Reddit is definitely overtaken with astroturf at this point. Especially in any subreddit where there is any kind of business interest in doing so.
"we could find a nail for this hammer... or we could just hammer everything until we find the nail or make too much money hammering for a bit then sell in may and go away".
They’re getting 200m a year to share that garbage pit with ai training.
There were problems with the "algorithm"[0] before being intentionally gamed... but I feel like it's easier than ever to have an army of bots intentionally pointing a conversation.
I'll give you a brief example (we should not debate this case on HN but I'm talking specifically about a hypothesis that can be drawn).
In the UK, the streets are alight with the news of the murder of a young white boy at the hands of a Sikh boy. In the UK, historically, the Sikh community has been seen as a bit of an outlier in terms of how well they integrated and how tolerant they are. They are, for all intents and purposes "model immigrants".
The issue was, when the police were called to the scene of the stabbing, they immediately arrested the barely conscious boy on the ground, who had been stabbed and was bleeding from the mouth- handcuffing him and dismissing his pleas on the basis that he might have been making racist remarks.
The people in my circles are furious at the police for doing this.
However, it seems like there is an army of bots who keep trying to paint it as if it's a problem with Sikhs, or that their religious rights were the problem.
(for context, British law permits baptised Sikhs to carry a dull Kirpan knife - but this knife was not used for the incident above, it was a separate and still illegal knife to carry).
So now, online, instead of people talking about police indifference or the issues we have when we see race before trying to assess the situation: we are instead caught in a conversation about banning Kirpans for Sikhs (they have never been used in any crime from what I can tell) or how the Sikhs should feel bad or whatever.
Which is wonderful for a politician who wants to dismiss the criticism against the police as racism, but not so good for holding the police and media to account for the situation and the attempted coverup.
By being able to control the aggression, they are able to control the response, which drowns everything else out, and with LLMs the barrier is stupidly low to do this.
Creating division for your own reasons has never been cheaper or easily accessible.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Data_scand...
I was gesturing that the sentiment online is being reframed from one of the police handling of the situation (whatever the outcome you personally think it should have gone down as) and the media coverage- to instead the "issue" of Sikhism and religious rights in the kingdom, despite those aspects playing literally no role in the situation that transpired.
I was speaking specifically about how little cost it is to do this reframing now.
A) He was described by the father of the killer as having a mouthful of blood when police arrived (per bodycam footage).
B) He stated he could not breathe 9 times and that he had been stabbed 5 times (as per bodycam footage)
C) He was immobilised
D) During the 999 call an ambulance was requested. (as per the recording to 999)
His statements were dismissed by police and he was handcuffed before any later assessment of his claims, the handling of the officer greatly accelerated the death of Nowak (as per the coroner report).
I'm not excusing the police's behavior, I just wanted to clarify they didn't assume the victim was the killer for no reason.
Its still annoyingly addictive but its half story telling and half bubble with a sprinkle of porn and niche interests.
OP has been here for over a decade and has loads of activity.
You aren't in a position to post this.
That said, unlike GP, I don't think you were accusing OP of astroturfing. Your comment was confusing, but it seemed you were complaining about astroturfing in general, not about this post in particular.
But what does an anon-free internet even look like? Is it even possible? Or will all online content eventually be considered untrustable and worthless? You can see a world where newspapers (online or otherwise) make a comeback simply because of the need for a trusted gatekeeper (which is what I imagine made them valuable in the first place). It's wild to think about.
Further, the challenge is not completely autonomous bots that are somehow separate of humans, never has been, all code on Earth has and will have a human imprint even in the wildest AGI fantasies. The first false dichotomy is anonymity and veracity, the second false dichotomy is human and bot. And tho biggest challenge comes from a specific human-bot combination, the Cory Doctorow Reverse Centaur (though Centaurs also complicate things). One human can suddenly impact the "volume" of discourse, like a magic hidden megaphone that somehow no one can detect at a dinner party where the lights are too low to see who is talking. /And/ if there's a door check at the party, it's easy to transport someone who makes pennies a day to show up at the door, look like anyone you want, and then come inside with a magic hidden microphone that you provide them.
I think it's less about proving human, more about proving /reputation associated with an entity/. It's not about whether "awbvious" is human, but whether "awbvious" is committed to acting human. Committed to not use a hidden, magic megaphone. Committed to not using hidden, magic megaphones with others. Which I am.
current bots are run and financed by humans already.
And what makes you think that current newspapers will evolve and regain trust? (as most of them are financed by 'rich' owners and therefore somehow influenced by the 'desire' of the owner).
<insert not-a-bot proof by anubis + 'pseudonymous reputation' >
This and the myriad of poor people that exist will have financial incentives to sell their identity to groups that will run bots behind them.
There are a few topical short-form non-fiction writers that feel truly worth reading more than an agentic summary, and I get a visceral pleasure just following his words and logic to their well tuned conclusions.
Just reminds me how bad a lot of the AI accelerated content is these days. May have to few shot to improve my own writing :)
Very few things in life experience exponential growth and assembled systems don't often stay that way if they don't become sigmoidal. ie its exponential and end is nigh xor its exponential then sigmoidal xor linear.
Also a bit hilarious to believe that a single 3 month cycle at TSMC could determine a severe amount of propped valutions.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/tech/943066/tsmc-ai-demand-struggle...
We are in 2026, supply chains are highly optimized which means we could make and deliver a lot of robots in a relative short period of time.
We also have solved all fundamental issues we had 20 years ago like communication thanks to the internet, translation and co.
We know have a system, which can be copy and pasted and run in parallel with a snap of a finger.
If (and this If is not that crazy) some breakthrough happens tomorrow, this can be used the day after tomorrow.
I currently say that it could become very very interesting in 5-15 years. I still follow AI very closely and i do not have the feeling anything is slowing down.
And independent of something happening, a lot of people did not find jobs due to this AI investment, a lot of jobs already disappeared too.
Companies like Nvidia, up 1000% since 2023, clearly cannot rely on "oh you'd get returns in 5-15 years". They (Jensen and others) are arguing for AGI in a year (he said this at a talk at Stanford ~ 1yr ago).
Long-term, ie 5-15 years there will be many technologies that change the world. Some will come from transformative tech, others will come from other places.
Financial instruments, investors etc have timelines.
Blowing timelines can risk the future if not properly aligned, especially in correlated risk. See the internet bubble, where it was clearly important but took 15 years to recover after the 2000 boom/bust.
In general, longevity risk can include the financial instrument timelines, it can include other technical factors about the technology, and it can also be that the boom serves important people too soon with gains, real limits are imposed, and then the whole system resets until the real limits are overcome or resolved.
Geopolitical and other risks exist here. The future isnt doom and gloom but it isnt exponentials and sunshine either.
And GenAI to mass produce misinformation and propoganda is a whole other thing. You see this right now with the Alberta sepratists in Canada. Comparing this to pollution like a means to an end is dismissive.
It's a tough nut to crack. I had a feeling that was the catalyst to my post. Am I completely inadequate? Why is it I can't create some perfect vibe app? I felt every prominent post I was seeing at the moment was saying my personal experience was invalid. It was so visceral, it was /too/ visceral. I got suspicious.
What was gnawing at me was the humility and nuance seemed missing in what I was seeing / was prominent. "I whipped up this code in seconds..." is usually--in a good faith scenario of telling such an experience--followed with some variant of "granted, it helps that I have twenty years in software engineering and could tell it was not slop. And my job has me using AI tools all day, whether I want to or not, so I already have a fair amount of prompting/tool skill to avoid slop. And, of course, this was a big win, but there were a ton of time wasters before that got me nowhere before and after this. And if I look at the negatives of what we give up--copyright theft, resource waste, ponzi-ish VC subsidizing token costs to create moats that probably won't happen but regardless is anti-competitive, financial trickery with tech-washing to cement broligarch status quo--not sure I'd make the trade they claim necessary for this win. But yeah, it was kinda neat when I took one second to look at it in isolation, before I remembered I live in a cyber dystopia and this tech doesn't seem to be leveling the playing field as much as the entire apparatus is making it seem bleaker."
Do I expect everyone to do this? No. Do I expect /no one/ to do this? No. Should I wait until one or more people reads an email to address my feeling before I make a comment? ...
I'll admit, I actually don't know on the last one. But I stand by my feeling. And I appreciate the feeling of this rule. But I also feel "degrades discussion and is usually mistaken" should be examined. Is it possible that "usually" is because astroturfing works both ways? "Usually" refers to a higher quantity of X over Y, which is exactly what astroturfing is about. Is it "usually" mistaken when brought up in good faith, carefully, and with nuance? One can call that making a "general statement."
I don't post about this topic constantly, I don't astroturf about astroturfing, a threshold hit me to make this comment, a threshold should be examined with this account and that comment. I think I am in line with the spirit of this rule. And I like the spirit of this rule. Beyond I am not sure.