A Reddit bot drove me insane
posthuman.blog
posthuman.blog
As someone who was really into GameFAQs forums, the enshittification cycle is just that, a predictable cycle.
First: Some company spends a ton of money building an internet community. Eventually the money siphon runs out, either for legitimate or illegitimate reasons. Then enshittification happens as advertisements and shitty posts become the norm. Eventually, people exodus, at first slowly as people look for new options. And then very rapidly as...
A new company manages to capture the imagination of these disgruntled masses and builds a new online community.
We are currently in the late stages of Reddit's enshittification cycle. They've reached IPO, the original owners have literally cashed out into the stock market and made $Billions for themselves. Their heart isn't in Reddit anymore. The time for replacement shopping has begun.
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Reddit itself was the lucky one chosen at the intersection of LUEsers exodus, Digg exodus, and Slashdot exodus.
Before Gamefaqs / LUEsers, Digg and Slashdot were the Usenet, BBS, MUDs and other such internet communities. Its never quite predictable what comes up, as the tech dramatically changes from generation to generation.
Slashdot lasted maybe 10 years (though still limps on). Digg lasted about 4 years before it started shedding users at alarming rates (and 6 years before it killed itself).
But after 20 years, Reddit still is still gaining users; It's not dying yet.
Reddit has changed so much over time. Reddit of 2006 was very different to reddit of 2008, and reddit of 2013 was very different again. By 2019, it's more or less managed to reinvent itself as an App, trading blows with Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok, almost unrecognisable.
I'm sure many people will put peak-reddit around 2019, but for me, Reddit of roughly 2011 was my favourite, and it's only been down hill from there.
I don't think Reddit can re-invent itself again, only continue to get worse. But I suspect it will still be around in 10 years.
The new users aren't exactly high quality, but they seem to exist. Or at least advertisers think they exist.... shrug.
For some other fun trends, checkout Facebook which has been clearly declining since 2012, or Instagram which appears to have been declining since 2023... not entirely sure why.
[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=slashdot...
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=slashdot...
[2] Zoomed: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2004-01-01%202...
I know Reddit has become infested with junk recently, but it just shows how bad the broader-internet has become that I'd rather search in Reddit than walk in that swamp.
I agree with you about Reddit being around in 10 years - because I don't see its users having any reason to suddenly depart, given every other large community is largely similar.
I disagree completely. You got the same thing at the same time on 4chan and other places as well.
I think it was less each place having a distinct & unique culture and more the overall culture of the internet was a huge fence between places of business/serious stuff and then the larger messy, funny, sad, sometimes offensive chaos of (mostly geeky or techy type people) side of the fence where Internet culture thrived - it wasn't a place of business, just a place to have fun and not everyone was there.
Because money, that wall has been broken down _from_ the business side of the Internet and business has leeched into almost every corner of our green space - all of that internet culture, funny cat videos, funny meme comics is all very profitable - especially if it's pushed and manicured for the masses using evil social media tactics.
That's the key, I think; the internet and all its culture has become INRT, as a stock that mostly only goes up, feeding on itself in the same way that Disney now only make live-action remakes.
It’s still possible to get useful answers on niche topics, but you will also get flooded with questionable sub-specific dogma, and god forbid your question is the tiniest bit obvious/unnecessary (according to the “experts” of course, never mind that it clearly wasn’t obvious to the asker)
It's akin to the concept of "climbing a ladder to the top and then pulling the ladder up behind you", and imho it's the alarm bell that indicates that a community has died, even if the community itself does not know it yet.
It would be like having to read and parse every book in the Library in order to get feedback on your short story, and half the time the reviewers will just throw your story in the trash before even reading the cover.
We will continue not to "have nice things" until more people are willing to pay for high quality services.
There is no amount of money that you can pay a modern corporation that will satisfy it. It perpetually wants one more dollar from you.
When I built my first website, xhtmlforum and selfhtml forum was amazing as it was a wiki combined with a community around it. The same for pentesting and learning how to solve CTFs. The same for electronics and how to build, etch, and debug motherboards for 6502/i386/etc. I could go on and on forever, but I loved the web for what it was: It always had an answer for anything that I could ever imagine, with other people wanting to build the same cool things, together, as a community.
And that spirit is kind of gone now. Now the statistical majority(?) wants to get famous and rich and be instagram and tiktok idols, without building something to get there. The quick buck has the priority now, and there's maybe some dozens of youtubers left that want to make knowledge on a beginner level accessible, which I have huge respect for. But video content is temporary, especially on platforms with shitty discovery methods like Youtube.
But the wikis and communities? Haha, good luck finding posts from pre 2010 with google. They've all been wiped out.
Just last week I wanted to explain to some junior dev what XHTML1.1 strict and the idea of separation of concerns was about when we still cared about accessibility. Google gave me 2 useful blog posts post-2017, 2 youtube videos of someone raging about it and favoring web components. And that was it. I was flabbergasted how much knowledge is lost.
There is no point in learning new ideas and concepts if you forgot how we got there, because we'll end up in an endless loop of repeating ourself. And I think the worst nightmare of 1984 has come true already. Google already controls the present, and the web archive might be nice but is absolutely useless as a search engine.
I wanted to start a pentest/CTF community because that's what I care most about nowadays. But turns out there's not many web forum software that's left and not enshittified yet that came after the PHP age. Now I'm writing my own markdown based forum software, with a webasm frontend for it and the idea to make all posts storable/shareable as markdown threads.
I don't want knowledge to get lost again in databases.
I am a part of a community that is run on a slightly modded FluxBB. It has more comments per hour than hacker news. Maybe even 10 times more. And new threads are started almost daily. I think this particular forum is almost ten years old? We did change platforms, but this was more then 7 years ago for sure.
And the code base isn't maintained, since moderators aren't very tech savvy.
That's to say: php forums are pretty robust, don't discount them! You can always migrate, if something better will come up. Older versions are just as good, as the enshittified ones.
grow community > get popular > get popular problems > get capitalists involved > enshittification
Ever find a great new restaurant? Small, quirky, but good? Things pick up, it grows, maybe moves to a new location. Everything's shiny and great. It's busy and feels fun to know about? Then over time it becomes less fun. The staff aren't working at some cool new place, but just working the same job over and over and you can tell. The newness wears off, and things start to just wear. A couple years later you reconnect with someone you haven't seen in a while and they recommend the place. You haven't been there forever. You go and it's a ghost of what it was. That wasn't enshitification, just the passing of time.
Enjoy the cool moments/places/songs/movies for what they are, don't expect them to be some sort of constant in life. 'music sucks now, movies suck now, XYZ niche thing fandom loves sucks now'. Nah. It's the same that it's ever been. But time has passed yet you want that moment of discovering XYZ to go for ever because it was so good, but it can't. Time won't allow that.
Reddit as a whole isn't interested in fairness, it's quite clear the direction they took as a site
1. subreddits where sane things are removed and their posters are banned in order to astroturf a moderator's insane opinions as normal
2. subreddits where insane things are removed and their posters are banned, as they should be, but the banned posters (who can be very numerous!) try very hard to make it out like it's situation 1.
I enjoy making music. I've started commenting on peoples youtube/soundcloud. And I've made a small circle of people to talk with, but it's so far removed from what Reddit used to provide before it became a 'content feed'.
I'm not related to either project (piefed is federated with lemmy instances), but enjoy those feeds A LOT.
After this last election, I think political groups realized local subreddits were underutilized and have regrouped accordingly.
While I still trust some appended Reddit searches on Google, I'm losing faith there too. Product/service recommendation threads are really easy to manipulate.
My pet theory is that someone who claims reddit is a great place for niche hobbies were never part of an old-school forum with truly passionate and engaging members.
The last 2-3 years this issue just became worse and worse.
Reddit is fantastic for memes though. There are some hilarious subreddits out there. But I rarely engage, just consume.
The reason for deliberately antagonizing them, and eventually banning them, was that /r/The_Donald's moderators were directly telling their membership to upvote specific posts so they'd rocket to the front page. "Inorganic results", "vote manipulation", "gaming the algorithm", whatever you'd like to call it.
So the admins had a reason to ban it, even if no doubt they and most of Reddit's users saw Trump supporters as "the enemy".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald#Prominence_on_Red...
Also, as this article has reminded me... 'member that time Spez admitted that he invisibly edited users' comments?
https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_...
There would need to be extensive evidence to convince me that the subreddit wasn't just botted. Threads would get thousands of posts extremely quickly, and there would sometimes be only a handful of comments. I don't really believe organic users were spending their free time refreshing "new" just in case a new post was made that required an immediate upvote.
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/4fh8s9/this...
Normal humans tend to upvote things that are already upvoted. But normal humans don't tend to look at the incoming stream of posts.
Ordinary T_D users were refreshing the subreddit's front page. Mods stickied the posts they wanted to rocket to the top. This got them past the hurdle where very few people look at /new to give those all-important first few upvotes. Ordinary T_D users upvoted the stickied posts. The mods then unstickied them less than an hour later, because now they're "organically" at the top of T_D, and the upvotes continued to pile in, rocketing the post to /r/all
Meanwhile, all the other subreddits weren't playing this game, so their users votes were split across multiple posts on their subreddit's front page. And mods of other subs use sticked posts for administrative notices, which are worded as such and tend not to get upvoted much... but if you were to sticky a normal post, users would upvote it. But stickied posts aren't eligible for /r/all... unless you unsticky them. Oops! T_D successfully gamed that oversight.
EDIT1: Also... as the comments in the link above reminds me; it used to be that any post could be stickied, e.g. normal link posts. It wasn't necessarily clear that they were stickied posts. What changed after the T_D manipulation is that sticky posts were renamed "Administrative Notes" and had to be text posts and had to be coloured differently from normal posts. Before that change, they weren't distinguished that way. Now perhaps the subterfuge by mods makes more sense?
EDIT2: WIRED's postmortem on T_D - it was cunning mods, not bots.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-hate-fueled-rise-of-rthe-don...
T_D’s moderators were looking for a way to game the system and force T_D onto r/all every day.
The mods realized that a key lay in the “sticky” system, by which moderators could pin a post at the top of their subreddit indefinitely. The system was meant for announcements, rule changes, upcoming events, and other minutia of day-to-day Redditing. But any thread could be stickied, and stickied threads behaved the same way that any other Reddit thread did: They accrued points by vote, and more points boosted the thread closer to the top of the page. This didn’t typically matter, since a stickied thread was by definition artificially held at the top of its subreddit already. But the mods weren’t trying to make threads visible on The_Donald. They wanted to boost them onto r/all.
T_D’s moderators began to sticky threads unrelated to their rules or announcements. Instead, they promoted especially provocative user-created threads. This tactic quickly proved effective. Before long, T_D was elevating a post or two onto r/all day after day.
Another T_D mod, Alex, says the team kept in close touch not only with which threads were successful, but also how mods could encourage their users to vote on stickied threads and drive them higher in Reddit’s r/all rankings. “We trained our subscribers to upvote and comment in every thread,” Alex says. “That is how we originally gamed the algorithm.” Jessie, a third mod, says T_D’s mods made “repetitive requests” to the user base to vote and boost threads. They used memes, gifs, and jokes to push users to act. It worked.On the other hand, there aren't simple technological fixes to social problems. T_D's mods remained tricksy and continued to work their userbase to upvote and focus - in ways which didn't breach the sitewide rules on manipulation - and still kept hitting /r/all
But yeah, using the sticky system to force posts to top of mind was super effective back then. It's all coming back.
Flaired only threads, so many bans and and hundreds of deleted posts on your average thread for anything against he MAGA party line.
You see the same phenomena on /r/all, which isn't personalized.
I deleted my account ages ago to break my own habit.
You have to remember that there was some pretty nutso tariff news right about the same time, not that strange for it to be highly represented on the front page.
That's not the whole truth. Subreddit Moderation is the key point that's vulnerable to abuse. I block all political subreddits. My blocklist has 120 entries. 10 of those are of inherent political nature. The rest is just like /r/pics - enshittified rage bait about Trump.
Then it returned with a vengeance.
A consequence of years of reddit allowing its mods to shadow ban centrist voices.
It’s hard to see how reddit escapes this mess. They need more normal people and less political zealots, but the site is already so far down the echo chamber path that its overt political partisanship scares off potential new normal users from participating.
I don't see why they would. Rage drives engagement, and they just got the number one rage inducing factor back into public office for the next 4 years. This form of engagement also works better on progressives I think.
I think Kamala actually did have the lead in Reddit's demographics.
So much anti-Kamala and pro-Trump stuff in the communities that are supposed to be strong for her.
That Kamala did as well as she did was really shocking to me. I mean it wasn't close, but Kamala couldn't even make past the very first debate in 2020 and her list of accomplishments is basically nothing. I never met anyone in real life with an actual compelling or supportive argument for her. At best it was "she's not Trump".
Taking Biden out and having no primary is probably the worst thing Democrats could have done.
I'd argue the 15 years of identity politics that both led to Harris as VP and prevented them from being able to commit the faux paux of possibly passing her up by letting their constituents decide if they liked her was their worst decision.
Using the 1/9/90 split [0] for creators/commenters/readers, it seems farfetched to suggest that reddit accounts (which benefits readers making an account to curate subreddit subscriptions) can't follow this pattern where many legitimate human users do not comment often.
[0] "The 1% Rule", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
In my experience, Reddit can be an okay place for niche hobbies until the reddit becomes semi-popular. Then it's a lost cause for anyone but newbies posting the same question every day and old timers who take pleasure in yelling at them.
Any real discussion is drowned out so the average post now is "bought these, new to the hobby, what do I do with them?".
The meshtastic sub is a good example of that. People buying hobbyist hardware, without doing any research. They probably saw some youtube video, hit the amazon "buy", then when it arrived, they're stumped.
Post a photo of your new gizmo: 300 upvotes. Video of you using your widget: 4 votes.
And in subreddits dedicated to actually making things, it's just hustling hustling hustling. With a small percentage of self-help posts like "how I spent 4 years in my boring-ass generic video game and nobody wanted it".
This is exactly what happened to all of the hobby reddits I enjoyed.
Any useful discussion was crowded out by 10 posts per week (or day) of people posting their newest purchase or asking a question that had been answered 1000 times already.
The useful Subreddits have mods who come down hard on these posts. They don’t proliferate as much if people don’t see them everywhere. It’s a lot of work for mods though.
A really great (awful) example of this that I saw was on the typewriters subreddit (which is already 90% people posting pictures of the same 5 or so overhyped machines):
In the 1950s, Royal used to give out gold typewriters as part of a writing contest.[0] I saw one of these come up on Goodwill’s auction site, saved screenshots for my records and followed it closely, since I knew bids would get really stupid really fast. Sure enough, winning bid was around $1500.
About two weeks after the auction ended (about the time Goodwill’s very slow shipping takes), I saw it pop up on the subreddit, exact machine, identical scratches, blemishes, and all to the one I had screenshots of. The post title? “Found this at my local thrift store for $50. How’d I do?”
That was enough to finally make my delete my account and seriously question anyone who thinks Reddit is actually good for niche hobbies.[1]
[0]https://www.antikeychop.com/gold-royal-quiet-de-luxe-typewri...
[1] Well, that and the fact that and the fact that I was probably going to lose my mind if I earnestly gave detailed advice on repairing a machine I had personally stripped and reassembled, only for someone to get upvoted to the top for posting a confident pseudo answer about some mechanism—that may or may not even exist in that machine—that they only faintly understood from a general YouTube video that they only half watched.
It takes a lot of effort to moderate a subreddit. People will post stuff all day, in large volumes.
Who's going to be willing to do that? Sure, some will just be nice people with a ton of free time, but many will definitely be political activists (or even state actors at this point) who have something to promote.
This. On forums you recognize members by their funny avatars and the hyper specific advice that they have (useful or otherwise). Stickied posts like "timbit2's Guide to Vintage Frobulators" or "New to Frobs? Not Sure Where to Start? READ" abound. There are usually decades of easily-searchable posts accumulated. People reply to your threads helpfully. The marketplace forums are full of well-cared-for gear.
On Reddit you get a lot of beauty shots and question posts with replies like "bro just get the new Vinculum x Chadbert420 frobber. Shit is [fire emojis]". There's usually a woefully out-of-date wiki or sticky that you can only access from one interface or another. There's no sense of community, just upvotes of pictures for clout.
Of course these are contrived straw men versions of their respective communities but in my experience they're correct more often than not. I have been dipping my toe into various Discords that seem to have a better sense of community but Discord doesn't seem to lend itself to longer-form content as forums do... I wonder whether this is something the Discord platform could be augmented to facilitate.
Now I think that it's a perverse incentive that requires very heavy handed moderation to not suck (AKA more free labor), and that time decaying posts can discourage quality, in-depth discussions.
Corollary: necroing forum threads isn't necessarily bad.
I've always agreed with this. It was usually considered bad etiquette at best on forums, but I never really understood why.
So what changed or what makes this place different? I would argue it's not the forum software but rather run differently, not placing in charge of every subreddit a cabal of unemployed fringe lunatics wielding power and waging war against their users because it's all they have.
Or maybe the forum software does suck and some just naturally migrated to a text-only low-bandwidth version of Reddit?
Speaking of which, does anyone know if there are any good articles/documentaries/exposés on reddit moderators? I really just want to know what one is like.
It's an interesting question. Primarily, I think it's because HN doesn't allow you to downvote instantly or even after a lengthy period of time. I think it's tied to total karma, but someone would have to provide more information there. Regardless, that single change probably makes a big difference.
Compared to Reddit, I've had some comments go into the tens of negative karma points within five minutes of posting. It wasn't because it was low quality, but because it wasn't the "correct" view to have in whatever subreddit I was engaging in. The downvoting there is practically militant.
However, as someone who usually holds a minority view on HN, I don't think the system here is perfect either. Usually an echo chamber forms because the dissidents don't last long and leave. If you reward the ones that stay the longest with downvote capabilities, it would explain my general experience quite well. But again, it's nothing compared to Reddit.
Note: I recognize this is a conversation on karma, which has a rule associated with it, but I hope we can make an exception here given it's a good faith discussion between Reddit/HN :)
According to https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented "After users reach 501 Karma, they gain the ability to downvote another comment."
I often wonder whether "limited downvotes" scheme would work: (let's say) 30 downvotes per 24h are free to use and after that each downvote decreases your karma by 1.
There’s several natural filters that promote healthy communities - Highly informed users, Active mods, Small community sizes, “Get stuff done” type conversations. In essence, communities where it’s easy to identify BS, and discourage navel gazing, have high signal to noise ratios. They are actively hostile to lazy posting.
A good example of this type of community is r/badeconomics, or was the last I checked, and askhistorians.
A separate note, There’s a 2024 paper that showed that that estimated that young adults spent a smaller portion their time online on high cognitive load reading. A majority of the time would be spent on “timepass” content.
Mainly it's niche/less popular. There is less of an incentive for outside interests to care.
Not having any real way for the audience to expand (there is only one "subreddit") definitely helps with that.
I dislike the voting mechanism here. It incentivises me to optimize my posting to things that will maximise the votes, rather than things I think will add value to the community, even if it's controversial.
On a forum, if I say something stupid/against-the-grain, I am called out by the forum members, or we have a debate about it. On HN and on reddit, I'm downvoted into oblivion with very little in the way of any discussion that helps me learn and improve.
The only thing that makes HN better than reddit for me is the community of like-minded people, a general respect for the rules, and the fact that here we have fantastic moderators.
But I maintain that the underlying _system_ that is managing discourse here is flawed in it's design. I wonder what HN would look like if voting was abolished, and /active was the homepage, where the most actively discussed posts are the ones that filter to the top of the list.
Forums were great too, but reddit made it really easy to get access to new niches quickly. Without having to join a new site, learn the forum slang and etiquette, etc.
Reddit is awful now though. IDK what the alternative is either. I'm in a few discords and Facebook groups that cover most topics but they both offer a much poorer user experience imo.
I would not describe the sub as toxic or anything, but it's literally impossible to get a dissenting opinion across on Reddit. Other hobby subs were the same.
Every single time I mentioned an opinion differing from the "hive-mind" consensus it was downvoted to hell, with no responses, counter arguments or anything resembling discussion. I would have liked to trade experiences but that's not possible.
While at the same time some of the other posters giving advice freely admit they don't actually have experience with what is discussed and are just repeating older posts.
There is no real value in that, and nowadays you can get mostly the same experience by just asking ChatGPT. Both have no clue and no real opinion of their own when it comes to details.
I take part in a few forums now, and it's a breath of fresh air. Much better experience and a lot more personal as well.
I'd propose having a separate UI for users to agree/disagree, vs. for users to flag rule breaking posts, like spam, flamebait, insults and so on. The agree/disagree count would just display a vanity number, but the rule-breaking UI would actually downweight the article or comment. You could audit occasionally and remove voting privileges from people abusing the rule-breaking UI as a "Mega-disagree."
But it isn't worth reading anything else anymore.
I really doubt most of it is astoturfing. You can find bot accounts, obviously. However, the Reddit hivemind has a very intense echo chamber.
Everyone learns very quickly that if you write something that doesn't match the popular opinion of Reddit, you're going to get downvoted quickly. Strike a nerve and you'll even get angry private messages or people going through your post history and trying to extend their argument into old comments.
Large forums have always been like this. You're at the mercy of a small number of users who have the most free time to post all day. Some times I'll get an unusually angry response on Reddit and click on their profile out of curiosity. It's often someone who has been commenting for the last 10 hours straight. You just can't compete with someone with infinite free time and a lot of anger to get out. Eventually they all sync up to drive away differing opinions
> You're at the mercy of a small number of users who have the most free time to post all day. Some times I'll get an unusually angry response on Reddit and click on their profile out of curiosity. It's often someone who has been commenting for the last 10 hours straight.
These people are also masters at toeing the line of forum or subreddit rules when trashing others, constantly baiting people to cross the line in replies and get themselves moderated. It's worse in forums where downvoting isn't available.
There have been discord servers made public where the entire point was to game the reddit algorithm to favor one political candidate.
The number of subreddits that do this is small. Hardly representative of typical Reddit behavior.
Everyone knows by now that /r/conservative isn’t a real subreddit because it’s “flavored users only”.
However, too many people make the leap from “astroturfing exists” to “everything I don’t like is astroturfing” way too quickly. It’s right up there with accusing people you disagree with of using ChatGPT or being paid shills.
The truth is, a lot of subreddits are the way they are because that’s just what Reddit’s user base thinks, not because a shadowy cabal is making them say those things.
I read a post from a former reddit admin a while back that was talking about they managed that. Apparently they had one sticky post each day, and sticky posts are blocked from being on the frontpage but since they'd change the main post each day, once they un-stickied it, it'd immediately get picked up by the algorithm for the frontpage, inadvertently gaming the whole system.
It's just so blatantly, demonstrably, obvious the level of manipulation which was targeted at the sub. Somebody, somewhere, added it to a list of subreddits to be manipulated. But you can't even discuss it there, because how are you going to use a compromised communication channel to communicate about how it's compromised?
The majority of the population seemingly can't even notice that sort of communication manipulation, it's gotten so sophisticated. Bot accounts used to be much easier to detect, now they all have very cleverly built-up account history and posts that are near indistinguishable from humans. And of course not all manipulation is bots/AI, there's coordinated shill/sockpuppet/astroturf campaigns with real people being tasked with doing the manipulation.
The smart people have already left and gone on to the next place, which will never be allowed to grow large enough or significant enough without the propaganda fire hose eventually being turned on it too. The only way to fix things is a radically different framework for communication.
What do you think that might look like?
But the five vote options (insightful, interesting, funny, off-topic, troll) were _useful_. Having a feed based on the score of votes plus friend bonus, friend-of-a-friend bonus, foe penalty, friend-of-a-foe penalty gave me a super news feed I stuck with for almost a decade.
I could see a more complex voting rule set being helpful. But basically, it was really good until it wasn't, and that was a problem of the people behind the scenes there, and not the system itself.
HackerNews is comment driven, but does a decent job of facilitating discussions - but not particularly deeply. Reddit is similar. Forums are much more amenable to linear, deep, discussion between a few parties, but can also facilitate comments. Both have their place on the internet, and I don't think that forums are necessarily the answer to everything, but it feels like a lot of people left those communities to end up in Reddit and that's a shame.
If you reply to an earlier one, the UI will handle it and show a new branch where that conversation started. I'm not a huge fan of typical mailing list web UX and usually view flat, but it's so common that I guess a lot of people like it. My opinion is probably biased from years of using/running forums, so I'm much more used to that UI.
I think newer systems like Discourse will formally track replies to you (versus a new message in the overall thread), while legacy forums like PHPBB usually just quote-reply.
its not that. they realized: a) that folks were filtering out the astroturfed subreddits in /r/all, and b) that r/all's filter list has a hard limit of 100 subreddits. so, by astroturfing >100 subreddits, they can guarantee to their clients that their posts will make the front of r/all for everyone.
But, somehow, partisan posts in one direction always seem to net over 1000 or 2000, yet partisan posts in the other direction net about zero.
Even with a skewed distribution, I would only expect maybe +20 to be the ceiling.
Why would you assume that? It's a fallacy to assume that political opinions are evenly distributed. People seem to agree that different sites attract people of different political persuasions. A post that gets highly upvoted on Truth Social might get highly downvoted on Reddit, and vice versa. That's not astroturfing, that's just self-selecting communities.
> partisan posts in one direction always seem to net over 1000 or 2000, yet partisan posts in the other direction net about zero.
Again, it depends on the audience. This is not a new phenomenon. 50 years ago, you would get a different response to certain political statements depending on whether you made them at a Grateful Dead Concert or at a meeting of the Fraternal Order of Police. Why should today be different?
> I would only expect maybe +20 to be the ceiling.
Why? People feel strongly about their political believes. It's polarizing and engaging in a way that a post about crockpots or guitar strings isn't.
For example one of the top r/aviation posts is a meme about airbuses with "slutty eyeliner" (87k points), and it far outpaces shop talk type submissions like "why does the landing gear not get retracted at the same time on this 777?" (2k points)
Yet political posts get +2000 out of nowhere and an influx of commentators who don't usually comment in that regional subreddit or don't even likely live there.
The top post of all time on r/toledo is about a police officer harassing a woman. It's highly engaging but not overtly political. It has 100x the upvotes of a normal r/toledo post about traffic or what have you.
One of the top posts of all time in r/sanjose is a video of someone trying to jimmy a hotel door open using a hook contraption. Highly engaging, not overtly political.
These were the first two city subreddits I checked. It's literally just how reddit works, highly engaging content bubbles to the top and can reach a much larger audience.
Either this is the design of the black box "algorithm," or it's not real engagement. There's no need to miscorrect me about something so hamfisted and overt.
A ton of near-dead subreddits with no activity and no reason to link to x.com for any reason suddenly had thousands of people show up demanding links to x.com be blocked like it's an everyday problem for the sub.
The quiet beneficiary of this campaign are those who benefit from Reddit's groomed narrative and their competing platform Bluesky.
I say this as a liberal, the artificially partisan takeovers of local subs is a real thing. It's one thing to ban trolls and consistent shit-talkers from a community. And frankly it's one thing to have some bias. But it was just so obviously hostile, and I was happy to see the sub get back some authenticity.
And this is the second of only two posts there, with the first supposedly being written in July of 2022.
All of this leads me to a reasonable suspicion that this person is actually the one who made the post they're complaining about.
I feel like the Old El Paso girl might have an opinion.
> When I publish my next piece I will personally write you an email, with some of my thoughts on the post.
‘My next piece’? Maybe for a part of a book or a long article, but for a blog post?
The next oddity, ignoring ‘personally’, which is inappropriate for a mailing list, is ‘…with some of my thoughts on the post’; you’re going to send me a piece with some of your thoughts on the post?
I’d expect more accurate phrasing from a med student.
Edit: tone down the criticism, I wrote without much thought that some one made the site; my apologies if I came off as overly critical.
This is common phrasing, even for blogs.
None of the other phrasing is out of place, either.
I think you're mistaking different phrasing preferences for LLM use.
You don’t really have to get it, to be fair. If it was, to give an example, a poorly thought-out decision, then you’re just picking on them for that.
Honestly, the situation was just too absurd/twisted/funny not to write about. I also had nothing to do yesterday so that helped.
I'm gonna write a part two about everyone turning against me, thinking I'm a bot haha.
But yeah, X, LinkedIn, and the rest all feel like the bots and content farmers have taken over.
I believe the pay for engagement incentives make people be as controversial as possible just to earn money. Imagine you are in a low-income nation, you pretend to be from the USA, you could earn a higher daily income by posting engagement bait. It is in your interest to upset as many people as possible and then set up counter bots to argue with your fee earning bots.
Not the "Western civilization is declining because the kids stopped going to church" church but a church full of old hippies and young queers. It's been fun, sometimes I get takeout on the way home
I'm also tending my own website, which nobody else has write access to, so that I can link people to information I've vetted myself. Can't link it without doxxing myself sadly
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-01-13-social-media-manipulati... (Press release)
https://demtech.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/202... (Actual report) (Very interesting, if you're only reading one report this month...-> goes into depth in what sectors in each country with cyber troops are involved, ie state, influencers, political parties, ngos, and which countries use human or bot.)
other: government control of media on the rise globally https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2024/10/22/government-co...
The best legitimate communities I know of online are Heavyequipmentforums.com and newagtalk.com. Good luck finding the real forums like these on Google search though, which is probably the product that has gone down the most in quality over time. Honestly, all of the above can probably be attributed to the falling quality of Google results.
Even on communities like r/woodworking, which used to be a bunch of nice people. I mean, how can you be toxic and a woodworker at the same time? Sure, occasionally you'd get someone that hammered his thumb but that was the exception.
…a.k.a Reddit's "Most-Addicted City" of 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.reddit...
Tons of people who are actually paid to go through conversation scripts, push narratives, etc.
Here's a good starting point though (trying to remember): https://www.reddit.com/r/shills/comments/3uoxpl/internet_shi...
But yeah, the site changed heavily around 2015-2016, in tandem with content policing growing, subs getting closed, etc.
These days I just use HN tbh.
Step one was get (sometimes a purchase, sometimes AI, etc...) a lot of pictures or same person.
Step two was create the basic "character" based on the pictures.
Step three was make posts, sometimes automated, sometimes manually, using the pictures and any appropriate content. This Step can last years and goal is create a internet presence that looks like a real person.
Final possible steps:
1. If character became famous enough, could be sold to an influencer or corporation to manage that profile and do whatever they wanted.
2. If wasn't sold, it was used often to generate legitimacy for other fake profiles.
3. The real cash cow: during PR emergencies those profiles would be used to direct the narrative, for example she told me her last work like that was using these profiles to make content go viral to distract the public from negative news that were viralizing about one of the world biggest appliances manufacturer. She said in 24 hours people were all over paying attention to the new "viral" post and forgot the news entirely and the company didn't even had to make a statement.
It didn't hit the news tab yesterday, only "new", because my account is newly registered. So I reposted it one more time.
Beep boop.
> Are reposts ok?
>If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.
I will keep that in mind.
What is real… am I just a bot?
Oh god… I’m a bot.
For a while I just used hacker news. Then I picked up TikTok. It isn't horrible but I sometimes have to be careful because the feed will start to try and feed me stuff that's just brain rot.
The irony that the affiliate link was for a book about this exact topic, just fantastic.
LLMs are truly memetic machines, the best we’ve created so far.
What’s the difference between a bot and a human who parrots other humans?
Is agency+novelty the new version of the Turing test?
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bonobo-calls-are-...
There's the often-captured idea that social interaction (including the ability to reason about what information another being is in possession of, being able to empathize with their viewpoint, anticipate their reactions, and use all of this to manipulate their next set of actions) is perhaps the main driver of intelligence explosion in humans, birds and other noticably more intelligent animals.
I find that interesting because if you look into the SciFi golden age notion of what the Intelligent Machines era would be like, Asimov-style, you usually get depictions of cooly calculating and reasoning, maximally logical machine beings. Yet what we've actually been able to create is mushy, vibe-y text generators that excel at generating manipulative slop. Maybe it's not a coincidence, but somehow echoing the general thrust of higher intelligence.
If I had to guess, I’d say it’s more likely this post is just recycled from some past post that did well, rather than written from-scratch by an LLM.
The rest of the account’s posts are just recycled old posts that did well. Simplest explanation is that this one is too.
I did a quick search for the affiliate tag noted in the blog post, and found another Redditor complaining about that same affiliate tag, but from three other accounts[0].
My fascination is that, with LLMs, the line between obvious bot regurgitation and seemingly human posts is now much thinner.
The fact that the Reddit post was an affiliate link for Edward Bernays' Propaganda is just the cherry on top, in this case it's like selling ice to eskimos.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/TheseFuckingAccounts/comments/1giyl...
So there's really no solution here. Disengage from places like Reddit; that's about it.
I recently decided to take a break from reddit, and may yet make that break permanent. There is still some good stuff there, but it's getting rarer and harder to find in a sea of spam.
https://i.imgur.com/nXp5cpk.png
My account is 18+ years old with 100k+ of organic karma evenly split between posting and commenting. I was an active moderator for both my local country sub and part of the moderator reserves program.
It was not clearly explained.
>Thanks for submitting an appeal to the Reddit admin team. We've reviewed your request and your appeal will not be granted and your ban will remain in place.
>-Reddit Admin Team
>This is an automated message; responses will not be received by Reddit admins.
It's really a bummer to lose an 18+ year account that I've accumulated so many friends and community relations, and one that is tied to a common public nickname I use on socials and is literally tattooed on my arm. So I figured I'd wait a year and request again.
I engage with real people on various discord servers instead nowadays.
> > This feels like it was written by a bot
To be fair, this is a comment you can find in nearly any reddit thread.
I randomly spot-check popular subreddits every month or two to see what the vibe is. Every time I check it's some variation of this theme: Popular post has some half-truth, glaring plot hole, exaggeration, or complete fabrication. It has thousands of comments from people who accept it at face value and want to talk about it.
My guilty pleasure is seeing how far down I have to scroll before I find a comment pointing out the issue. Years ago you it was within the first few comments. Lately? I often can't find it at all.
As far as I can tell, the people who continue engaging with the ragebait slop don't actually care if it's true or not. When I've tried to post correcting information (such as direct quotes from the link that contradict the headline) I'll get a lot of angry responses from people saying they don't actually care that it's wrong because the headline supports something they feel is true. They've already made up their mind about what reality is like and the headline merely exists as a prompt for letting them rage about it a little longer. They don't actually care if it's true or not, because they believe some bigger picture truth justifies the lie.
This even plays out in subreddits like /r/AmITheAsshole where the moderators explicitly allow creative writing exercises and people routinely repost stories with genders swapped or roles reversed as an experiment.
The last time I looked the top post had a big bold EDIT at the top saying that it was a ChatGPT generated story with a screenshot showing the prompt and output. Remarkably, that didn't appear to stop people from commenting! There was a steady stream of comments from people even after the edit who were commenting on the story, either because they skimmed it or because they didn't care that it was fake. The story was a just a prompt for them to vent at the imaginary subjects.
I've found generic/mass-appeal reddit/twitter/whatever to be mostly social hygiene where people get together to link up with their tribe. If there is interaction between tribes, it mostly follows the same patterns (but it's rare, because power accumulates on one side and you get more ideologically aligned groups). The ideal version would be one where members of other tribes are around, but they quickly get shouted down and then either join the local tribe or leave defeated, admitting they were wrong.
Whether something really happened (in some particular way) doesn't matter if discussing reality is not the point.
Reddit chose to kill itself; a maggot-ridden corpse is the expected find.
> because they believe some bigger picture truth justifies the lie.
I go around bleating about this issue quite often and that's the best, most empathetic [1] way I've seen it phrased.
[1] not a typo for emphatic
Like, I can easily believe that many big corporations are doing all sorts of shady stuff, but the lack of precision makes it impossible to put everything into perspective. (And it's not like "just break them all up, regardless of the details" is a viable solution: you'll just end up with a bunch of slightly-smaller shady corporations.)
currently thats pretty much two humor based subreddits.
this has been slowly getting worse and worse over the years. Ive also for sure experienced the google search results from reddit that have felt manipulated. one that springs to mind is a topic about favorite bar soap... really? the consensus in a hygiene subreddit was that the most popular brand with likely the highest advertising budget of any other brand is the top comment? its also not like a defeated "xxx gets the job done and is affordable" its like a really odd praising of them.
I google "how to be a bully" one day as joke and find a bot has written hundreds of thousands of articles including "how to be a bully" where it confuses itself - do I condemn bullying or give a how-to? Must be "write article on random topic to pull clicks"... this is all beautiful to me. Thank you dead internet
Pretty unhappy about it as well. I have no real interest in physical socializing, but virtual socializing is slowly becoming untenable. Small communities (can) work OK, but anything at-scale is various degrees of rough. I just don't think natural language and the human experience can properly scale this large, and it shows.
https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/perching_aix.json...
it's fairly easy to export your data.
I find the quality level comes and goes on HN, but overall it's still much higher than anywhere else I've seen.
Good to know it's that straightforward though, I knew of the repo but was like eh, maybe next time, always the next time.
The political posts are toxic AF
They're among us.
First they polluted email with spam. Then they polluted search results with SEO. Now they pollute forums with crap like this.
For a brief moment in the 20th century, small pockets of middle-class people in the West forgot this basic fact of the universe, but people the world over still suffered. Leaded gasoline. Big tobacco. Cults. Big oil. Big sugar. Violent ideologies with seven-digit body counts. ...All of this happened while we were enjoying our nice suburban lifestyles where we could "leave our doors unlocked."
It never stopped, but it never started, either. Radium water. Snake oil salesmen. The Claque. Papal indulgences. Debased and shaved coinage. The greatest engineer of the Roman period, Hero of Alexandria, made numerous devices that performed "miracles" so temples could extract donations from visitors. I'm sure if they were around today, those same ancient corrupt priests would be shilling memecoins.
This behaviour isn't even unique to humans.
Ever since the first bacterium with a defective metabolic pathway started taking excess production from its neighbours, there have been cheaters. Ecologists call it the Black Queen hypothesis: if the other guy is left holding the bag, then you can invest more of your own energy into reproducing, until there's no more slack in the carrying capacity. Cheating is literally an evolutionary strategy.
To be part of the world you must be resilient to the evil that is baked into it, even when it comes to your doorstep.
If a platform can't or won't offer the tools to limit abuse, go find or build a new platform that can.
How can a domain be registered via _link shortener_?
IIUC an entity engaged a service to register a domain on its behalf. So the entity did indeed register via the service, but it would also be correct to state that registration was carried out by the service. That service also happens to provide a link shortener. So instead of referring to the service as "company X" the author went with "link shortener".
It's sometimes available on other types of SaaS services where your URL would otherwise be customer-facing as well.
The default experience there is terrible these days but it's still salvageable for now.
For an example mixed with a bit of irony, a few months ago, I submitted a link to a content obfuscator (meant to target site scraping bots) that I wrote. One of the replies was from a brand new account, that hasn't posted before or since, with a fairly obvious LLM take:
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42517774:
If your content got ingested by scrapers that don't respect the robots.txt, but that it was copied to another domain with a more lenient robots.txt, you could poison legitimate datasets.
It seems wasteful to actively try to sabotage humankind's technological progress.At that time, there were a whole bunch of flagged-dead comments from newly-created accounts that had compound-word usernames (such as the text I linked to above from 'earlydeveloper'.) So, if these are people manually writing those posts, I understand the behavior even less than the bot hypothesis.
BRIAN: I'm not the Messiah! Will you please listen? I am not the Messiah, do you understand?! Honestly!
GIRL: Only the true Messiah denies His divinity.
BRIAN: What?! Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right! I am the Messiah!
FOLLOWERS: He is! He is the Messiah!
s/messiah/LLM/ig
- https://pastebin.one/block-us-politics-and-propaganda-on-red...
Go to Dashboard / Settings in uBlock Origin, click on My Filters, copy + paste the filters from the PasteBin into it and click Apply Changes. Note that the filters block posts by specific keywords in the title or whole subreddits or posts by particular users. You can use the same filter template to block whatever you want.
(Unfortunately, this is like playing whack-a-mole. Everyday, I have to add 2-3 new entries to ensure I am not bombarded with the cesspit that US politics is today.)
LLMs can practically pass the Turing test in this context so on one hand, this should become worse, but on the other hand we are not that far from where the LLM comments are about as worth as the random real ones anyway. And if you want more than this level, you have to curate better.
I thought, they are probably all bots, but then I got to your next line:
> Maybe they were also bots, spiraling endlessly into their algorithmically optimized oblivion?
Yep. It's bots all the way down.
- sent from a human
/s
Yes, I am aware of this theory fairly well.
> The top comment mentions something called "Dead Internet Theory": the belief that most online interactions are automated loops of bots communicating with eachother.
That's what a bot would say!
But seriously, I think we'll see some social networks start pushing a "verified human" tag soon enough... if it wasn't for the fact they earn tons of money from bots that provide a steady supply highly upvoted / impressed / engaged with / ad view generating content.
I wouldn't at all be surprised if Reddit itself is behind bot networks. But we'd need a whistleblower to verify that conspiracy theory.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/SipsTea/comments/1jxnau3/does_size_...
I don't follow it super close, but I've seen some videos from the Wan model that's now available in ComfyUI, and they can be really good.
Like you said, most of is not AI, my best guess is that somebody used AI to do inpainting to remove the captions and watermark. First time I've seen anything like it.
It’s a typical get rich quick scheme on Amazon. Generate garbage books or “illustrate” classics. I keep seeing adds about it on youtube.
One of the more engaging themes today is alienation, AI, society being fractured, etc. so they figured to use that. I’d give them some points for “cleverness”, but even that is LLM generated most likely.
The Neal Stephenson Novel Fall, or; Dodge in Hell. One of its themes was an internet saturated with bots to the point where people need special filters. A hacker assaulting the internet with "apes", etc. Post-truth society.
The Talos Principle, Chatbots.html: >
"Jenny77: chatbots are becoming increasingly sophisticated
nigel_pyjamas: true, but hardly relevant to this discussion
Jenny77: are you sure?
Jenny77: how do you know that I'm not a bot?
samschwartz: don't be ridiculous
Jenny77: i'm not ridiculous
Jenny77: honestly, how would you know?
veganwarrior: haha troll
Jenny77: i'm not a troll
veganwarrior: yeah right
Jenny77: is there anything I've written so far that could not be written by a bot?
Jenny77: i responded to simple insults like "ridiculous" and "troll" with very basic negations
Jenny77: and i detected that none of you use proper orthography so i also avoided capitalization
veganwarrior: what's the capital of France?
Jenny77: paris
Jenny77: even the simplest script could pull that info from the net
nigel_pyjamas: what's the capital of Croatia?
Jenny77: Zagreb
nigel_pyjamas: OK she's a bot, lol
Jenny77: i'm not a bot
Jenny77: i'm European
Jenny77: we learn these things in school
samschwartz: i've seen you in this chatroom many times
samschwartz: bots can't participate in discussions
samschwartz: at best they can interject random comments
veganwarrior: sam is right
veganwarrior: stop trolling
nigel_pyjamas: uhh, veganwarrior
nigel_pyjamas: sam is a bot"
onMessage(sender, message) {if(config[sender]) sendMessage(sender, selectRandom(chatHistory[config[sender]]));}
Some of my friends would talk to it for several minutes before realizing. Mind you, they were also approximately 14.
And you have the ELIZA effect, where people believed ELIZA (a very primitive chatbot) was a real person even after being told how it worked.
As long as they got a timer, so the bots react "between 10 and 30 mins later" and they got a limit to "5 interactions per day", otherwise, if some-five coders forget those limits, and we end up having 5 bots interacting within a 1ms of the 'previous post', Reddit will run out of storage space :)
> Every post is either political ragebait, recycled "funny" cat videos, "Am I the asshole for divorcing my husband after he killed our two children while drunk and high?"-type slop, or tired wojack memes.
The trick to Reddit is to audit your subreddits. There are thousands of interesting, well run, topic specific subreddits. Find communities around your interests and only subscribe to them. Get rid of the default ones that are mostly just cesspools these days.
Over the years I've cultivated mine to include several book series and authors I like, 3d printing, homebrewing, etc.
The other trick is to avoid the Reddit app. Use https://old.reddit.com, even on mobile. It's still the best way to use Reddit.
This has its own problems, obviously, but there is something to a monied-interests-unfriendly set of cultural shibboleths.
I read a report that 49% of internet traffic in 2024 was bots. I believe this will increase significantly this year.
We (humans) are a minority now.
Take this post for example. How many are going to do the level of research in the post on the <1,000 word post itself? I know I'm not, it's just not something to make more than a passing comment like this about. Similarly, the comments here will total to perhaps more words but even less engageable content. Just be aware of what you're wanting to get out of content and where/how you're actually going to find that. If you're going to Reddit or HN (or any other aggregate site) where you put in low effort to consume large variety of content quickly you're most likely not going to make any deep connections or associations with ideas or people in that session. Bots and recycled content are top performers in that kind of environment precisely because that type of content lacks a need for anything more substantial.
It actively promotes stuff that is as dramatic (and often divisive and vitriolic as possible) because that's what gets a lot of clicks and comments. It's a huge machine that turns attention into outrage.
The author's comment about having to search to find one single comment asking if it's real is how I feel when I see some AITA type post that is blatantly fake, but only like 1 or 2 out of a few thousand comments is pointing this out. There's this sort of kayfabe they all engage in there.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/o5tjcn/evolving_the_b...
its a weird era
Social media is and has been dead for real engagement for nearly a decade.
Honestly, I think the "but anything can be circumvented" attitude is part of how we got here. People have just given up. These problems can be solved/mitigated, but the nihilistic POV has to be killed in order to solve them.
I only browse for things I am interested in when I am curious about a product review or need help with a problem to see if someone else has ran across it.
I suspect that post was plagiarized rather than AI-written or written by the spammer.
Given that the accounts other posts were clearly reposts, I think this is the most likely explanation.
It’s much easier to find old posts that did well, change a few words or add a link, and repost it. It’s harder to prompt the AI to get a post that will do well compared to starting with proven material from the past.
It is interesting to see everyone’s AI suspicion turned up to 11, though. We’ve gone from “everything I don’t like on Reddit is a paid shill” to “everything I don’t like on Reddit is LLM generated”.
Yeah, that's where you always find the good shit. Vote based communities are for creating false consensus, not discussion.
It creates this awful system where you might never see pushback on an idea.
Horrible place to spend your time like all social media if you care about exposing yourself to bad ideas that you’ll passively pick up through mere repetition.
There's less money to be made by targeting languages with fewer speakers, so it tends to be more real. But maybe in the future this will also end because LLMs are quite good at writing in non-English languages as well.
1 month old acct
def someone using it to shill and karma farming
But after the fall of the USSR and the general joke which was scientific socialism, i expected that to disappear
:)
It must be really sad to be born into the "reality's not real" internet brain damaged generations 8-(
Of course, suggesting that all of that is why new millennium generations are the most neurotic in human history, is considered offensive.
I'll state again: The main difference between the LSD generation and the iPhone generation, is that after 6 or 8 hours, the LSD would wear off.
This sobering allowed the whole experience to reform as a sort of perspective altering, beneficial after effect. Since the iPhone is NEVER EVER turned off, this beneficial after effect never occurs. Thus, doom scroll neurosis.
Sadly, even though I'm only trying to advocate for reality, and point out a pathway to rationality and sanity, you may start your flagging and downvoting now... 8-(
This was the tipping point for me
Now I use discord, it's more organic and fun, I find it's a good substitute.
The memes are better on discord
"...cancels an android into catalepsy," Rachael said, her eyes shut. "For a few seconds."