Reddit is full of bots: thread reposted comment by comment, 10 months later
lemmy.blahaj.zone
lemmy.blahaj.zone
https://www.404media.co/ai-is-poisoning-reddit-to-promote-pr...
Google is failing, so users start putting "Reddit" on the ends of their search results. Where do we go when Reddit is no longer useful and contains the same AI generated dreck as all the Google search results? It shows how many single points of failure there are on the informational web. Pretty much the only informational resource on the web that's still unscathed is Wikipedia (thanks herculean-level efforts by its editors, mind you), but I wouldn't bank on it in the same way I wouldn't bank on Reddit. The "information age" might be coming to an end.
Exactly what a bot would say.
This is a little melodramatic, no?
Access to information, even without Wikipedia or Reddit, can still be found easily (compared to pre internet days) I personally don’t use google search anymore, but can still find links to public MIT textbooks (like SICP or Deep Learning) by searching on there. I’m sure google scholar, scihub, and arxiv will be around for a good while.
I’m sure if Wikipedia falls, another encyclopedia would take its place, since so many primary sources are still discoverable if you know the terms to search for. Maybe with a paywall, maybe not.
First time I've heard people making that claim was around 2020 in the context of corona iirc. I think they called it "the age of misinformation", and that has only become more relevant since then, so I think it was even more on point then they realized back then.
Examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35688266
We are racing towards the abyss orders of magnitude faster than with climate change or nuclear proliferation, and even the overwhelming majority AI experts coming out and saying there is at least 20% chance of a global catastrophe or even risk of extinction earns a mere shrug: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/opena...
And CEOs: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/06/14/business/artificial-intel...
And yet even the most mild, libertarian-friendly proposal to mitigate the harm is utterly rejected by AI fans who gang up on any criticism, as the future botswarms will: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35808289
I said the entire internet will turn into a dark forest, including all forums like Reddit and even HN. Swarms of bots will cooperate to “gang up on” opponents and astroturf to shift public opinion. And the worst part will be when humans start to PREFER bots the way organizations already do (eg trading bots replaced humans on wall street).
The AI people are building a dystopian future for us and won’t face ANY accountability or disincentives, but rather the opposite. I expect this post to be downvoted by AI people chafing at any criticism. (Like the opposite of web3 posts.) The replies, if any would even appear, will be predictably “well, it was all already possible with human efforts”, ignoring the massive difference in scale and cost to malicious actors (well, the replies would have been that if I didn’t call it out just now, because they always are, and hardly any actual substantive discussion of the extreme dangerous outcomes that are only starting to come about in very early stages).
1. Bot swarms will simply disrupt everything about the Internet as we know it. Most people ALREADY barely scritinize chats and articles, so bots can EASILY produce those at scale to push opinion in any direction, or just sell shyt
2. Botswarms will outplay adversarrial games vs humans for karma / reputation points, as well as launch coordinated attacks on opponents organically trying to stop whatever viewpoint is being gradually pushed or sold, until they give up or are totally reputationally discredited
3. People start to PREFER bots to humans, just as they PREFER google maps to asking for directions etc. At that point most humans would be surrounded by 100-1000 bots and have no way of affecting other humans.
4. Physical world, cameras capturing all the info and cross correlating where you are. Maybe slaughterbots are mass-produced. Who knows.
When the costs come down and scale goes up, it doesnt matter about AGI, the entire society is disrupted permanently. And that’s what AI is on track to so. It’s far easier to continually create a mess than to continually clean it up.
Not to mention point 4 contains things that have been in place already for over a decade. It’s not even a prediction: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169
But sure, take the one tiny thing you can caricature and ignore the rest. That’s one step up from strawman, I guess
You're the one bringing up the prospect of extinction. Extinction! And a 20% chance at that. So no, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask about how we arrive at that outcome. Because there's a massive distinction between "dystopian" and "extinction".
My main concern for the next 5 years is that the Internet is going to become a dark forest where you can’t trust anything, it will be impossible to discern fake stuff, and even if it was, the botswarms will gang up to take care of any dissent.
That alone is extremely plausible and scary. Every single institution we have relies on the inefficiency of an attacker. Let alone swarms of attackers that any member of the institution can run instead of themselves, and can be subverted to bring about ANY goal, by who knows behind the scenes.
It wasn't quite obvious marketer-speak, but certain comments have just seemed like not quite the way a regular commenter would word things.
I figured it was regular humans doing it though. Sigh...
When I was a kid I wanted to learn electronics, so I got some books and parts at radio shack but certain things weren't obvious for someone who knows nothing, so I didn't know where the ground was supposed to go in a schematic diagram for instance. And the adults around me didn't know -- so I just had to figure it out. Now a kid can go on /r/askengineers and get an answer from an engineer in less than 20 minutes.
But overall -- maybe the 'information age' has backfired for society in general. Those kids will figure out what they want to know regardless of how easy it is, and so many people just look for information that confirms what they already think then weaponize 'facts' so they don't have to budge.
I'm really not sure -- it is so useful to me, but every time a nice place gets an influx of people it turns to shit, so I tend to lean misanthropic in the long term.
A problem I have with reddit are the users looking through my post history trying to extract more information than I present at face value in my post. Sometimes, it works out in my favor because I have an XY problem and get redirected to the correct resource. But most of the time, its just used to determine how they'll engage with me (seriously or not, mockingly or not, high effort or low effort). This is a specific problem that doesn't exist on HN, as a rule.
I'd rather not delete my post after I got my answer, in order to help other people coming in from google searches, so instead I create an account for each subreddit that I post in. If each subreddit should be considered its own forum, it would make sense to have a different account for each forum. It was even once encouraged by reddit for users to have multiple accounts.
The issue now is that most subs "shadow queue" (not shadow ban) posts from new accounts in an attempt to curtail spam. You'll still see your post if you're logged in, but not if you're logged out. And there is no engagement on it until a mod releases it.
Similarly, I am permanently behind a VPN, so creating accounts cause them to be actually shadow banned by default by reddit admins. I must message them to prove that I'm actually a human, after realizing that the mods also don't see my post in their queue. Once, after I got my account appealed, it got shadow banned again, for reasons unknown to me. I was particularly bitter since I had spent 4 hours to make a single high effort comment on that account.
Even if I've managed to overcome all this friction and gotten my post actually appears in the "new" queue, there are myriads of reasons why the post won't yield fruitful results. It could be the timing of the day or the week. Perhaps my title wasn't catchy enough. Maybe my wall of text was too big because I tried to fit enough context and people's eyes just glazed off. Maybe the post got overshadowed by more successful posts upvote wise and never made it to the hot page of the sub. Perhaps my questions is way outside of the skill range of that average sub's users (I've seen this happen often on my posts and others', in various outcomes). Or perhaps the regulars there have seen the same introductory level questions twice a day over the years and simply refuse to engage with them anymore.
It has gotten to the point that if I can't find someone else with the same question in various wordings as I have on reddit through a site:reddit.com search, I simply assume that no one has the answer.
As for why youtube, it's not where I usually start, but ends up being the best solution after all other potential solutions have been exhausted. I'll give some examples:
For music (I know its not work related), a lot of amateur/indie music is so old, it can't be bought anymore, and can't be liscenced to spotify. Most real piracy solutions are defunct (lack of seeders, dead mediafire/megaupload links). The only way to find the song is some random person's channel that was made 12 years ago and hasn't been updated since.
For many "open core" saas products, the problem starts at the documentation. Often, I just need a "getting started"/bird-eye-view of the system and how it would potentially connect with the rest of my systems. The first thing you are told to do in the docs is to sign up for their managed offering. Once I find my way to the self-hosted section of the docs, I am told to download a docker image. I don't want to download a docker image or sift through a 500 line docker file to know which configs are relevant or will do to my system. Then, they'll have a "you can also compile it from source" link that points to their github project page. If things they had a binary upload, excellent. But now I need to figure out what to stick in my config file, environment headers to set, arguments to pass before I have a "sane" startup.
The docs are also an excellent way to get lost in the weeds to "try to attempt whatever it is poorly themselves". You can easily get misled, as terms are recycled between different products with different meanings in each one. They may provide api docs, but no working examples. They may provide working examples, but without any notes, comments or implications on what each line or command does (To get started, run this command in your console: sudo curl ... | sh). You may have reached a certain point before getting it to work, but now you're stuck and you're not sure where the issue is. Sometimes, the docs are sparse, and when you're trying to learn a concept from a page, they'll have links all over the page linking to other concepts. You don't know if these are advanced concepts you can ignore for now or fundamental concepts prerequired for learning what you're trying to learn.
The community around these products are also less susceptible to helping you out. The product devs are focused solely on building the product, or support only the paid managed saas users. The other users are often "drive-by" github issue makers, mostly employees working with said product. They will post massive dump logs and grafana screenshots with machines provisioned with TBs of memory and clusters with hundreds of nodes. They're here to get their problem solved so they can move on with their workday, not subscribe to the project page to receive notifications of others who might have the same issues as them.
Youtube has "solved" these "open core" issues for me more than 3 times now. When you find a good 30min/1hr/playlist, its like finding a gold mine. They almost always start with a succinct birds-eye-view so you can early return/break once you realize this isn't what you need, rather than the product's landing page saying how its the silver bullet to all your problems. The web of "concept" has been linearized in a dependency chain for you. You can see the person doing things and their effects in real time without having to commit the effort. You can see what auxiliary (debugging) tools are used and their install process. You can see which commands are more relevant than other, instead of wading through `prog --help` or `man prog`. They comment on what they're doing so you know the scope and side effects of each command. You can watch it at 2x speed, skip, rewind. All of this allows you to cement a better fundamental understanding of the product you're working with, rather just calling up support from the paid managed service and slapping the it on your CV.
Then there are all the other fast evolving spheres of tech. Being stuck in the usual enterprise CRUD, it can be hard to dip your toes in adjacent domains. Whether it be finetuning an llm for your purposes, fpgas, linux, gpu shader programming, networking, photoshop/illustrator, video editing, game dev, etc... These domains are all evolving rapidly, and if you want to start and finish something with only a weekend of free time, a youtube tutorial is often good enough.
[0] https://reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1cc0fyy/i_made_a_li...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1cg39yq/deaddit...
https://www.reddit.com/user/Clear-Car862/
If you inspect their comment history, they are recommending several products in almost every reply. ContractsCounsel is one of the services they recommend. The formula they use for recommending is very similar for every post.
Also interesting, one of their only actual posts mentions the phenomenon of using bots to advertise, I guess trying to throw people off their trail?
I find it pretty funny tbh.
Ask a conservative about that opinion. Do it before you do exactly what I'm accusing you of and downvoting the bad man who said the thing against "your side".
EDIT: Yea, thanks for the gaslighting but Wikipedia's organized effort to remove conservative editors to shift a left bias in the content is well documented. I'm the crazy one injecting politics into "fair and unbiased wikipedia" lol
Just wish we could decide what we were shown [still]. Can't have it both ways if you want section 230 protection.
Or we weren't in it all the way quite yet, and the real information age is not defined only by the availability of information, but also by the massive quantity which drowns out simplistic search methodologies.
Maybe this is the natural end state of information systems. First they gather useful information, then they gather all information, then information starts being generated that is tailored to the system for the purpose of being in the system and affecting how it's used, often negatively. I can think of lots of examples, from internal wikis to rumor mills at work.
I think the idea of translating something through a few languages back to the source language again, and the inconsistencies and weirdness of that will be prevalent, just to a lesser degree (that's not a problem of machine translation, it's just a problem of translation which was used to comedic effect as it was exacerbated by automatic machine translation problems). Good translation requires an immense amount of context, which I don't think will be taken into account in most cases as it's expensive, yet translation of material will be a large market going forward IMO, and any automated defeat of it (which will be the only option at the volume I think we'll see) will just be an arms race.
*exposé
Would you be able to create system where you somehow battle this spam but retain privacy in some way?
Is there an alternative that retains max privacy in a world with a trillion bots spamming away?
Ie. does any good systems exist where say you can get a HUMAN-ID, by some sort of verification, this then grants you access to create users, but no one can see what user are tied to what HUMAN-ID, but you can only create say 5 total, and if some are busted doing spam they are all revoked (bad orwellian idea)
Or maybe some advanced federated trust chains where if lots of different people deem you a spammer you can get your users taken away, but no state power can revoke it in one move for example or see who you are.
We would extend the whois database to contain an oauth url for a given IP block and then forums or other services that need to ensure a real human person is present (Like at registration or when combined with some other trust systems), would bounce the user over to the URL and it would require the user to login via U2F/passkeys/TOTP/etc.
The thinking is that isps are the ones who know their customers are real, and as long as they can challenge them in a human interactive way, that should provide a strong signal that it's a real human. It's also a good way to protect against cookie stealing and could provide resistance from 'man in the browser" attacks as the end user would become suspicious of all the isp challenge pages popping up if a machine was being used in spamming.
It's not foolproof, there could be insiders working at the ISP, and this would require cooperation of all isps everywhere, but it would be a step in the right direction
Needless to say, such ideas make some people very unhappy, although it can be done in a way that doesn't grant governments any new powers they don't already have. The most common objection is from Americans who make the same arguments they make about elections: some people don't have id of any kind and shouldn't be expected to get one.
You can also of course buy identities from people who don't care, as a sibling comment says. But that's inevitable for any identity system where identities can be had cheaply.
As others have mentioned, there are numerous ideological issues. However the alternative might be never encountering a real person online again.
And if not applicable for the broader internet, then probably in smaller or even country-sized gated communities, where people will expect to interact with 'real humans.
Also while IDs may be traded, the relatively small number of fake IDs compared to the infinite bots that can be created today is not even comparable.
What is that argument like, in practice?
"I will not tell you who I am, but I demand to vote!"
> that's inevitable for any identity system where identities can be had cheaply
Therein lies the rub. Your system is the economic solution to the spam problem. You don't really care about the passport itself, all you want is to associate generating identity with a cost.
A closely related solution to the same problem is to associate every identity in the system with a phone number, which also carries a cost to generate. Similar to what most tech giants do (helped on by external factors, but that's the basic argument).
Then you cannot hand wave away any problems with that they are "inevitable for any system where identities are too cheap". Because the proposed solution is to associate identity with cost. If that cost is too small in practice, it is not a good solution.
Block and fine ISP's that host bots. Throw people in prison that run bots.
Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
Anonymity on the web has led to some pretty atrocious behavior.
Plus, at this point, anonymity on the internet is an illusion anyway.
Just use existing trusted CAs to issue personal certs based on some reasonably robust verification process.
Maybe the AI apocalypse will help fix the internet by making anonymity untenable.
It is not hard to find Facebook groups that are far far more toxic than most Reddit groups, for example. Most USEnet identities were not hard to associate with real world identities, but the quality of those posts was not obviously better than those that weren't. And so on.
There are differences between the groups, but perhaps those have more to do with whatever contemporary issues that carry social stigma than with signal quality. And social stigma is very different between societies and tends to change over time. One generation can upend them completely, and any solution to social credibility must take a longer aim than that.
The future is likely more similar to LinkedIn
Wikipedia is great as long as the topic isn’t politically controversial. In those cases you get the US State Dept/corporate media-approved perspectives with all the censored perspectives available in the Talk page.
I was kinda shocked to see the stats on active editors, laid out fairly well in this report by a source that was banned from Wikipedia by a ridiculously small group
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censor...
As an example, there are some Wikipedia editors that continually remove mentions of genocide from the opening paragraphs of Stalin's page, whereas they leave them there for Hitler.
People really enjoy pushing their ideology in their spare time. I really don't understand it.
While nothing of the sort exists on Joe Biden's page.
Mind you I only gave this inspection some 10 seconds of my time, Ctrl+F for "rac" which I suspected would be one such topic.
Probably because there's really nothing in Biden's history of statements that compares with the kind of stuff Trump routinely says. Not even the "racial jungle" remark (which while impolitic, doesn't carry the racist import sometimes attributed to it).
It does mention the sexual assault allegations (including the not-so-credible ones from Tara Reade), so there's no censorship there.
We don't have to come to agreement on your overall point (and precious few are still reading this thread by this stage). I just wanted to get a sense of where you were coming from.
Compare:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Hummus&oldid...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Hummus&oldid...
Yes there was an edit war over Hummus being called Levantine because some people insisted the Jews were colonizing the food.
Sometimes you find a subreddit with specific topic and seek to find firsthand experiences from it
Unless you want your week consumed wiki-lawyering your edits to overcome them, the bias remains.
It states:
> "The most popular posts on Reddit have switched from reposted content from “karma farmers,” or engagement hackers, to nearly entirely original content from less popular Reddit users. Original content from smaller communities is now outperforming recycled evergreen content by a tremendous margin across the platform. As of October, none of the top five posts of the month on r/all were original. By March of this year, four out of five of these posts were original. "
In my experience this hasn't been the case at all. I've also noticed that if you click the profile of people that end up on the front page, they are often new (or suddenly active) accounts with a certain pattern:
1) Make 3-4 posts not related to the content they want to promote, to "warm up" the account. I'm guessing there's a soft-ban on new accounts here.
2) Post the actual content/narrative they want to promote.
3) Suddenly, this post gets 10k upvotes and reaches the frontpage.
Are LLMs not just fancy Markov chains? They are next token predictors which have some hidden internal state that output probability distributions which lead to further states.
Someone did this on Reddit 9 years ago. It was remarkably good.
https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator/comments/3g9ioz/
I posted this example earlier today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40208741 of a reddit account shilling Sourcegraph. They flat-out deny that this's a bot, but it's clear to Me.
Can't trust anything or anyone any more. Pretty sad.
Doesn't look like a bot at all, possible shill sure but they're a person.
We do give free/sponsored accounts to our Discord mods, open source maintainers, and folks who write guest blog posts for us. u/Prolacticus is not one of those accounts.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40208741
I fully believe that you aren't paying him directly to do this, but I don't believe that any human would shill so hard (and always mentioning the price and the same gist of 'it's fantastic' etc). Any chance it's a replyguy or similar test, either by someone else in your org without your knowledge or just by the creator themselves as I guess they need to do some 'live testing' before charging real 'customers'.
You make a great point. It's highly unlikely that a newly-created account just so happens to post content that's engaging enough to be featured in Reddit's frontpage. It's far more likely that these "less popular Reddit users" are sock puppet accounts used to post special-purpose content which is then subjected to industrial-grade boosting to force it onto everyone's first page.
Changes of this magnitude are practically impossible without the backing of either Reddit itself or marketing companies intending to control the flow of information.
Personally, I'm fairly certain it's a difficult cat-and-mouse game, but there's no question that some very popular mods also use bot farms to promote the content they want on the subs they mod.
A lot of subs have low-karma blocks for new accounts, so spammers have to buy aged accounts to be able to post in a lot of places.
Check /r/interestingasfuck, /r/satisfyingasfuck, /r/natureisfuckingcute, hellsomememes, and a lot of other subs.
Qualities of subs particularly susceptible to such spam:
* Subs that don't require OC (not news, not a hobby sub) * Subs that don't demand proof of identity (/r/selfies, /r/glowups)
So, counter to the quote you cited, I still see a lot of karma farmers on reddit, and like you say, they'll often do what you and I describe and then turn into an Onlyfans account, or something like that.
reddit is just such a goddamned cesspool, and I am so curious as to what nefarious actors are doing on it and why they're doing it.
Different topic, but I'm ranting: The political echo chambers are wild. Places like BadHasbara, Palestine, IsraelExposed, Conservative, Libertarian, antiwork, WorkersStrikeBack, Anticonsumption, all have wild agendas that will instaban anyone who challenges the dreck that gets posted there.
Those are the best ones; stop telling everybody about it or they'll get flooded with losers from that orange site I keep hearing about.
So the hobbies/games I'm currently playing are subreddits I subscribe to and actively browse. Games like Anno 1800, Cities Skylines, and Manor Lords. All 3 have very active and passionate community members that are constantly posting high quality content around inspiration for builds, tips and tricks, community update news, patch discussions, mods, etc. etc.
If you want more silly subreddits not related to hobbies, it depends on what your humor is. Here is a wide range of options: r/AnimalsBeingBros, r/ActLikeYouBelong, r/softwaregore, r/raspberry_pi, r/lockpicking, r/FellowKids, r/dogswithjobs, r/BirdsArentReal, r/BreadStapledToTrees - subreddits that are related around hobbies or niche humor will make you love reddit.
Again, tl;dr, reddit is not the place for real life news. If you don't use it for that, you'll find yourself enjoying the website a ton more.
r/billiards r/boots r/frugalmalefashion (arguably small nowadays) r/hiphopheads r/mtb r/self hosted r/sffpc
EDIT: Also, the way I make Reddit useful to me is I change the default sorting for subreddits from Hot to Top > Monthly, and also disable content recommendations. It'll shows less content and Reddit will sometimes say "No more content right now", which is great.
That said, I'd be careful saying the sub can't be "trusted." It's annoying but when you do get an answer it's generally sourced and credible. As opposed to the unadulterated bullshit I've seen on the rest of the site regarding basically anything I have professional experience and/or formal training in.
The strictest moderation there is can be found in high quality academic publishing. You are allowed to publish only if what you say has high value, and is said in the proper way. Can't get your Flat Earth Quarterly published in Nature, and we're all better for it.
I swear some of the things I've been downvoted for in r/embedded is just out of control nuts.
One of them closed to non-approved submitters, and now they get AI-generated requests for account approval.
From a user's PoV, this is at worst a good thing and at best completely irrelevant.
I never go to the large subreddits anyway (political, news, pics, etc), so whether or not they are around, or around and filled with LLM trash is completely irrelevant to me.
OTOH, the subreddits I do visit are alive and well and show no signs of being less valuable to me than before.
EDIT: "Vanish" forever. Yes, there have been protests and black outs, but everything I have ever subscribed to did come back.
In fact, the biggest losers were the users of the small, niche subreddits that the admins couldn’t strongarm into returning.
Your statements are really baffling to me.
The admins didn't care that we had a thriving community, no spam, and they banned the subreddit. They also blocked anyone from ever creating a replacement with the same name (still to this day). So, it definitely does happen. I'm keeping it vague here to maintain my anonymity.
Side note, reddit dropped that rule about 2 years ago so I suppose we could start one up again, but I've lost interest in that topic.
This is what made me realize that reddit is actually an awful platform for information, while there is a lot of good stuff there the average user is NOT educated, and the average users outnumber the individuals educated in a particular subject.
I have been downvoted to hell many times even though my information was backed by multiple studies and factual.
Because there's no way to have "the EDC thread" or the "post pics of your phone" thread, this low-effort shit fills the subreddit.
* Encouraging authoritarian and know it all attitudes, essentially fake experts
* Taking the Moralistic high road
* Operational FOMO: Covering topics that "Big XYZ" doesnt want you to know leading to users to come back over and over for the inside scoop
The entire thing is designed to cement user's attention. It's fascinating.
The algorithm now suggests posts, popular ones with lots of fighting in the comments, from subs you dont subscribe to. Essentially causing organic brigading which is against Reddit rules
What's the subreddit? It's not in the screenshot but I'm guessing r politics?
It's all the same lunatic that has no idea they're on the other side of the horseshoe as "the bad people".
They used to be based on super low paid human, then it was bot train the account up then humans use it when it's cooked, and I guess we're now entering the bot from top to bottom era.
Now there is a stock price to protect. They literally are obligated to keep the bots running because it directly effects the stock price.
It's new stupid world.
I made that comment in 2012.
I hate the site and have limited the time I spend on it but there aren't good alternatives for certain communities.
Moviechat.org seems to be a spiritual successor, and I'm pretty sure that a lot of its initial content is archived IMDB forum posts, but it's not nearly as active.
From our hackernews perspective, the website sucks now. From the average user perspective, reddit is another fun app full of dopamine hits.
But both things can be true: great, deep, obscure info and general worse (dare I say, hostile) user experience.
Honestly, I don't think pissing off the mods has made that big of a difference. Yes, some subs shut down, but otherwise I haven't seen a meaningful cultural change in Reddit as a result of that whole issue.
In fact, one of the reasons I believe Reddit is so crappy is specifically that they bow to mods in many ways. Many communities are run by, frankly, psychos who are way too happy with the power they have over their little ponds. I've lost count of how many times my posts have either been removed or my user banned despite having followed the explicit rules of a sub. Communities vary, but I've found this "you should have read our minds" attitude to be commonplace.
Yes, you can spin off your own sub, but then you're taking a gamble as to whether the original community is going to come after you; they seem to win at least half the time by convincing Reddit that your [relatively pissant] community is toxic in some way. Good luck if your community is blamed for creating "drama" even when there's a lack of brigading.
I'm not a mod or anything, but I think there are actually a lot of legitimate reasons for a mod to have that attitude. It's unreasonable to expect a volunteer to create a comprehensive rules of behavior and enforce it in a lawyerly way and keep a community on track and not burn out. I've seen more than a few online communities have serious problems with certain users that would have been best handled with a "we're sick of dealing with you, enjoy your ban." Then, there's also the fact that if a community is too popular, a mod can only scale by being more brusque.
Maybe depends on the subs you read, because I have not noticed an appreciable difference before and after the "going dark" thing.
LLM paraphrasing is likely to either drift away from "what worked" towards unknown territory or introduce tics that don't really cohere quite right. We can confidently assume it's being used as part of other strategies, but it's not actually optimal here.
The real issue is that Reddit (and Facebook, Youtube, Amazon, Tinder, etc) have very little incentive to aggressively police against this until and unless examples like this make big news and start to harm their general reputation. In the meantime, it just makes their sites look more alive and popular. It's good for them right up until they it becomes a defining association with their brand. This lazy approach works for the bots and the sites, so there's no reason to overcomplicate or take on bigger risks.
Strange times.
I guess their license allows them to do this, but wow.
Reddit's terms says:
>You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content: [...]
Users only grant reddit to repost their comment, not anyone else. Are you claiming that reddit themselves are doing the reposting?
Reddit was a great idea. Then it got successful and greedy.
Good examples from the front page just now include https://old.reddit.com/r/AITAH/comments/1cgmfrt/aitah_for_ma... and https://old.reddit.com/r/AITAH/comments/1cg4c7n/aitah_for_ge...
Posts that are clearly farmed bots that figured out how to use LLMs to vary the same genre of question over and over again.
LLM Bots that seem to respond set to counter at all costs mode. Yes I’m aware of how dumb people can be, but these adapt in a way that feels very LLMish — instantly sacrificing the point just to counter you and try to get another response
On top of that I see Google is dumping tons of fresh traffic, but the behavior of these users seems different than Google drop bys. These are tons and tons of users who seemingly appear out of thin air with histories.
I dunno — it all seems really weird and particularly set for rage engagement to me.
So unless they exclusively plan to sell rage engagement to film Studios and political campaigns their market is going to be microscopic and terribly performing.
I think Reddit could be enjoying a short term boost but once Google drops them it’s a bust.
The age of small self-hosted forums is unfortunately behind us, and I don't see them reviving any time soon.
The underlying software is not really important, it's what you can do with it.
I wish more people would try Discourse, which is threaded like a real messageboard without all the automation bells and whistles.
If HN was a sub reddit I would never visit it.
I'm on a sports team messageboard that still runs on a mid-00s phpBB backend. There are no bots because there is nothing to propagandize about on such a small, topically focused community.
Also younger people find forums archaic and weird, to the extent that most people my age (early 20's) that I've talked to about this prefer imageboards over forums. As much as I'd love for forums to make a comeback, younger people are the ones who determine the next shape culture will take and there is very little chance small forums will grow. It's such a shame too, it's so difficult to find good Discord servers and so much technical knowledge is unindexable and will most likely be lost forever once Discord stops burning money for growth.
1 - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot...
2 - https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/advanced-ai-chatbots-...
Some (including me) have shifted to Lemmy, a FOSS Fediverse alternative like Mastodon is to X (Twitter). There are many instances of Lemmy to choose from as home. Mine is lemmy.world. I run a few communities there and we have a chill environment there.
If you miss the old reddit feel, you can emulate it with old.lemmy.world
Some Reddit third-party app devs converted their apps to Lemmy apps after Reddit made those API changes.
There's tildes.net which is run by a former Reddit admin, but it's smaller and invite-only.
Since the very beginning, the only thing of value on reddit was the comments. If you do away with comments, then you will only ever see content from people who can be bothered to learn how to use Wordpress or whatever and post it to a blog. For those starting out, that sounds screaming into the void, so they never start. Commenting is a much more casual and approachable way to provide specialized, detailed content to those who are already proven interested, and you're virtually guaranteed that at least one person out there will give you the attention your effort earned.
Any social media that doesn't allow this is either dead on arrival, or popularity is heavily manipulated by some industry heavyweight who can make it popular despite its uselessness.
To that end, my harebrained idea is to put a hard cap on the number of members a subreddit can have, and restrict posting and voting to those members. If people want, they can create <subreddit>2 and so on, each cluster self-regulating. To prevent squatting, you can only spawn a new one once the last one reaches a critical mass, and it has to be started by a member of the old one.
Just.
Don't ask for general life advice, don't go to "popular", don't talk politics( one of my biggest regrets is how political I was in my youth).
But theirs no better source of technical information from people who tend to be willing to help.
Go to stack overflow, say you've never programmed and want to know what tools to use. You'll be banned.
Go to Reddit, you'll get tons of helpful information. Rarely a subject matter expert jumps in.
AI is probably what I'd ask my stupid programming questions now though. Stupid as in how do I download a file in C++...
The beauty of the internet is that real people love to give advice in a subject that they care about?
Are you trying to become a better cook? Do you want the best chocolate chip cookie recopies? Go to the cooking subreddits and start searching or asking.
It's often the best place for product reviews if there's a hobbyist group
Opinion: talking politics isn't politics: it's mostly just group signalling. If you're genuinely learning things, that's alright; if you're organising something real, likewise. But if you're just trying to win the "information war" (i.e., the current internet argument), that's almost never meaningful political engagement.
Example: this comment isn't politics. I'm just advertising that I'm a contrarian. (And this paragraph advertises that I'm a meta-contrarian, also known as a hypocrite.)
Depends on the subreddit. The subreddits for certain hobbies are even worse than stack overflow. But yes, I agree with you that there are still helpful communities.
It's gone from that weird little Digg clone with a tiny comment section (the good convo was on Slashdot #onionbelt) to a meme site and eventually (with the addition of subreddits) a genuine information repository.
The Blackout in 2023 hit the site in a bad way. Most of the tech subreddits I followed have sice dispersed to various Lemmy instances and fizzled out.
Imagine you live in a community that has half the houses painted yellow and half the houses painted blue. Suddenly you start seeing posted that all yellow houses should be painted blue. The HOA puts it up for a vote, and there are 5000 votes pro blue.... when there are only 250 houses in your neighborhood. I mean, if you lived that neighborhood you'd be up in arms about why the HOA didn't do the bare minimum about the situation.
This is the same for bot content. Suddenly the views of one person out number everyone else...
"You should be mad! You should be really mad all the time. Look, there are thousands of people that are really mad, and if you're not mad you're the dumb minority that's not paying attention. Here are 1000 people that are all mad around you and doing something about it, you need to do something too. Yea, remember that 'real person' that talked to you on 'forum' and you got along with them, they are so totally mad!"
Until we give up on thinking 'internet people' are real, internet people will have a far higher impact on our lives than they should.
Yet there are newer submissions with fewer points shown there
I am curious why this post is (currently) #148 on HN with 218 comments and is three hours old. It is surrounded by "one day ago, zero comments" posts. Given the context of the original post, it feels right to be curious as to why this is buried.
(Note: Went from 148 to 153 while I wrote this comment)
I now have to use .json at the end of the URL to get the content, but I suspect that'll stop working at some point.
Reddit like every other advertising fueled social media company, will ignore the reality of who uses their platform and instead lie cheat and obfuscate the facts in order to remain in "good standing" with the ad tech cabal...
You write a bot that is able to look for similar content from the past and copy paste the top comments and replies. THis has been happening since the beginning of time. I remember seeing this on college humor.
This is a super easy non expensive way to get an account with a ton of karma.
Trivially defeated once posters know it's a thing, but it would be better than nothing.
edit: or greedy sampling only?
Looking forward to Google Search recommending stores and restaurants that closed years ago, or videogames that don't exist.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensi...
I quit reddit a few years ago but I've checked it out recently and found it quite tolerable.
Personally, I've observed this phenomenon on r/Polarfitness as soon as the sub becomes a list of complaints and negative feedback about after-sales service, positive content magically appears with very generic content but dozens of comments.
Instead what you see is a post from a fresh account that is a copy/repost of one of the top posts in either that or a sibling subreddit.
This is then followed by a half dozen accounts reposting the top comments from the original as their own comments. This is often where they mess up and it's easily detectable when not the OP responds as the OP.
If you check back in a month or two or so, the accounts are inevitably banned by Reddit or shilling something somewhere else (with a minimum age/rep requirement) themselves and/or using the accounts to express support for something shilled. The "resume writer" was annoying prolific.
I find it doubtful that Reddit corporate is using such an approach to try to drive up engagement numbers.
I would make it so new accounts have very limited permissions, create a way for real users to confirm they are humans like via SMS or how other competent social media do it.
Why they are not currently keeping them in check, though? I'd like to say "engagement" but I prefer to believe in "incompetence".
I am guessing here, no data or proof, but there are a lot of very young accounts that defend Putin, defend soviet war crimes , try to cause chaos, do personal attacks in comments. This accounts have sometimes real people behind but for sure bots/scripts are used to create them and then farm karma/points to be allowed to post. Someone like me with a single account for years must always be sure to fllow the rules, this bots/trolls are always aggressive, spread false shit and do not care if banned, and seems reddit is fine with same troll making many accounts and use them for bad stuff.
Because some subreddits require you have some karma before commenting, more karma to be allowed to post I assume this trolls use scripts to post random stuff to get this karma points. There are bots that find popular past submission and post the same thing again to get the karma points.
So EU or USA needs to tell reddit that they are responsible for the shit posted by bots and we will see tehm inventing ways to stop 99% of them/
You'll start noticing comments that have been edited months or years after the original, that insert links for a particular product/service. I've already seen this for a variety of IPTV comments I was searching. I'd imagine this is mostly done via mass outreach.
On a different note, I'd imagine the pushback had this been "right wing" propaganda being caught to be 100x with mentions of criminal activity, even more censorship, etc.
>>Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
In this case what changed? Was reddit on top of spam a few years ago and deliberately let spam happen? Or did spammers realize the value and got more aggressive with their spamming? It's not clear how what's happening right now resembles "they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves". Are you just using it in the literal sense of "service got shittier"?
Here, it's probably fair to say that spam strategies continue to innovate and reduce their operational costs while Reddit (and most of their peers) drag their feet on responding to it as long as the spam satisfies the quality norms of the site (as sufficiently delayed replays do).
Reddit (et al) presumably puts a fair effort into suppressing obvious noise, but much less effort into generated content that creates engagements or appears plausibly real, and that this *amounts to a decay over time as the implicitly permitted generated content itself becomes cheaper to produce and more widespread.
Their self-benefiting inaction satisfies the original usage of "enshittening" even as the term has expanded in common use.
I think these would be a lot more obvious if Reddit's own integrated search was better.
Surely there's an alternate explanation for this? ie. the military is filled with 20-somethings, and reddit's primary demographic is 20-somethings, therefore you'd expect any sort of cluster of 20-somethings (ie. a military base) to be more "reddit addicted"? Moreover, surely the US military can afford a $5/month VPN subscription to cover their tracks?
https://old.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit...
From my point of view, reddit is pretty dead, not sure there's any real conversation going on there. Of it's own doing, of course. Censor and create echo chambers and people leave. Even the people who would ideologically align with the echo chamber become bored of the lack of conversation and move on.
It's interesting, what's the point? Is reddit preventing a digg-like crash by producing fake bots. Reddit api yahoo changes suggest it's not external.
Now, I also looked into what they seem to be investigating on how to fix it. Their approach seems to be idiotic at best. Like they don't acknowledge what even caused this to them.
Now the dead internet theory isn't accurate. It's very obvious facebook and X are real conversations. It's just a matter of hasbeen social media pretending they didn't die is kind of a new thing.
It's amazing how the "AI abundance" advocates don't understand something so blatantly obvious.
You can tell from the comments, which don't read like typical loquacity of ChatGPT style LLMs.
I imagine you are complaining about people that disagree with you on how to solve the problem.