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Comment by randycupertino | Hacker News Reader

I'm in a local facebook group for my town where people post hiking pics, bird pics, local business updates, contractor recommendations etc. I am annoyed to see "brain rot" videos starting to take over the page.

There is one dude promoting his succulent repotting/resale business and he's posted like 5-8 ai generated surfer dude monkey surfing and partying with his potted succulents just in the last week. I opened the comments expecting to see other people complaining, "hey buddy take your ai-spam elsewhere" but all the comments were "cute!" "adorable" and "love this!" I just ended up blocking this dude but I am sad for humanity lol.

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On modern social media, even if you had a group full of smart and reasonable people, the platform itself is injecting crap that may well drive out many of them.

I rececently returned to Reddit since there are no other remaining discussion venues for one of my hobbies. I looked at the new-Reddit interface and shuddered: ads are being shown among comments, and many comments are hidden by defaul because apparently discussion and community brings insufficient engagement for a modern ad-based internet business. Even if I and a tiny, tiny percentage of people are still using the old-Reddit interface, obviously the overall culture there is going to be molded by the default one.

My favorite Reddit UX scam is that you tap on comments to collapse them along with their children, UNLESS they’re an ad that masks itself exactly like a comment in which case you tap it with the intent of collapsing it, but instead you inadvertently increase RDDT shareholder value (at the expense of the time you waste closing the webview)!

I refuse to use reddit with it's modern UI. Once old.reddit.com dies I'm hanging up my spurs

I left when they killed 3rd party app access.

Honestly even the curated subs I was a part of were pretty toxic or echo-chambery now that I've had time to look back

The biggest problem is that Lemmy is no substitute for Reddit. Majority of it is run by tankies and people professing extreme left views.

I'm saying you don't even need a substitute. Genuinely looking back, I was more anxious when I would browse reddit in my free time.

I promise, disengage from social media (and the doom news cycle for that matter) and you'll be happier, or at least you'll worry about stuff you can control instead of stuff you can't.

Except hn. Never disengage from hn.

Since I use the fedi in other ways, and I'm still here, it isn't necessary. Is it fun to test? sure!!

"Extreme left" said by someone likely from the USA is slightly left-of-center basically anywhere else.

The USA democrats and "left" have been overton window'ed so hard that a actual democratic socialist, Mamdani, is compared to being a communist. https://nypost.com/cover/november-5-2025/

There's also hundreds of Lemmy federated servers. I'm sure some are actual communist. But there's plenty for all walks of life. And it's like Mastodon in that regard.

And honestly, if "killing SNAP and other public benefits for poor people" is capitalist, I want nothing to do with that. That is completely ethically bankrupt. Doubly so being one of the richest countries in the world. Absolutely 0 people should be starving. And I'd also say that 0 people should be involuntarily homeless. (some may want to, and choose to be vagabonds and travel. they should have that right! but they should also be able to choose to have a home.)

>"Extreme left" said by someone likely from the USA is slightly left-of-center basically anywhere else.

This is a 2000s era meme that was started to try and get people to see reason and vote against Bush, but it is not true and has not been for coming up on a decade. The Democratic Party is to the left of many European left parties, especially on issues like immigration and freedom of identity, and its politicians (especially the young ones) regularly pitch welfare state expansions that are more generous than European counterparts (see Kat Abu on 'medicare for anyone physically present in the US, for free'; a more generous offer than even the NHS).

Is that the democratic party or a fringe left that is trying to accomplish something as part of the party ? what policies did the democrats actually implement across the years? Bernie is considered by the democratic party leadership to be a radical(hes not) and would prop up anyone but him

>What policies did the Democrats actually implement over the years?

Roughly in order: Don't Ask/Don't Tell repeal. Dodd-Frank. Lily Ledbetter (extends the statute of limitations on equal pay suits). Making it clear that sexual orientation and gender identity are equal to race in hate crime law. Banning lifetime coverage caps so your insurer cannot simply decide your life is not worth living and banning the practice of excluding pre-existing conditions from healthcare coverage so that you are not enslaved to whatever employer you happened to be working for when you got the worst news of your life. Establishing the CFPB to end unfair credit practices like medical debt reporting. Capping the cost of insulin at $35 per month for Medicare. Allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. ACA subsidy expansion. People our normie centrist presidents put on the bench decided Obergefell. People our normie centrist presidents put on the bench are protecting human expression.

You have to engage in motivated reasoning not to recognize these things as making life better. If you want to make life even better, consider voting for Democrats. When you don't vote for them, they become the minority party. When they are the minority party, no amount of impotent screaming or saying please can turn 49 votes into 61 votes, nor can it force Republicans to help them help you.

Bernie is a loudmouth with almost no legislative accomplishments that spent his life building his own brand and ratfucking the party. Of course the party leadership doesn't like him. When you get a rock in your shoe, do you like the rock?

Actual leaders are in the trenches right now embarrassing the GOP with this shutdown to force them to make COVID-era healthcare subsidies permanent. What's Bernie doing except derailing news events to complain that party leadership isn't supporting his faction in comparatively irrelevant local races?

Ah yes, so one candidate for the Democratic primary (she isn’t even a Dem primary winner yet) for one of 434 Congressional seats may have a position that on the edge might be slightly more “left wing” on one issue in one of the more right wing Western European nations, is clearly evidence that the U.S. is no longer far to Europe’s right…

To be fair, setting aside my snark, I don’t disagree with you. The real problem here is simply the fact that the single axis left-right political framework is insufficient to capture even the simplest democracy in the world right now.

And the US has made huge leaps to the left on some axes, but is still far to the right of the European center on many other axes.

The OP says tankies. Those kinds of extreme left are extreme even by non-USA standards. A European-style democratic socialist like Mamdani would be, one hopes, to the right of them. Tankies were largely forced out of European mainstream parties after the shocks of 1937, 1956 and 1968.

A better way to think of it is that the western “left” isn’t part of the global left. Using tankie unironically is a classic example.

The massive sympathy for Russia in the Ukraine war among the far left makes it pretty clear that tankies are alive and kicking.

I haven't encountered that. Where are you seeing that other than in one or two people? Is that a thing in online spaces?

Can you share any evidence of this massive sympathy?

Lemmy is occupied by tankies and Marxist leninists and that’s not my type of lefties. They also espouse violence which I don’t like. For example the main federated server is called lemmy.ml ml standing for Marxist leninists. They are also the developer server hence all federated servers have to federate with them.

Well you can choose to affiliate with another party. I did so. I was unaffilaated for years, though!

I built my private version of Infinity for Android. The steps were 90% automated. They were in a Reddit thread like this one (I just pasted the first thing I found now), although I don't know if the build process still works. https://www.reddit.com/r/Infinity_For_Reddit/comments/1izm7c... -- you have to side-load the app, which is a little tricky because you have to load it onto your phone. I think put it on a private Google Drive.

Maybe similar solutions exist for iOS, but maybe the side-loading is not as easy?

Anyway, on Windows/Chrome I use uBlock Origin and never see any ads in Reddit online. There was a lot of drama about reddit selling out in 2023 (I was sad to see Infinity die), but there are tech solutions to avoid its enshittification.

Where would you go to? Hacker new?

Not to mention that, at least on the iOS app, the button to close an ad is in a totally different place than the rest of the UI screens, which is always in the top-left of the screen. A small “X” is placed in the middle-left of the ad image, to make you spend an extra second finding it, which I would assume they are happy to report as a user engagement metric to their advertisers.

If I accidentally did it Adsense would ban me.

Do it anyway! Then you have a case against them.

I think it's possible to remove ads with reddit revanced

Old reddit is unfortunately just a rounding error. I weep for the day they decide to kill it.

I don't, the utility of reddit has declined over time for me but there are still a handful of reddits that I enjoy but them killing old.reddit.com is absolutely what will push me off the platform entirely.

Though at this point I spend (or waste depending on PoV) much less time on reddit than I used to.

I'm sure they're going to eventually. They say they won't, but they deprecated private messages. Yeah, I did use those lol.

weep? I'd finally be free. I wish this site would disappear too. Whoever designed these algorithms got me good, at a young age, and I don't think these sites have been a net positive overall or on me personally

We are already free. If we keep returning to a few subreddits, it's because we can't find an equivalent community elsewhere. If they kill the old interface, we'll eventually use the new one if there are no other alternatives, no need to lie to ourselves.

Nah, I just leave. Because I want too, and because I don't like Reddit's AI training ppolicies.

Iam nearly 15 years on reddit now and I would miss it if i cant use old. or a good client. Iam sure sooner or later it will happen and ill most probably leave.

Reddits quality went downhill over the years but there is more or less no successor/competitor. It will be over and buried forever. Eternal september gets them all.

Side note: be free if you want to and dont make it dependent on decisions others do for you.

I am in the same boat. I think I will get a lot more of time back if they kill old

I don't know how anyone can use the official reddit mobile app for more than 5 minutes. Between the ads and terrible interface it's an awful experience. But I also hate facebook so I'm clearly not the target audience for this stuff.

RedReader is a much better interface but lately has been having issues for me so I just haven't been using reddit. If and when they kill that client I'll be done with the platform.

I hate Facebook with a passion! Mostly because my family is there, and they're constant lecturers.

I first joined reddit in 2010 because it was the best place to see other people's minecraft creations. I no longer have an account but by far the most commonly suggested videos for me when I view the front page without an account are

1. Car crashes

2. Street/bum fights

3. Conspiracy theory content (UFOs, Anti-vax, chemtrails)

4. Anti-semitic videos (one such video was titled "Kanye was right about everything")

5. Anti-muslim videos (weirdly I get a lot of Indian majority subreddits that post a lot of hate videos about Pakistan/Muslims)

Every single one of these categories produces feelings of outrage. Reddit has just become a fucking hate machine. Not just hate toward other races, but hate toward the entire human race. Every video shows someone doing some anti-social shit, like people driving like total assholes, or running people over, or getting hit by a train after cutting off traffic, or beating each other senseless in public. In the 1990s there was a huge outcry over violence in media because of Mortal Kombat, Doom, and The Matrix, but here we are today watching actual people die on dashcams regularly. This has to be just bad for us on a really primal level

It's wild how many fan subreddits end up turning into hate boards for the sub's alleged purpose.

People thought video games would turn people violent, turns out it was social media that did it

OK maybe try to escape the algorithm? This is different with Reddit, though. You'd have to figure out which settings you need to change.

When I visit Youtube in a privat tab from my German IP all I get is "be afraid of the other" alt right "vote for AFD", "chemtrails are here to get you" kind of videos. Not a singel "cute cat" or "interesting science fact" in sight. :-(

It's almost as if they like the population to be afraid.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but with ad blockers I never see ads on Reddit. I honestly don't think I've ever seen an ad on Reddit at all, with a tiny exception for ads for other Reddit offerings, which is very recent for me.

Not saying they're not on there, but the ad blockers must be doing a pretty good job on that site.

I don't usually see them either!

I never use the app, only login to old. and when old is taken away, I will take my marbles and go home.

I don't either! Mostly because I don't use many apps anyway. I like the web.

> since there are no other remaining discussion venues for one of my hobbies

maybe you find a suitable board on 4chan

Lol or just create one.

There are Firefox extensions that monkeypatch the old UI with usability enhancements and force a redirect for all reddit links.

You bet there are, and I use them regularly. The ones I need, anyway.

My theory is that Reddit as a community-builder died when their moderator crisis started, prompted by the API pricing issue. I swear I haven't seen a funny, Redditesque thread since then. No copypastas, none of the old memes. It's all slop, meaningless comments, and generic content these days. Endless reposts. I don't know what happened to Reddit…

I'm leaving Reddit because of all this!

I've found a page on Facebook that regularly posts single white mothers with black babies on supposed dating profiles with very demanding requirements for men. The comments are loaded with people saying that they deserve their current situation, enforcing racial stereotypes, etc. It's not hard to see that these are AI generated, as there are maybe 5-8 posts a day like this, and the images are pretty clearly AI generated. Regardless, they get the engagement, and they sell the shirts. Easy way to automate a business, I guess, but at what cost?!

Could you give me some searching clues to hunt down this or a similar profile?

I don't have a link, but I have seen exactly what he's talking about, which probably means that it is an established business model and multiple actors are doing it.

A similar thing I have randomly come across multiple times on YouTube are videos consisting of a still AI image of a white person mistreating a black person (e.g. a white police officer screaming with rage at a black man eating in a diner) and an AI voiceover text telling a GPT-generated story hashtagged #heartwarming, e.g. "The white police officer was violent against the black man... What he didn't know was this was a highly decorated veteran!"

Some of these are clearly getting picked up by the algorithm and drawing hundreds of thousands of views. The factories behind these are probably halfway around the world but realized the race relations of a large economy can be exploited for profit or geopolitics.

Several of the Reddit "AmITheAsshole"-style subs have a significant number of posts which are either AI or sloppy creative writing.

Mass-produced outrage bait isn't new, and it's available in a thousand flavors. But AI has accelerated this process, at least for people who don't notice when they're getting played (or who don't want to notice).

Looks like this

https://imgur.com/gallery/ai-is-being-used-to-create-rage-ag...

Here are a few examples of ones where right-wing influencers are making AI-shop videos of people complaining about losing SNAP benefits:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1ojydgq...

https://www.reddit.com/r/themayormccheese/comments/1ojtbwz/a...

Note how that second one all uses the same script, "I have 7 babies from 7 different baby daddies!"

I'm pretty surprised by how fooled normal people are by all this AI-sludge, and/or how accepting they are of all this low-effort content. My reaction to this stuff is the same as yours: please don't clog the internet up with all this fake content! But everyone else in my life thinks it's great, and sometimes don't believe me when I point out it's obviously AI generated. I think people are already totally fooled and think it's real.

> I'm pretty surprised by how fooled normal people are by all this AI-sludge, and/or how accepting they are of all this low-effort content. My reaction to this stuff is the same as yours: please don't clog the internet up with all this fake content!

I instinctively want to blame AI, but on some level, I think the problem runs deeper: it's that we are for some reason compelled to consume content where it just doesn't matter if it's real or not. It has no bearing on your life. You just want to spend your time scrolling through heartwarming stories about complete strangers, or through rage-bait that reinforces your political beliefs. Ethically, I see a difference between telling you true stories and lies. But if we're being honest with ourselves... what changes if the kitten rescued from a storm sewer is actually just gen AI?

This isn't even a Facebook thing. 24-hour news networks and many newspapers perfected this craft before. Endless streams of celebrity gossip and stories about stranded / rescued pets, written for no reason other than to satisfy this weird craving among the readers.

Each step along the way lowers the bar for feeding you the content and allows it to be tailored better, but I don't know what the fix here is. Short of banning the internet and forcing people to go outside more.

Cultural antibodies take a long time to develop. In twenty years you will see more common resistance to what's being produced today, but less to whatever new innovation is released then.

See, for example, the slowly declining efficacy of banner ads, as each cohort of computer user learned to ignore them but they still retained efficacy on newer vintages of users.

I will admit, I consider myself pretty tech savvy and I am having a harder time these days identifying AI-generated content (aside from the obvious ones).

I find myself squinting hard at interior design pictures on Pinterest to see if they’re real, I can never be sure with an instagram video, and even blogs and comments are getting harder to tell.

And I think the fact that I am having a harder time distinguishing reality from AI worries me greatly that I would be susceptible to misinformation if I venture outside of trusted sources.

I have the exact same response!

> all the comments were "cute!" "adorable" and "love this!"

Probably bots?

Just a few hours ago, I was trying to find the profile of an excellent swimmer I met at dinner yesterday. I knew his first name and the club he swims in, so I searched his name together with the club and "swimming" on Instagram without using the keyword club. Almost all the results were attractive girls posing in swimsuits, but none were actual amateur swimmers. The guy I was looking for didn't appear at all.

BTW, mi Instagram account is just a placeholder and I can't imagine an algorithm suggesting that content. It seems like a default suggestion.

> ...I can't imagine an algorithm suggesting that content. It seems like a default suggestion.

This implies that the default suggestion isn't a data analyzed soup of what people of a given age / location / demographic / search text are most likely to respond to. Even if it is your first time to log on to a platform it is very much algorithm driven.

Keep in mind the FB algorithm is likely showing you that content more than to others since it might have detected it’d be annoying to you (and that results in better engagement metrics).

Have you seen sci-fi movies? It's all fake! And people are happy with this. Same here, it becomes annoying only after some time. Most didn't get to this point yet. By the time they get quality will be better, so like new again. After that even adults will have hard time telling apart reality from generated. Like little kids believe dreams are true.

Moderators really need to start cracking down on this stuff. If nothing else just posts per week limits or something.

> in a local facebook group for my town ... [someone posts AI promos]

> I opened the comments expecting to see other people complaining

people are less confrontational the more local it is

Funny to complain about content marketing that happens outside of HN, when content marketing is so popular here.

E.g. in this recent 800+ point submission[1] a company presents their product as the ultimate alternative to PaaS, their use case seems shallow and presents their product in positive light only.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45661253

I think it's not at all self-contradicting.

HN is a niche forum that is all about making things that scale. Most human interactions shouldn't scale, there's no space for them to be absorbed except by other humans.

Only the very top should scale down, and that can be done in more ways, some more ethical than others.

I think it’s a generational thing. Younger people don’t really use Facebook very much and are much more active on TikTok and instagram, both of which I would describe as semi-hostile to AI, or at least the kind of lazy slop AI you’re talking about.

Those comments are probably AI as well

I'm actually writing fairly literally lol! If you want me to write more in-depth comments, I sure can! I'm not stupid enough to go generate them like you might be, I suppose. In fact, I think the whole thing is ridiculous, so I try to avoid it entirely!!

The internet will be more and more ai stuff.

At the end of the day, people don't care if it's real or not as long as it's either entertaining or tells them what they want to hear.

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