

I noticed getting away from habitually scrolling has taken the shine off browsing the desktop too: Like now I have formed the complete realization that the content on that website just isn't remotely good anymore. There was a time where I could reasonably justify all the cruft and advertising shoveled at you there because of the quality content and discussion, but that's almost completely dwindled away now.

In hindsight, it's like the cool neighborhood bar full of geeks gradually started watering down the beers with urine over the last few years and I just realized the geeks are all gone, the patrons are all just shouting at each other, and the beer is just piss.

The site always had a contrarian edge to it, but the userbase seems completely driven over into a culture of "gotchas" - "well actuallys" as you say. And a decade ago the people making "gotchas" about technology were maybe at least informed in the niche, not fomenting cynically negative conspiracy theories and getting voted to the top of a front page threads. The site is so pessimistic now. I firmly believe habitually browsing reddit will poison your outlook to be more negative and cynical because the community constantly promotes that mindset.

The sad thing is, that for finding actually useful info instead of SEO spam drivel and copy pasted identical articles just phrased slightly differently, adding 'reddit' to google search is still the best way. Speaks loudly about the state of google and the internet.

It's not just Reddit. Over the past 6-12 months I've noticed that most of the places I "consume" at have all gone downhill due the monetization/commercialization by the content creator. I used to spend way too much time on Reddit and Youtube and would use tools like SelfControl and screentime to moderate my usage. I've noticed that recently I don't have to do that anyone. Everything has turned into a money grab and I'm no longer interested in the content. My current reddit routine is scrolling for a couple of minutes, realizing I haven't seen anything interesting and I lose interest and close the app. I have a 15 min screentime timer for reddit and I don't even hit it anymore. The same goes for youtube. There are just a handful of specific youtubers I follow now, the rest I feel like I'm being sold something or is just low quality content created for the sole purpose of inserting ads into.

Some subs are still pretty decent, especially the ones discussing topics that are not adjacent to politics and news.

That said the points you list is why I don't understand how anyone invested money in their IPO. The thing is clearly one scandal away from a meltdown a la Digg.

It's interesting how you're calling out foreign astroturfing, when I see reddit as full of utterly banal, uninteresting, and embarrassingly nationalistic domestic propaganda that often lacks even a shred of self-awareness and self-reflection (and would be downvoted to hell if posted by the 'other' side).

Perhaps that's what the 'marketplace of ideas' is supposed to produce. It's supposed to be a global site for global users to talk to each other, not an echo chamber for us to clap each other on the back[1] as we regurgitate our propaganda.

[1] Top two threads on Reddit right now are about a negative-to-China political cartoon, but I don't imagine that you call people upvoting that out as trolls and astroturfers... Because it aligns with your world view.

The other side doing it is outrageous and tasteless and propaganda, our side doing it is, well, normal. To our sensibilities.

I've had good experiences on more focused subreddits (trades, specific hobbies, etc). Basically anything that's not general or not likely to overlap with overt politics, the quality of discussion/information there is still decent.

> reposted comments from the last time XYZ was posted

This gets me the most, as its fueling all the rest. So many top comments are just bots posting the exact same text as the last time the link was posted, which is done to farm karma for selling to marketers, propagandists, and of course, more spammers, continuing the cycle of garbage.

Agreed. They just closed i.reddit.com, and I've actually stopped browsing reddit. I used to linger after looking something up. Also tangentially -- what is reddit's obsession with Anker products?

People complain about homelessness in the San Francisco sub all the time though? I'll be honest, I hardly go to that sub but whenever I do it seems like there's at least one post about it.

Agree, Reddit is terrible. Heavy handed political bias too.

The dumpster fire that is Reddit braces itself for another flaming tire to its pile

It’s a shame because the small communities are great. I’ve had an Electrical engineer explain to me the intricacies of stepper motors to better optimize my 3D printers, and the creator of LORA had an in depth conversation asking people how he could improve LORAs for Stable Diffusion.

But you’re right, the main subreddits are terrible and have been for a very long time.

There is nothing Reddit loves more than hating itself. You would fit right in.

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