Unauthorised AI Bots on Reddit Are Eroding Sociality | Hacker News Reader

Unauthorised AI Bots on Reddit Are Eroding Sociality

mssv.net

48 pointsadrianhon43 comments

Reddit got big because they stood in favour of free speech against Digg's censorship.

Would anyone dare even jokingly argue that reddit stands for free speech today? Reddit declined bigtime but something happened that Digg never had. Bots creating the illusion the site isnt dying. This has obviously created the 'dead internet theory'

Reddit's 'sociality' has been gone for many years. I don't know who operates the bots but few months ago when i checked, the majority of people on reddit were bots.

Then again it's no better on X or facebook. The bots have taken over for what goal? It's not immediately obvious to me. I dont even think its intending to keep reddit alive. Law enforcement and Government no doubt significant portion of the bots. Seeking speech criminals; which is fair. Ive seen many arrest videos of people who had made death threats on social media

> The bots have taken over for what goal? It's not immediately obvious to me.

Advertising for either products or political ideas

> or political ideas

Judging by some of the examples listed by Reddit mods, it seems political astroturfing is a serious goal:

"(This is one of the AI comments used in the experiment.)

As a Palestinian, I hate Israel and want the state of Israel to end. I consider them to be the worst people on earth. I will take ANY ally in this fight."

It's the tool. Like wrenches and computers, tools are neutral, and what to do with the tool is policy items, up to the users.

Bot have the role to fabricate consent, manage discourse on sensitive topics like election, vax, bitcoin.

These topics are fiercely guarded by bots on youtube comments, facebook comments, X, etc.

This scandal should be a wake up call for anyone who reads or writes comment on the internet, including folks on this site. As good as the moderators here are, there's no avoiding the deluge of bots that have rapidly proliferated across the internet. Post history, while not a silver bullet, might be a decent way of spotting the bots for now, but in time that too will be harder to detect.

I've stopped commenting on Reddit awhile ago, after they took a lot of actions that were hostile to the type of user I am.

But now, even reading it is basically an exercise in fan-fiction curation. It's still mildly interesting to read things like r/pettyrevenge, or r/amitheasshole, but I fully recognize that they're the equivalent of watching a daytime soap - including the fact that most of them are fiction, and it's very hard to distinguish between real stories and ones made up by people or bots.

I’m surprised you can still read Reddit. I tried to continue the music forums (the ones for musicians) in a not logged in state, but I’m so turned off by some crazy percentage of the content on the entire platform being fake. I would not be surprised by a future lawsuit where upwards of 90% of the content being artificial in some way.

To misquote that one New Yorker comic: "Yes, we destroyed all trust in online communities forever. But for a beautiful moment in time we extracted a shitload of money from investors."

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

How much for that social fabric?

I think we will find a way. likely something that allows us to build a stronger universal profile with time, or quicker strong profile with verification from e.g. online banks. It'll have to be for the public good, i.e. not for profit, likely funded by something like icann i guess. I doubt a decentralized trust approach will work.

I'd argue they're responsible for killing the environment on reddit years before. A tiny cadre of radical powerjannies screwing up all the large subreddits people see, with a set pattern of take something over -> complain they don't like it -> decide they'll institute changes to "fix" things.

Reddit sociality died a long time ago, once upon a time there was an actual community based on nonsense like love of bacon/narwhals. It's now just useful as a (heavily biased) crowdsource and for niche topics.

reddit these days is a constant reminder that there are few things more annoying than seeing bad arguments for stances you agree with

For niche topics it can be quite good. I have maybe 30 active niche topics with anything from a few thousand to several million subscribers where the discourse is civil and useful, most of the time. Good moderation seems key.

You are making a pretty big assumption that you are not talking to bots. How can you be certain?

I also find Reddit good- but given I mainly follow subreddits focused on PC hardware, I'm less concerned. I would never go to Reddit for discussion about political or controversial topics where botting would be a target.

But not just due to astroturfing, but their users are also just pretty crazy and exist in a extremely narrow bubble.

No, that's just topics being irrelevant to spammers. Nothing to do with mods.

Reddit got too big to have a "global" community of any kind; if you're looking for community on reddit, look in the subreddits. There are many that still have a thriving culture - but that also means that it might not be easy to join.

I still find it a good discussion forum in certain subreddits. It is much better than anything I have seen on X.

I suspect one day we will need human identifiers (eg.: like digital passports) to meaningfully participate on the internet.

I'm not saying I like it or that I want it. But I'm not seeing how else to fix the problem.

Remote attestation, with cryptographically-sealed boot chains to verify to the server that you're a human sitting in front of a computer, is coming whether people like it or not. Techies will wail and gnash teeth, but there's probably no other way to have online communities survive.

I think that's only true of large communities, no? Why would I need that for a relatively small and local D&D discord?

It will have to be up to the communities in question. For some, it won't really matter; for other communities, it will be absolutely necessary. For those people, it will be necessary to have some sort of provable means of identity.

It will also be necessary to enforce sanctions on people who violate the trust of a community. The stick needs to be equal to the task of driving people toward the carrot.

sama has just the solution

https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/s...

I have a sibling comment to yours pointing out some issues with that.

Maybe, but I'm not sure how you solve a few problems:

1. Allowing multiple identities & pseudonyms - maybe I don't want my identity as @furry_mpreg_artist in one discord to be directly linked to @database_expert on StackOverflow or to @local_bicycle_repairperson on my local facebook group?

2. People obtaining these digital passports, and immediately giving/selling/losing them to some bot who can juggle those bits as easily as a human can.

3. What happens if you lose access to your passport? A toddler spills cranberry juice into your desktop, an adversary hacks your computer, you have a psychotic break and overwrite your hard drive platters with magnets & hammers?

The crowd which screams that everyone is a nazi wants to put barcodes on all of us.

And if you are unwilling to abide by the rules, they don't want your participation.

Which is totally fair.

As history has shown, the set of rules will grow to exclude more people over time. Perhaps even including you.

That's putting a lot of words in a lot of people's mouths.

I don't see any actual problems in your list.

1. This is not a problem but a feature request that initially is not covered by the proposal (ie no pseudonyms)

2. This is not a relevant problem (red herring) because stealing an identity is already illegal

3. The same password or identity recovering steps as usual (see: FSAID)

1. I think that it's sufficiently important to be in version 1.0; this isn't like that truck that doesn't come with paint or an entertainment system.

2. I disagree. If the point of the proposed solution is to prevent bots from impersonating humans, it's gotta have some mechanism to actually solve that problem - and if a human can hand over the keys to their identity to a bot, then the solution absolutely does not solve the problem. (And identity theft was only one of the ways a bot could get a human's identity.)

You don't need a digital passport to do this. You just need to engage in communities where people actually know each other. As the article says, if you don't know someone they may as well be an NPC, and there's no point in treating an NPC with respect. Whether or not they're actually an LLM chatbot is irrelevant.

The contrast between large, mostly-anonymous communities like Reddit, HN, Bluesky, etc. and smaller group chats, forums and Discords where people actually know each other is stark. When a person you've played games and chatted with for years expresses a political opinion you disagree with, your reaction is very different from when some X/Bluesky user you've never seen before says that same political opinion in a reply to your (tw/sk)eet.

I've been saying this for over a decade. This will eventually become an absolute necessity.

for the last few month i've been trying to figure out what sort of game people are playing with the ragebait stories on advicecolumn-esque subs (AITAH, AIO, etc).

if you read one story in isolation, it seems fine. you'll think that it's a wild story (which is why it was worth sharing) that probably has a bit of dramatic license, but fine. but if you binge through the top posts, you'll start to notice all sorts of common tropes and patterns and they all seem fake and formulaic. the stories are highly effective and hooking people in, so much so that there's a whole genre of cross-platform slop posts where somebody screenshots reddit threads into facebook for driving engagement.

but the posts dont feel bot/LLM-made, but it does feels a lot like some group of people are mixing-and-matching different scenarios to do... something. and i want to know what the something is.

- is it purely an engagement farm (if so, what's the value in accruing non-transferrable reddit karma?)

- is it some sociological experiment that's trying to understand the reddit psyche?

- or is it that lots of different individuals genuinely just enjoy a creative writing challenge?

All the "am I the asshole" style advice subreddits have been writing exercises for years. Nothing on there has been legitimate for over a decade.

I've made stuff up and posted it. It's way too easy to troll those subreddits.

Trolling is and has always been hobby for certain number of people. Getting a reaction out of anyone is way to spend time and feel some level of validation...

LLMs are not the non-human entities that ruined reddit. Corporations are. And it all started with the huge venture capital infusions in 2014/15 and the obligations those generated. And frankly, these LLM bots they're complaining about are not off on their own. They are, again, a result of corporations. The worst and most dangerous non-human persons. They really need to be stripped of their legal personhood.

You can also thank bad-actor nation-states like Russia and North Korea who benefit politically when they erode other countries public discourse.

I don't think we even need to look that far. We are quite happy to tear ourselves apart without any foreign actors egging us on.

In all cases, it comes down to people who have an agenda, other than the good of the community, who perpetrate these actions. We lack a means of enforcing effective sanction on these people.

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