Reddit is full of bots: thread reposted comment by comment, 10 months later

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/11615413

by SushiHippie • 2 years ago

356 282 2 years ago

lemmy.blahaj.zone

leetrout2• 2 years ago

Reddit has steadily declined over the past few years and it seems to have sped up since pissing off the mod community last year.

SlimyHog• 2 years ago

I deleted my account once they killed 3rd party apps and whenever I visit I've noticed that the quality of comments is WAY worse than I remember.

Zambyte• 2 years ago

Funnily enough I didn't even use any third party apps at the time (just the old web client) but that whole fiasco was enough for me to finally curb my addiction. I also noticed the quality of comments seeming very bad whenever I go to something on Reddit (once every few months at this point). I don't think the quality has actually gotten much worse recently though; I think it was just so normal to me when I was using it. I think it has been a pretty slow decline over the last decade or so, to the point where it is now.

SkyPuncher• 2 years ago

It’s absolutely terrible on the big subs now. Smaller subs seem to be okay, but it seems a lot of the content has gone elsewhere.

criddell• 2 years ago

Past few years? I've been reading about the decline of Reddit since Condé Nast Publications bought it in 2006.

gipp• 2 years ago

One of my higher-voted comments on Reddit was in response to some thread bemoaning the decline of the site towards lowest-common-denominator meme content and recycled jokes. My comment was pointing out that people had been saying that for years, with multiple links to past, nearly identical threads.

I made that comment in 2012.

CSMastermind• 2 years ago

For discussing entertainment like specific video games, movies, book series, TV shows, sports teams, etc. there simply isn't a good alternative to Reddit.

I hate the site and have limited the time I spend on it but there aren't good alternatives for certain communities.

jjcon• 2 years ago

I find that discord has far better communities than Reddit ever did

akuchling• 2 years ago

For most entertainment topics, the-avocado.org has some lively discussion (based on Disqus).

rvba2• 2 years ago

IMDB forums used to be a community for film and TV but amazon killed it in its infinite wisdom of lowest common denominator

Workaccount2• 2 years ago

Reddit has enshitified, and I would also guess that their usage numbers are way up. The goal is to compete with tiktok, instagram, youtube for average everyday people.

From our hackernews perspective, the website sucks now. From the average user perspective, reddit is another fun app full of dopamine hits.

idiotsecant• 2 years ago

I know it's unfashionable in HN circles to admit it but there is still tons of high quality niche content (technical and otherwise) on Reddit that can't be found anywhere else.

ravenstine3• 2 years ago

Reddit was getting shitty way before the past few years.

Honestly, I don't think pissing off the mods has made that big of a difference. Yes, some subs shut down, but otherwise I haven't seen a meaningful cultural change in Reddit as a result of that whole issue.

In fact, one of the reasons I believe Reddit is so crappy is specifically that they bow to mods in many ways. Many communities are run by, frankly, psychos who are way too happy with the power they have over their little ponds. I've lost count of how many times my posts have either been removed or my user banned despite having followed the explicit rules of a sub. Communities vary, but I've found this "you should have read our minds" attitude to be commonplace.

Yes, you can spin off your own sub, but then you're taking a gamble as to whether the original community is going to come after you; they seem to win at least half the time by convincing Reddit that your [relatively pissant] community is toxic in some way. Good luck if your community is blamed for creating "drama" even when there's a lack of brigading.

tivert• 2 years ago

I've lost count of how many times my posts have either been removed or my user banned despite having followed the explicit rules of a sub. Communities vary, but I've found this "you should have read our minds" attitude to be commonplace.

I'm not a mod or anything, but I think there are actually a lot of legitimate reasons for a mod to have that attitude. It's unreasonable to expect a volunteer to create a comprehensive rules of behavior and enforce it in a lawyerly way and keep a community on track and not burn out. I've seen more than a few online communities have serious problems with certain users that would have been best handled with a "we're sick of dealing with you, enjoy your ban." Then, there's also the fact that if a community is too popular, a mod can only scale by being more brusque.

ilikehurdles• 2 years ago

Killing the API access made detecting and tracking spam bots impossible. There was a whole subreddit called thesefuckingaccounts where the latest tactics in spam and karma farming were being tracked.

lelanthran3• 2 years ago

Reddit has steadily declined over the past few years and it seems to have sped up since pissing off the mod community last year.

Maybe depends on the subs you read, because I have not noticed an appreciable difference before and after the "going dark" thing.

charlie0• 2 years ago

I see the dead internet theory is proving more than just a theory.

pixl972• 2 years ago

Dead internet prophecy.

RedShift1• 2 years ago

Fake engagement by Reddit to prop up usage numbers?

Beretta_Vexee• 2 years ago

The phenomenon seems to be limited to a certain number of subreddits that are close to a brand or have products to sell. They recycle content to give the impression that there is some interest in their brand, product, crypto, etc. and to avoid giving the image of a dead brand.

Personally, I've observed this phenomenon on r/Polarfitness as soon as the sub becomes a list of complaints and negative feedback about after-sales service, positive content magically appears with very generic content but dozens of comments.

mh-• 2 years ago

r/AskReddit has been my guilty pleasure for like a decade, and it's super prevalent there too. No products being pushed in the threads I've seen called out.

oaththrowaway• 2 years ago

It happens on meme pages all the time

shagie• 2 years ago

Good fake engagement would be more convincing and harder to detect.

Instead what you see is a post from a fresh account that is a copy/repost of one of the top posts in either that or a sibling subreddit.

This is then followed by a half dozen accounts reposting the top comments from the original as their own comments. This is often where they mess up and it's easily detectable when not the OP responds as the OP.

If you check back in a month or two or so, the accounts are inevitably banned by Reddit or shilling something somewhere else (with a minimum age/rep requirement) themselves and/or using the accounts to express support for something shilled. The "resume writer" was annoying prolific.

I find it doubtful that Reddit corporate is using such an approach to try to drive up engagement numbers.

isoprophlex• 2 years ago

I'm not sure what pisses me off more, the confirmation that the internet is indeed full of undead activity, or the sheer laziness of this specific example. My god people, it's the age of LLMs, at least mix up your astroturfing a little!

nolok3• 2 years ago

It's like internet phishing email and the like. It almost bothers you more that they put so little effort into it, and that if they do that it probably because it's not worth it to do more.

ToucanLoucan• 2 years ago

When the pigs are already happily gorging on the slop, why would you suggest a four course dinner instead?

swatcoder2• 2 years ago

For the purposes of just generating activity in a subreddit and building karma history for bot accounts, replaying proven content verbatim is more reliable and cost-effective.

LLM paraphrasing is likely to either drift away from "what worked" towards unknown territory or introduce tics that don't really cohere quite right. We can confidently assume it's being used as part of other strategies, but it's not actually optimal here.

The real issue is that Reddit (and Facebook, Youtube, Amazon, Tinder, etc) have very little incentive to aggressively police against this until and unless examples like this make big news and start to harm their general reputation. In the meantime, it just makes their sites look more alive and popular. It's good for them right up until they it becomes a defining association with their brand. This lazy approach works for the bots and the sites, so there's no reason to overcomplicate or take on bigger risks.

arkh2• 2 years ago

I feel those LLM augmented bots will usher the return of small community run forums. Because those let you require people to be humans, for example by being invite only.

DexesTTP• 2 years ago

I don't think it's likely. The real migration has been and will continue to be towards Discord servers and similar "smallish" live chat-based communities on centralized services.

The age of small self-hosted forums is unfortunately behind us, and I don't see them reviving any time soon.

arkh2• 2 years ago

Those Discord servers, even if hosted by centralized company are community run forums. You can set "your" server to be invite only so you can filter who gets in.

The underlying software is not really important, it's what you can do with it.

rchaud4• 2 years ago

The closed-source Discord that has bots built into the platform, that's the solution?

I wish more people would try Discourse, which is threaded like a real messageboard without all the automation bells and whistles.

6510• 2 years ago

Forums work just fine. You get to have your own community with your own rules on your own website with your own advertisement. If it helps you can also make your own tools. For local communities they are also amazingly fast.

If HN was a sub reddit I would never visit it.

rchaud4• 2 years ago

Small community forums (low '000s or even '00s) are bot-resistant because there isn't much value in targeting so few people. Kinda like the old adage of buying a Mac because virus/malware makers got the biggest bang for their buck targeting Windows machines.

I'm on a sports team messageboard that still runs on a mid-00s phpBB backend. There are no bots because there is nothing to propagandize about on such a small, topically focused community.

krainboltgreene4• 2 years ago

What does this have to do with the post? These aren't generated AI comments.

bithaze• 2 years ago

There have also been (possibly AI-generated) comments that are simply rephrasing prior comments or even comments on the same post and piggybacking onto an already upvoted comment. It's not as common as the straight copy and paste comments but it is obvious by the same limited user history and rephrased comments that don't quite make sense in context.

janetmissed• 2 years ago

As other commenters have already said, Discord has more or less replaced the traditional forum. I'd argue that this push towards small Discord communities has been happening for years now, since places like reddit, twitter, or even instagram are unsuitable/hostile to forming connections. The primary focus on those platforms is content consumption, and any sense of community (at least on reddit) completely breaks down after a sub becomes >10k. My theory is that LLM's won't drastically change people's experience with reddit/twitter, because those platforms already make communicating with humans on them as meaningless and impersonal as talking to an LLM.

Also younger people find forums archaic and weird, to the extent that most people my age (early 20's) that I've talked to about this prefer imageboards over forums. As much as I'd love for forums to make a comeback, younger people are the ones who determine the next shape culture will take and there is very little chance small forums will grow. It's such a shame too, it's so difficult to find good Discord servers and so much technical knowledge is unindexable and will most likely be lost forever once Discord stops burning money for growth.

exabrial• 2 years ago

I've noticed that the entire board is full of discussion that encourages further user over engagement with "them" (bots) by (among many other things):

* Encouraging authoritarian and know it all attitudes, essentially fake experts

* Taking the Moralistic high road

* Operational FOMO: Covering topics that "Big XYZ" doesnt want you to know leading to users to come back over and over for the inside scoop

The entire thing is designed to cement user's attention. It's fascinating.

shmatt• 2 years ago

Im long on RDDT because it reminds me so much of Facebook when they started pushing more negative content because it got higher interaction. When a sad face reaction was "worth" 5x more than a Like to the algorithm

The algorithm now suggests posts, popular ones with lots of fighting in the comments, from subs you dont subscribe to. Essentially causing organic brigading which is against Reddit rules

gruez5• 2 years ago

I've noticed that the entire board

What's the subreddit? It's not in the screenshot but I'm guessing r politics?

kibwen• 2 years ago

Here's the thread in question (note that the screenshot in the OP isn't recent, the thread is from last October): https://old.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/16zw82...

kkukshtel• 2 years ago

This is just reddit

tsunamifury5• 2 years ago

I’m seeing tons and tons of automated behavior on Reddit.

Posts that are clearly farmed bots that figured out how to use LLMs to vary the same genre of question over and over again.

LLM Bots that seem to respond set to counter at all costs mode. Yes I’m aware of how dumb people can be, but these adapt in a way that feels very LLMish — instantly sacrificing the point just to counter you and try to get another response

On top of that I see Google is dumping tons of fresh traffic, but the behavior of these users seems different than Google drop bys. These are tons and tons of users who seemingly appear out of thin air with histories.

I dunno — it all seems really weird and particularly set for rage engagement to me.

lodovic• 2 years ago

I sometimes wonder if these are really LLMs, or rather just people desperate for karma. But the screenshot of the copied thread was an eye-opener.

evantbyrne2• 2 years ago

Reddit is the ideal place for bots, because there is a critical mass of anonymous posters who will bicker about topics they know nothing about–not to mention numerous other shameless cultural practices. It is may already be impossible for regular users to tell themselves apart from LLMs when engaged in typical Reddit discourse.

tsunamifury5• 2 years ago

The problem is that infinite bicker produces low quality long term training data, terrible ad targeting data, and even worse conversions.

So unless they exclusively plan to sell rage engagement to film Studios and political campaigns their market is going to be microscopic and terribly performing.

KeplerBoy• 2 years ago

Damn, we might just generate the comments with an LLM chrome extension on the fly, because it doesn't matter either way.

perks_12• 2 years ago

What did people expect? The SEO smelled the "just add reddit" trend years ago and started to publish their bs directly on reddit.

ct0• 2 years ago

Any of the big subs have been a toxic wasteland for a number of years. Small subs that have less than say, 10k users are there its at recently.

ai_what• 2 years ago

This is why I felt surprised to read this article about a week ago: https://sherwood.news/tech/reddit-is-quietly-changing-the-wa...

It states:

"The most popular posts on Reddit have switched from reposted content from “karma farmers,” or engagement hackers, to nearly entirely original content from less popular Reddit users. Original content from smaller communities is now outperforming recycled evergreen content by a tremendous margin across the platform. As of October, none of the top five posts of the month on r/all were original. By March of this year, four out of five of these posts were original. "

In my experience this hasn't been the case at all. I've also noticed that if you click the profile of people that end up on the front page, they are often new (or suddenly active) accounts with a certain pattern:

1) Make 3-4 posts not related to the content they want to promote, to "warm up" the account. I'm guessing there's a soft-ban on new accounts here.

2) Post the actual content/narrative they want to promote.

3) Suddenly, this post gets 10k upvotes and reaches the frontpage.

causal2• 2 years ago

Seems plausible that LLMs have made it much easier to fool Reddit's own metrics by generating "original" content and comments.

debacle• 2 years ago

I haven't seen a massive correlation in LLM popularity and reddit bots. A good old markov chain can simulate the average reddit thread, and the botting issue has been prevalent for quite a long time.

sebazzz• 2 years ago

Both Reddit and X have nothing to gain by banning boys because metrics and engagement suffers.

throwreplyguy2• 2 years ago

I wish it was that obvious. I think it's like criminals - the obvious ones get caught, and people go "criminals are pretty dumb", but there are plenty of smart ones too.

I posted this example earlier today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40208741 of a reddit account shilling Sourcegraph. They flat-out deny that this's a bot, but it's clear to Me.

Can't trust anything or anyone any more. Pretty sad.

KomoD2• 2 years ago

They flat-out deny that this's a bot, but it's clear to Me.

Doesn't look like a bot at all, possible shill sure but they're a person.

jdorfman• 2 years ago

Hi, head of community at Sourcegraph here. We don't use bots. u/Prolacticus is a Pro user, we do not pay him/her, and they are not sponsored. In fact, I offered them swag a month ago, and they refused.

We do give free/sponsored accounts to our Discord mods, open source maintainers, and folks who write guest blog posts for us. u/Prolacticus is not one of those accounts.

chipdart• 2 years ago

In my experience this hasn't been the case at all. I've also noticed that if you click the profile of people that end up on the front page, they are often new (or suddenly active) accounts with a certain pattern:

You make a great point. It's highly unlikely that a newly-created account just so happens to post content that's engaging enough to be featured in Reddit's frontpage. It's far more likely that these "less popular Reddit users" are sock puppet accounts used to post special-purpose content which is then subjected to industrial-grade boosting to force it onto everyone's first page.

Changes of this magnitude are practically impossible without the backing of either Reddit itself or marketing companies intending to control the flow of information.

q1w24• 2 years ago

Exactly - and it's important to make a distinction between the bots that post comments and posts, and the much larger and more influential bot farms that manipulate content (both promoting and demoting).

Personally, I'm fairly certain it's a difficult cat-and-mouse game, but there's no question that some very popular mods also use bot farms to promote the content they want on the subs they mod.

qingcharles2• 2 years ago

There are thousands of nicely aged Reddit accounts for sale online.

A lot of subs have low-karma blocks for new accounts, so spammers have to buy aged accounts to be able to post in a lot of places.

unethical_ban• 2 years ago

I've noticed something like that. Something I see a lot is a years old account with no account history prior to the past few days, spamming unoriginal content.

Check /r/interestingasfuck, /r/satisfyingasfuck, /r/natureisfuckingcute, hellsomememes, and a lot of other subs.

Qualities of subs particularly susceptible to such spam:

* Subs that don't require OC (not news, not a hobby sub) * Subs that don't demand proof of identity (/r/selfies, /r/glowups)

So, counter to the quote you cited, I still see a lot of karma farmers on reddit, and like you say, they'll often do what you and I describe and then turn into an Onlyfans account, or something like that.

reddit is just such a goddamned cesspool, and I am so curious as to what nefarious actors are doing on it and why they're doing it.

Different topic, but I'm ranting: The political echo chambers are wild. Places like BadHasbara, Palestine, IsraelExposed, Conservative, Libertarian, antiwork, WorkersStrikeBack, Anticonsumption, all have wild agendas that will instaban anyone who challenges the dreck that gets posted there.

deusum• 2 years ago

With AI we can expect full disinformation posts with supporting conversations.

harborsong• 2 years ago

Imagine today's AI several years ago, the Democrats could have used AI to generate ten times the disinformation about Trump and the Russians instead of having Steele write one dossier.

gmd632• 2 years ago

When everyone has the power of AI and the scalability offered by the virtual world, just a few liars can ruin the entire internet.

It's amazing how the "AI abundance" advocates don't understand something so blatantly obvious.

rchaud4• 2 years ago

This isn't AI, they are simply reposting a previous, presumably "real" conversation verbatim under different usernames.

You can tell from the comments, which don't read like typical loquacity of ChatGPT style LLMs.

euphetar• 2 years ago

The scary part is that perhaps there are in fact LLM generated bot threads, but they are not so easily busted

marcosdumay• 2 years ago

Everybody understands this. It's completely obvious.

I imagine you are complaining about people that disagree with you on how to solve the problem.

gmd632• 2 years ago

I think the problem has many solutions, but none of them result in equitable abundance, or anything close to resembling that.

bluetidepro5• 2 years ago

The key to make Reddit still an amazing resource is finding niche subreddits that fit your interests. The very broad subreddits like funny, news, pics, politics (where this is likely from), etc. etc. are all just full of spam, and trash like this. They have been for YEARS now. However, say you dive into a subreddit for a specific video game you like, it's going to be full of relevant content with very little spam. Or if anything, the type of spam is just reposting content which still may even be new for you. Reddit is not dying, just the giant stadium size subreddits are trash. I visit video game subreddits for games I actively play almost daily and they are all incredibly useful and interesting.

nolok3• 2 years ago

I mean, it's pretty much where half of "smaller forums" went. The other half being on discord.

RicoElectrico• 2 years ago

And the third half on Facebook groups.

GolfPopper2• 2 years ago

Or still being quietly run somewhere on BBCode.

nomilk• 2 years ago

I know this is (almost hopelessly) subjective, but can you (or others) recommend a few? (I'm a reddit newb and my feed resembles a mainstream news website).

lelanthran3• 2 years ago

I visit /r/programming, /r/gamedev, /r/projectcar and a few others (woodworking, home building, short scifi stories)

rvba2• 2 years ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/

https://www.reddit.com/r/longreads

the_snooze• 2 years ago

If you're a college sports fan, /r/cfb, /r/collegebasketball, and /r/collegebaseball are excellent. The first two are large subreddits, but their mods absolutely stay on top of things. Not just clearing out spam and off-topic discussion, but also posting "official" game threads and post-game summaries so you don't have dozens of "Auburn defeats Alabama 34-28" posts clogging up the front page.

bluetidepro5• 2 years ago

I don't use reddit for any real news, I just use it for hobbies/interests. Using reddit for news is a terrible idea for all the content farming and spam trash that this post is talking about. That would be like getting your news from just random people shouting on the side of the street.

So the hobbies/games I'm currently playing are subreddits I subscribe to and actively browse. Games like Anno 1800, Cities Skylines, and Manor Lords. All 3 have very active and passionate community members that are constantly posting high quality content around inspiration for builds, tips and tricks, community update news, patch discussions, mods, etc. etc.

If you want more silly subreddits not related to hobbies, it depends on what your humor is. Here is a wide range of options: r/AnimalsBeingBros, r/ActLikeYouBelong, r/softwaregore, r/raspberry_pi, r/lockpicking, r/FellowKids, r/dogswithjobs, r/BirdsArentReal, r/BreadStapledToTrees - subreddits that are related around hobbies or niche humor will make you love reddit.

Again, tl;dr, reddit is not the place for real life news. If you don't use it for that, you'll find yourself enjoying the website a ton more.

ehaughee• 2 years ago

This will definitely be subjective and I highly recommend using the subreddit search to find topics you enjoy, BUT here are a few of mine:

r/billiards r/boots r/frugalmalefashion (arguably small nowadays) r/hiphopheads r/mtb r/self hosted r/sffpc

browningstreet• 2 years ago

Also r/AskHistorians

EDIT: Also, the way I make Reddit useful to me is I change the default sorting for subreddits from Hot to Top > Monthly, and also disable content recommendations. It'll shows less content and Reddit will sometimes say "No more content right now", which is great.

ramcle• 2 years ago

Check out DepthHub: https://www.reddit.com/user/Lapper/m/depthhub/ It's a "multireddit", an amalgamation of multiple subreddits, a feature that Reddit as a company no longer seems to care about. From the description: "DepthHub gathers the best in-depth submissions and discussion on Reddit. You can use the DepthHub as an alternative front page with high quality discussion and inquiry. " I used to visit it pretty much every day, back when third-party apps were allowed.

nineplay2• 2 years ago

/r/AskHistorians is a national treasure. Don't trust any 'historical' information from any other subreddit.

spywaregorilla• 2 years ago

Don't go to reddit for the sake of going to reddit. If you don't have a specific content area that you want to engage with, just getting involved in the reddit universe is going to be a bad experience.

652• 2 years ago

I like /r/ExperiencedDevs, it's usually pretty good.

bonestamp24• 2 years ago

What things are you passionate about or at least interested in? There is likely a subreddit for each one.

Retr0id• 2 years ago

I know a couple of people who moderate niche-but-active subreddits, and they're still inundated with spam. The only real difference is that they can stay on top of it, for the most part. So yeah, the niche subreddits are still alive, but I think they're struggling.

One of them closed to non-approved submitters, and now they get AI-generated requests for account approval.

btreecat• 2 years ago

This is exactly why I gave up moderation of a sub that was around 100k members. It just was so much spam and noise and poor tooling to deal with it all.

lelanthran3• 2 years ago

Reddit is not dying, just the giant stadium size subreddits are trash.

From a user's PoV, this is at worst a good thing and at best completely irrelevant.

I never go to the large subreddits anyway (political, news, pics, etc), so whether or not they are around, or around and filled with LLM trash is completely irrelevant to me.

OTOH, the subreddits I do visit are alive and well and show no signs of being less valuable to me than before.

rospaya• 2 years ago

Why would I dedicate my time to a subreddit that might vanish overnight or might get taken over by the admins? Way back, subreddits were independent forums, and now they're one protest away from being kidnapped.

bluetidepro5• 2 years ago

I have never seen a subreddit for a game/hobby that I've subscribed to vanish overnight. In all my 13+ YEARS on reddit.

EDIT: "Vanish" forever. Yes, there have been protests and black outs, but everything I have ever subscribed to did come back.

dpkirchner• 2 years ago

Forums come, forums go, there are no guarantees any site will stay up indefinitely. IMO that fact alone shouldn't stop you from participating.

theChaparral• 2 years ago

I really agree. I think the key to your key is you have to actively seek out media that interests you. Don't just be a passive consumer of it.

asicsp• 2 years ago

I'm part of a few book subreddits and I definitely enjoy the reviews and discussions there. My TBR list is in thousands thanks to them...

cableshaft• 2 years ago

r/boardgames is pretty good, if you're into board games.

bigstrat2003• 2 years ago

/r/boardgames would be good, if they didn't go on rants about politics every so often. I couldn't take it any more after a while. I'm trying to read about board games to enjoy myself, not to be reminded of life's problems.

avgDev• 2 years ago

I moderate a niche subreddit, we were focused on information backed by science. The mod team is doctors, chemists, and devs. However, as we are growing we are noticing a lot of new people are spreading myths and since our average user is becoming dumber wrong opinions often end up at the top.

This is what made me realize that reddit is actually an awful platform for information, while there is a lot of good stuff there the average user is NOT educated, and the average users outnumber the individuals educated in a particular subject.

I have been downvoted to hell many times even though my information was backed by multiple studies and factual.

floren• 2 years ago

There's still just so much fucking garbage though. Yesterday I was wondering if I ought to switch to a flipphone so my son doesn't see me playing on my smartphone so much, so I headed over to /r/dumbphones to try and get a feel for what's currently a good option. I figured I'd look through the top posts of the last month to find good discussion. Instead, the top post is some dipshit meme, and all but 1 or 2 of the first 25 posts are "my EDC as an 18/f/cali", just pictures of the contents of their pockets!

Because there's no way to have "the EDC thread" or the "post pics of your phone" thread, this low-effort shit fills the subreddit.

extraduder_ire• 2 years ago

If this is being done by someone other than reddit itself, it'd be nice to get r9k-style hashes of comments to spot this more easily.

Trivially defeated once posters know it's a thing, but it would be better than nothing.

abduhl• 2 years ago

I have a pet theory that bots and AI generated content are constantly being posted to a couple subreddits (AITAH, AskReddit, etc.) where the general theme of the post is basically cheating and/or open relationships. These posts garner a lot of strong opinions and ultimately end up on the front page. Much like the OP here, the content and discussion always seems so recycled.

Good examples from the front page just now include https://old.reddit.com/r/AITAH/comments/1cgmfrt/aitah_for_ma... and https://old.reddit.com/r/AITAH/comments/1cg4c7n/aitah_for_ge...

brisketbbq• 2 years ago

well it doesn't necessarily have to be AI generated content. I rarely read those posts, but when I do, I find myself actually questioning if it's really true. I suspect some people have too much time on their hands and make stories up for reddit karma instead of writing journals and books that nobody will read. At least they're exploring creative writing, though.

dotty-• 2 years ago

This has been happening for years. My theory is the actors running the bots are instructing their bots to use old popular threads as a blueprint to get a bunch of upvotes across all of their accounts at once. The idea being that clearly Reddit users liked the original posts and comments in the past, so the users will upvote it again. Then they sell the accounts to bad actors who are interested in purchasing accounts with real looking post histories.

nolok3• 2 years ago

They don't sell their account to bad actors much anymore, instead they sell services. Want this product or that news story or this ... To have lots of comments and upvote from tens of account. If you search a little you can easily find those shops, they sell for every social media out there and you pay per "thousands of likes" or stuff like that.

They used to be based on super low paid human, then it was bot train the account up then humans use it when it's cooked, and I guess we're now entering the bot from top to bottom era.

thrtythreeforty• 2 years ago

If I were Reddit I'd be running some sort of counter-offensive, throwing a few hundred dollars at those services and flagging accounts which upvote my poison pill as sockpuppets.

dmoy• 2 years ago

Yup this is a very old strategy. Years back when I was helping mod a very large (10/15m+) sub, the head mod was running a pipeline in the background to help detect this exact thing.

tsunamifury5• 2 years ago

I’m starting to suspect Reddit is becoming human-RAG for Gemini. On the backend Gemini forms questions of what people want from it, and it posts backwards to Reddit to train on rated answers.

rchaud4• 2 years ago

Very possible, although surely Reddit could have charged more than $60m for that [0].

Looking forward to Google Search recommending stores and restaurants that closed years ago, or videogames that don't exist.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensi...

mchinen• 2 years ago

So this means there is only one agent with multiple accounts running the same that has a bug to use the same seed every time (possibly seeded on a hash of the content if we are generous)?

edit: or greedy sampling only?

webdoodle• 2 years ago

Reddit's enshitification was a long time in the making, bots and psyops are all it consists of anymore. I wonder if Eglin AFB, home to psyop army units (1st and 7th Special Forces), is still burning the midnight oil...

https://archive.is/9qoe7

gruez5• 2 years ago

Reddit's enshitification was a long time in the making, bots and psyops are all it consists of anymore. I wonder if Eglin AFB, home to psyop army units (1st and 7th Special Forces), is still burning the midnight oil...

Surely there's an alternate explanation for this? ie. the military is filled with 20-somethings, and reddit's primary demographic is 20-somethings, therefore you'd expect any sort of cluster of 20-somethings (ie. a military base) to be more "reddit addicted"? Moreover, surely the US military can afford a $5/month VPN subscription to cover their tracks?

davisr• 2 years ago

And yet, there weren't any other military bases, and Reddit deleted that blog post after publication. There's a lot more information available if you care to search.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit...

b2bsaas002• 2 years ago

We tried Reddit Ads. Hundreds of reported click but when inspecting the session recording with Posthog they were almost zero.

tensor2• 2 years ago

A lot of comments here about AI, but if you actually looked at the source material you'd see that what is shown is a verbatim copy of a thread of user comments using new accounts. This is not an example of an LLM generating AI content, it's a blatant copy of human content with attribution removed.

I guess their license allows them to do this, but wow.

gruez5• 2 years ago

I guess their license allows them to do this, but wow.

Reddit's terms says:

You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content: [...]

Users only grant reddit to repost their comment, not anyone else. Are you claiming that reddit themselves are doing the reposting?

tensor2• 2 years ago

I don't know who is doing the reposting, but the only party that seems to benefit from that sort of thing would be reddit. Why would a 3rd party do that?

ta9882• 2 years ago

Remember that elections are coming in the US, and it is likely that the new Cambridge Analytica-like are ramping up operations. Not sure that's the case here, but I saw an increase of politically hinted posts recently from obvious fake accounts.

b2bsaas002• 2 years ago

Humans are such a rare resource online.

passion__desire• 2 years ago

"If you can't tell, does it matter?" This line from Westworld being played out on reddit. How does one determine if one is a real person with access to only text / comments and the constraint of keeping everyone anonymous.

overthemoon• 2 years ago

I still get some use and entertainment out of Reddit by staying to more niche subreddits. They draw people who are a little more willing and able to curate the social environment--willing in that it can be an extension of the hobby or interest, able in that it's small enough to be feasible for people to do it. I don't think you could say the same about the big ones, their size might actually make it impossible for human curation.

To that end, my harebrained idea is to put a hard cap on the number of members a subreddit can have, and restrict posting and voting to those members. If people want, they can create <subreddit>2 and so on, each cluster self-regulating. To prevent squatting, you can only spawn a new one once the last one reaches a critical mass, and it has to be started by a member of the old one.

ta9882• 2 years ago

This is one more step toward Enshittification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification much better explanation than Dead Internet if you ask me.

gruez5• 2 years ago

How is this "Enshittification" in the original sense? From the article:

>Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

In this case what changed? Was reddit on top of spam a few years ago and deliberately let spam happen? Or did spammers realize the value and got more aggressive with their spamming? It's not clear how what's happening right now resembles "they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves". Are you just using it in the literal sense of "service got shittier"?

swatcoder2• 2 years ago

I do think the term has broadened to just capture the general decay of quality across services and software, which is probably fair since we often can't make evidenced claims about why it's happening in any specific instance.

Here, it's probably fair to say that spam strategies continue to innovate and reduce their operational costs while Reddit (and most of their peers) drag their feet on responding to it as long as the spam satisfies the quality norms of the site (as sufficiently delayed replays do).

Reddit (et al) presumably puts a fair effort into suppressing obvious noise, but much less effort into generated content that creates engagements or appears plausibly real, and that this *amounts to a decay over time as the implicitly permitted generated content itself becomes cheaper to produce and more widespread.

Their self-benefiting inaction satisfies the original usage of "enshittening" even as the term has expanded in common use.

linearrust• 2 years ago

It's been like that for a while now. News and political subs are the absolute worst. Those subs and mods coordinate with news companies and political parties. Sports, movies, music and other commercial subs are just advertisment platforms tied to companies.

Reddit was a great idea. Then it got successful and greedy.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 2 years ago

How full? I'm sure Reddit has quite a few bots but I also think that their size is an immunity of sorts.

I quit reddit a few years ago but I've checked it out recently and found it quite tolerable.

adamgordonbell• 2 years ago

I had a post do well on /r/programming and then months later it reappeared and someone was responding with my words. "Author here, what I meant by X was Xa and not Xb" etc. It was very confusing, because they were responding with my words to a bot saying something I had previously responded to.

Strange times.

999900000999• 2 years ago

Reddit is awesome.

Just.

Don't ask for general life advice, don't go to "popular", don't talk politics( one of my biggest regrets is how political I was in my youth).

But theirs no better source of technical information from people who tend to be willing to help.

Go to stack overflow, say you've never programmed and want to know what tools to use. You'll be banned.

Go to Reddit, you'll get tons of helpful information. Rarely a subject matter expert jumps in.

AI is probably what I'd ask my stupid programming questions now though. Stupid as in how do I download a file in C++...

nineplay2• 2 years ago

When used right, reddit is full of the most helpful people on the internet.

The beauty of the internet is that real people love to give advice in a subject that they care about?

Are you trying to become a better cook? Do you want the best chocolate chip cookie recopies? Go to the cooking subreddits and start searching or asking.

It's often the best place for product reviews if there's a hobbyist group

wizzwizz4• 2 years ago

don't talk politics( one of my biggest regrets is how political I was in my youth).

Opinion: talking politics isn't politics: it's mostly just group signalling. If you're genuinely learning things, that's alright; if you're organising something real, likewise. But if you're just trying to win the "information war" (i.e., the current internet argument), that's almost never meaningful political engagement.

Example: this comment isn't politics. I'm just advertising that I'm a contrarian. (And this paragraph advertises that I'm a meta-contrarian, also known as a hypocrite.)

pteraspidomorph2• 2 years ago

Go to Reddit, you'll get tons of helpful information.

Depends on the subreddit. The subreddits for certain hobbies are even worse than stack overflow. But yes, I agree with you that there are still helpful communities.

costco• 2 years ago

Reddit has by far the worst antibot protections of all the major social media sites. For starters you can register with an account using a mobile API endpoint with no email or captcha at all and the only reason this isn't widely used is because they have a request signing scheme that deters the lowest effort botters. As long as you're not posting newly registered domains from an IP address labelled as a Tor exit you probably won't be banned. If you search for terms like "payday loans" or "sbobet" and look at the account history of the posters you will see the most robotic stuff.

wcchandler• 2 years ago

Reddit doesn't provide value to me anymore. I've been toying around with the idea of building out what I once used Reddit for - news from the Internet. Obviously, it's about 20 years post Reddit's inception, so I've been brainstorming how that would look today. I know I want a skimfeed-like "clean" site with OpenGraph support, but what else? Do we even need comments anymore? I'm half tempted to feed articles into AI, and get them to generate a few dozen comments. Then let users upvote those comments accordingly. Nobody can generate their own comments. Could that approach be fine tuned to a useful site? Or would it turn into a bigger echo chamber with everyone being racist? [1][2]

1 - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot...

2 - https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/advanced-ai-chatbots-...

mjfl• 2 years ago

don't we have Reddit's source? Why doesn't someone just clone it?

lazycouchpotato• 2 years ago

There have been multiple attempts to clone it, but the communities there almost always end up toxic or filled with illicit activities.

Some (including me) have shifted to Lemmy, a FOSS Fediverse alternative like Mastodon is to X (Twitter). There are many instances of Lemmy to choose from as home. Mine is lemmy.world. I run a few communities there and we have a chill environment there.

If you miss the old reddit feel, you can emulate it with old.lemmy.world

Some Reddit third-party app devs converted their apps to Lemmy apps after Reddit made those API changes.

There's tildes.net which is run by a former Reddit admin, but it's smaller and invite-only.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 2 years ago

Do we even need comments anymore?

Since the very beginning, the only thing of value on reddit was the comments. If you do away with comments, then you will only ever see content from people who can be bothered to learn how to use Wordpress or whatever and post it to a blog. For those starting out, that sounds screaming into the void, so they never start. Commenting is a much more casual and approachable way to provide specialized, detailed content to those who are already proven interested, and you're virtually guaranteed that at least one person out there will give you the attention your effort earned.

Any social media that doesn't allow this is either dead on arrival, or popularity is heavily manipulated by some industry heavyweight who can make it popular despite its uselessness.

PurpleRamen• 2 years ago

At which point will people say: it's full of humans? Is it about visibility? Human:bot-ratio? Quality? Perception aka "Turing-test"? I'm always curious about people claiming this and that is a bot or AI, how much of those are true and how many have just a failed perception, where not even all real humans can succeed their test.

segasaturn3• 2 years ago

404Media ran an expose on a new LLM product designed to mimmick real users having discussions on Reddit and plug your product in the comments, called "Reply Guy" (lol)

https://www.404media.co/ai-is-poisoning-reddit-to-promote-pr...

Google is failing, so users start putting "Reddit" on the ends of their search results. Where do we go when Reddit is no longer useful and contains the same AI generated dreck as all the Google search results? It shows how many single points of failure there are on the informational web. Pretty much the only informational resource on the web that's still unscathed is Wikipedia (thanks herculean-level efforts by its editors, mind you), but I wouldn't bank on it in the same way I wouldn't bank on Reddit. The "information age" might be coming to an end.

barbariangrunge2• 2 years ago

Tangental: 404 media is a fun agency, always enjoy their articles. Edit: This plug is not by a bot, but in the near future, nobody will ever trust a plug like this because they’ll suspect it is by a bot. Weird

Aardwolf• 2 years ago

A bot could add "Edit: ...." to their reply just to make it seem like they're human and need to edit their responses

qingcharles2• 2 years ago

"This plug is not by a bot"

Exactly what a bot would say.

dartos2• 2 years ago

The "information age" might be coming to an end.

This is a little melodramatic, no?

Access to information, even without Wikipedia or Reddit, can still be found easily (compared to pre internet days) I personally don’t use google search anymore, but can still find links to public MIT textbooks (like SICP or Deep Learning) by searching on there. I’m sure google scholar, scihub, and arxiv will be around for a good while.

I’m sure if Wikipedia falls, another encyclopedia would take its place, since so many primary sources are still discoverable if you know the terms to search for. Maybe with a paywall, maybe not.

Phenomenit• 2 years ago

Yeah the problem is that academia has the same issue with garbage papers. As long as information has some ad value, be it commercial or political it will fill all spaces with garbage to make a buck.

ffsm8• 2 years ago

I don't think it's melodramatic.

First time I've heard people making that claim was around 2020 in the context of corona iirc. I think they called it "the age of misinformation", and that has only become more relevant since then, so I think it was even more on point then they realized back then.

krainboltgreene4• 2 years ago

None of this content is AI generated, not sure why you're bringing that up?

schlauerfox• 2 years ago

You don't define a bot as AI?

segasaturn3• 2 years ago

I personally don't make much distinction between content that's generated by AI (LLMs), posted by bots, and manually forwarded by your grandma to your old AOL account. It's all the same spam, the new stuff is just more sophisticated.

nimajneb• 2 years ago

I've started putting reddit, servethehome, etc to my searches. Otherwise the results are lackluster in google or bing.

ccppurcell• 2 years ago

Are you a bot?

EGreg4• 2 years ago

I have predicted this exact VERY predictable scenario this for years and got downvotes by AI enthusiasts who don’t want to even deal with any downsides of AI.

Examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35688266

We are racing towards the abyss orders of magnitude faster than with climate change or nuclear proliferation, and even the overwhelming majority AI experts coming out and saying there is at least 20% chance of a global catastrophe or even risk of extinction earns a mere shrug: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/opena...

And CEOs: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/06/14/business/artificial-intel...

And yet even the most mild, libertarian-friendly proposal to mitigate the harm is utterly rejected by AI fans who gang up on any criticism, as the future botswarms will: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35808289

I said the entire internet will turn into a dark forest, including all forums like Reddit and even HN. Swarms of bots will cooperate to “gang up on” opponents and astroturf to shift public opinion. And the worst part will be when humans start to PREFER bots the way organizations already do (eg trading bots replaced humans on wall street).

The AI people are building a dystopian future for us and won’t face ANY accountability or disincentives, but rather the opposite. I expect this post to be downvoted by AI people chafing at any criticism. (Like the opposite of web3 posts.) The replies, if any would even appear, will be predictably “well, it was all already possible with human efforts”, ignoring the massive difference in scale and cost to malicious actors (well, the replies would have been that if I didn’t call it out just now, because they always are, and hardly any actual substantive discussion of the extreme dangerous outcomes that are only starting to come about in very early stages).

jprete2• 2 years ago

I've made the same prediction. It was blatantly obvious to me what would happen as soon as I saw GPT 3.5 producing decent quality responses. I had hoped the finger problem of image generators would last longer, but there are a lot of people with absolutely no foresight on the potential downsides of technology. SORA and other video generators are absolute madness.

LargeWu3• 2 years ago

Can anybody explain, specifically, what that 20% risk looks like? The most specific I ever see is "an adversarial AI will become sentient and wipe out humanity". It sounds like as much snake oil as the people pushing AI itself.

orangevelcro• 2 years ago

I think I've come across this bot on reddit before. I read a lot of skincare-related subreddits and people talk about their routine and 'holy grail' products...so that seems like an appealing place for this type of thing to infest.

It wasn't quite obvious marketer-speak, but certain comments have just seemed like not quite the way a regular commenter would word things.

I figured it was regular humans doing it though. Sigh...

tsunamifury5• 2 years ago

It’s hard to tell because the small communities have their own newspeak which seems weird to outsiders.

Eisenstein2• 2 years ago

I absolutely love having access to so much information, but it really seems like most people just don't even care. The ability to access experts of all kinds for advice or just to fill curiosity has been a boon to me, and I like sharing what I know with people who are interested. But when I look around at the people I know -- some of them are incredibly smart (much smarter than I am) but instead of making a reddit post or going on a topical forum, they just watch a youtube video or try to attempt whatever it is poorly themselves or just don't care to know more about things.

When I was a kid I wanted to learn electronics, so I got some books and parts at radio shack but certain things weren't obvious for someone who knows nothing, so I didn't know where the ground was supposed to go in a schematic diagram for instance. And the adults around me didn't know -- so I just had to figure it out. Now a kid can go on /r/askengineers and get an answer from an engineer in less than 20 minutes.

But overall -- maybe the 'information age' has backfired for society in general. Those kids will figure out what they want to know regardless of how easy it is, and so many people just look for information that confirms what they already think then weaponize 'facts' so they don't have to budge.

I'm really not sure -- it is so useful to me, but every time a nice place gets an influx of people it turns to shit, so I tend to lean misanthropic in the long term.

slron• 2 years ago

I'm one of the people who exhibit the behavior you've observed (watching a youtube video rather than creating a forum post, not the "try to attempt whatever it is poorly themselves or just don't care to know more about things" part), so I thought I'd explain how it got to this. First there is the "why not create a reddit post":

A problem I have with reddit are the users looking through my post history trying to extract more information than I present at face value in my post. Sometimes, it works out in my favor because I have an XY problem and get redirected to the correct resource. But most of the time, its just used to determine how they'll engage with me (seriously or not, mockingly or not, high effort or low effort). This is a specific problem that doesn't exist on HN, as a rule.

I'd rather not delete my post after I got my answer, in order to help other people coming in from google searches, so instead I create an account for each subreddit that I post in. If each subreddit should be considered its own forum, it would make sense to have a different account for each forum. It was even once encouraged by reddit for users to have multiple accounts.

The issue now is that most subs "shadow queue" (not shadow ban) posts from new accounts in an attempt to curtail spam. You'll still see your post if you're logged in, but not if you're logged out. And there is no engagement on it until a mod releases it.

Similarly, I am permanently behind a VPN, so creating accounts cause them to be actually shadow banned by default by reddit admins. I must message them to prove that I'm actually a human, after realizing that the mods also don't see my post in their queue. Once, after I got my account appealed, it got shadow banned again, for reasons unknown to me. I was particularly bitter since I had spent 4 hours to make a single high effort comment on that account.

Even if I've managed to overcome all this friction and gotten my post actually appears in the "new" queue, there are myriads of reasons why the post won't yield fruitful results. It could be the timing of the day or the week. Perhaps my title wasn't catchy enough. Maybe my wall of text was too big because I tried to fit enough context and people's eyes just glazed off. Maybe the post got overshadowed by more successful posts upvote wise and never made it to the hot page of the sub. Perhaps my questions is way outside of the skill range of that average sub's users (I've seen this happen often on my posts and others', in various outcomes). Or perhaps the regulars there have seen the same introductory level questions twice a day over the years and simply refuse to engage with them anymore.

It has gotten to the point that if I can't find someone else with the same question in various wordings as I have on reddit through a site:reddit.com search, I simply assume that no one has the answer.

As for why youtube, it's not where I usually start, but ends up being the best solution after all other potential solutions have been exhausted. I'll give some examples:

For music (I know its not work related), a lot of amateur/indie music is so old, it can't be bought anymore, and can't be liscenced to spotify. Most real piracy solutions are defunct (lack of seeders, dead mediafire/megaupload links). The only way to find the song is some random person's channel that was made 12 years ago and hasn't been updated since.

For many "open core" saas products, the problem starts at the documentation. Often, I just need a "getting started"/bird-eye-view of the system and how it would potentially connect with the rest of my systems. The first thing you are told to do in the docs is to sign up for their managed offering. Once I find my way to the self-hosted section of the docs, I am told to download a docker image. I don't want to download a docker image or sift through a 500 line docker file to know which configs are relevant or will do to my system. Then, they'll have a "you can also compile it from source" link that points to their github project page. If things they had a binary upload, excellent. But now I need to figure out what to stick in my config file, environment headers to set, arguments to pass before I have a "sane" startup.

The docs are also an excellent way to get lost in the weeds to "try to attempt whatever it is poorly themselves". You can easily get misled, as terms are recycled between different products with different meanings in each one. They may provide api docs, but no working examples. They may provide working examples, but without any notes, comments or implications on what each line or command does (To get started, run this command in your console: sudo curl ... | sh). You may have reached a certain point before getting it to work, but now you're stuck and you're not sure where the issue is. Sometimes, the docs are sparse, and when you're trying to learn a concept from a page, they'll have links all over the page linking to other concepts. You don't know if these are advanced concepts you can ignore for now or fundamental concepts prerequired for learning what you're trying to learn.

The community around these products are also less susceptible to helping you out. The product devs are focused solely on building the product, or support only the paid managed saas users. The other users are often "drive-by" github issue makers, mostly employees working with said product. They will post massive dump logs and grafana screenshots with machines provisioned with TBs of memory and clusters with hundreds of nodes. They're here to get their problem solved so they can move on with their workday, not subscribe to the project page to receive notifications of others who might have the same issues as them.

Youtube has "solved" these "open core" issues for me more than 3 times now. When you find a good 30min/1hr/playlist, its like finding a gold mine. They almost always start with a succinct birds-eye-view so you can early return/break once you realize this isn't what you need, rather than the product's landing page saying how its the silver bullet to all your problems. The web of "concept" has been linearized in a dependency chain for you. You can see the person doing things and their effects in real time without having to commit the effort. You can see what auxiliary (debugging) tools are used and their install process. You can see which commands are more relevant than other, instead of wading through `prog --help` or `man prog`. They comment on what they're doing so you know the scope and side effects of each command. You can watch it at 2x speed, skip, rewind. All of this allows you to cement a better fundamental understanding of the product you're working with, rather just calling up support from the paid managed service and slapping the it on your CV.

Then there are all the other fast evolving spheres of tech. Being stuck in the usual enterprise CRUD, it can be hard to dip your toes in adjacent domains. Whether it be finetuning an llm for your purposes, fpgas, linux, gpu shader programming, networking, photoshop/illustrator, video editing, game dev, etc... These domains are all evolving rapidly, and if you want to start and finish something with only a weekend of free time, a youtube tutorial is often good enough.

jprete2• 2 years ago

I downloaded Wikipedia months ago so I would have access to only-slightly-tainted information during the information winter.

jtriangle• 2 years ago

I'm glad that I'm not the only one who keeps local backups of Wikipedia

chaosharmonic• 2 years ago

/r/LocalLlama has also had multiple[0][1] trending threads about dead Internet generators just within past week

[0] https://reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1cc0fyy/i_made_a_li...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1cg39yq/deaddit...

stagger87• 2 years ago

Very timely, I just came across this account doing this exact thing if you want to see it in action.

https://www.reddit.com/user/Clear-Car862/

If you inspect their comment history, they are recommending several products in almost every reply. ContractsCounsel is one of the services they recommend. The formula they use for recommending is very similar for every post.

Also interesting, one of their only actual posts mentions the phenomenon of using bots to advertise, I guess trying to throw people off their trail?

wobfan• 2 years ago

TBF I just went into this EmploymentLaw sub, and when you look at the posts here (https://www.reddit.com/r/EmploymentLaw/comments/1boucq8/cali...), it just looks like there are bots talking to bots.

I find it pretty funny tbh.

SlowRobotAhead5• 2 years ago

the only informational resource on the web that's still unscathed is Wikipedia

Ask a conservative about that opinion. Do it before you do exactly what I'm accusing you of and downvoting the bad man who said the thing against "your side".

EDIT: Yea, thanks for the gaslighting but Wikipedia's organized effort to remove conservative editors to shift a left bias in the content is well documented. I'm the crazy one injecting politics into "fair and unbiased wikipedia" lol

segasaturn3• 2 years ago

Why do you assume that I'm not a conservative?

Eisenstein2• 2 years ago

Injecting right/left politics into everything is so tired. I hope one day you realize how silly and artificial it is. Stop letting people who benefit from civil strife convince you that we always have to fight each other.

NoGravitas• 2 years ago

Wikipedia censors leftist content, too (in favor of "centrist", US State Department positions). Part of the problem is that their definition of neutral point of view is pegged to the editorial biases of the papers of record, which through a combination of corporate ownership and "access journalism" converge on a particular world-view, that of neoliberalism.

6gvONxR4sf7o• 2 years ago

Huh, that just put a new perspective on facebook's huge push for open LLMs. The less useful anonymous stuff becomes, the more useful content made by people you know IRL is. And that's facebook's/IG's original value proposition.

barbariangrunge2• 2 years ago

Then why is my feed 95% ads lately?

kbenson2• 2 years ago

The "information age" might be coming to an end.

Or we weren't in it all the way quite yet, and the real information age is not defined only by the availability of information, but also by the massive quantity which drowns out simplistic search methodologies.

Maybe this is the natural end state of information systems. First they gather useful information, then they gather all information, then information starts being generated that is tailored to the system for the purpose of being in the system and affecting how it's used, often negatively. I can think of lots of examples, from internal wikis to rumor mills at work.

valval4• 2 years ago

Anything you can’t replicate using given instructions isn’t valid or interesting information. Once machines can be made to understand this, they’ll know to ignore useless information like we (sometimes) do as humans. The situation is not beyond hope by any means if you ask me.

MiguelX413• 2 years ago

404Media ran an expose...

*exposé

MyFirstSass2• 2 years ago

So are we headed towards some sort of identification like passport, drivers license etc to be able to post?

Would you be able to create system where you somehow battle this spam but retain privacy in some way?

Is there an alternative that retains max privacy in a world with a trillion bots spamming away?

Ie. does any good systems exist where say you can get a HUMAN-ID, by some sort of verification, this then grants you access to create users, but no one can see what user are tied to what HUMAN-ID, but you can only create say 5 total, and if some are busted doing spam they are all revoked (bad orwellian idea)

Or maybe some advanced federated trust chains where if lots of different people deem you a spammer you can get your users taken away, but no state power can revoke it in one move for example or see who you are.

bryan_w• 2 years ago

I'll just put this out there because I don't know if I could ever implement it, I've had this idea that's essentially "IP permitted from"

We would extend the whois database to contain an oauth url for a given IP block and then forums or other services that need to ensure a real human person is present (Like at registration or when combined with some other trust systems), would bounce the user over to the URL and it would require the user to login via U2F/passkeys/TOTP/etc.

The thinking is that isps are the ones who know their customers are real, and as long as they can challenge them in a human interactive way, that should provide a strong signal that it's a real human. It's also a good way to protect against cookie stealing and could provide resistance from 'man in the browser" attacks as the end user would become suspicious of all the isp challenge pages popping up if a machine was being used in spamming.

It's not foolproof, there could be insiders working at the ISP, and this would require cooperation of all isps everywhere, but it would be a step in the right direction

pavel_lishin• 2 years ago

Folks have suggested web-of-trust systems. I don't know how they would be implemented - for now, I guess this is already sort of a thing on any platform where users can "repost"/"retweet" things.

tmaly• 2 years ago

We will probably need dogs like they did in the Terminator movies at some point.

catbird• 2 years ago

Even if a passport was required, I think the same problems would appear. There are plenty of people with no interest in ever posting on Reddit. Some of them might be convinced to allow someone else to use a bot to post on their behalf if there is money to be made.

mike_hearn• 2 years ago

Yes it's possible to do this. I wrote up a scheme for that years ago that I called "proof of passport". You can create anonymous identities tied to a hash of your epassport certificate using SGX enclaves and some careful protocol design.

Needless to say, such ideas make some people very unhappy, although it can be done in a way that doesn't grant governments any new powers they don't already have. The most common objection is from Americans who make the same arguments they make about elections: some people don't have id of any kind and shouldn't be expected to get one.

You can also of course buy identities from people who don't care, as a sibling comment says. But that's inevitable for any identity system where identities can be had cheaply.

Gibbon12• 2 years ago

Is there an alternative that retains max privacy in a world with a trillion bots spamming away?

Block and fine ISP's that host bots. Throw people in prison that run bots.

berniedurfee• 2 years ago

Seems like we need to start trading anonymity for credibility?

Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Anonymity on the web has led to some pretty atrocious behavior.

Plus, at this point, anonymity on the internet is an illusion anyway.

Just use existing trusted CAs to issue personal certs based on some reasonably robust verification process.

Maybe the AI apocalypse will help fix the internet by making anonymity untenable.

AbstractH243• 2 years ago

Historically speaking, Reddit has been incredibly loose about identifying who is behind an account. Not even requiring email verification, let alone phone number or something more advanced like a drivers license.

The future is likely more similar to LinkedIn

user39393822• 2 years ago

the only informational resource on the web that's still unscathed is Wikipedia

Wikipedia is great as long as the topic isn’t politically controversial. In those cases you get the US State Dept/corporate media-approved perspectives with all the censored perspectives available in the Talk page.

adamomada• 2 years ago

Don’t forget Corporate PR

I was kinda shocked to see the stats on active editors, laid out fairly well in this report by a source that was banned from Wikipedia by a ridiculously small group

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censor...

q1w24• 2 years ago

Even political and historical events that you would not think are controversial have become biased.

As an example, there are some Wikipedia editors that continually remove mentions of genocide from the opening paragraphs of Stalin's page, whereas they leave them there for Hitler.

People really enjoy pushing their ideology in their spare time. I really don't understand it.

racional3• 2 years ago

Examples?

mauvia• 2 years ago

It isn't necessarily in the talk page, those are scrubbed sometimes too.

Compare:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Hummus&oldid...

Yes there was an edit war over Hummus being called Levantine because some people insisted the Jews were colonizing the food.

nzealand• 2 years ago

ReplyGuy was posted here six months back under a different name...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38070502

Tau_Cygna_V• 2 years ago

We live in crazy times

space_oddity3• 2 years ago

Google is failing, so users start putting "Reddit" on the ends of their search results

Sometimes you find a subreddit with specific topic and seek to find firsthand experiences from it

valval4• 2 years ago

Wikipedia is a hilarious mess of US left-wing political bias.

kelseydh• 2 years ago

Wikipedia is very much scathed on many topics. Especially on political or social subjects, gatekeeping editors watching their pet pages can easily maintain bias or sanitize articles.

Unless you want your week consumed wiki-lawyering your edits to overcome them, the bias remains.

AndyMcConachie• 2 years ago

Much like the S in IOT is for security, the G in Internet and Web is for Genuine.

DudeOpotomus• 2 years ago

Their newly minted status as a Public company will remove any concerns or care for anything other than a (bullsh*t) measure of growth.

Reddit like every other advertising fueled social media company, will ignore the reality of who uses their platform and instead lie cheat and obfuscate the facts in order to remain in "good standing" with the ad tech cabal...

philip1209• 2 years ago

I think it's inevitable that some kind of "Verify personhood" test will be coming for many UGC platforms - perhaps something like Stripe Identity.

freshpretzels• 2 years ago

Time to find more forums and buy more paper books.

simion3142• 2 years ago

why is reddit allowing creating of bot accounts? Money?

I would make it so new accounts have very limited permissions, create a way for real users to confirm they are humans like via SMS or how other competent social media do it.

probably_wrong• 2 years ago

Bot accounts used to be useful in the past, and I'd bet some of them remain. Bots like the one that would ping you in X days (to see if a discussion ever had an update), the one that would tell how many times a user used the n word (useful for witch hunts), the one who would summarize stuff for you before it was cool, the ones that would identify topics from the FAQ and tell you so...

Why they are not currently keeping them in check, though? I'd like to say "engagement" but I prefer to believe in "incompetence".

simion3142• 2 years ago

I am not referring at those bots.

I am guessing here, no data or proof, but there are a lot of very young accounts that defend Putin, defend soviet war crimes , try to cause chaos, do personal attacks in comments. This accounts have sometimes real people behind but for sure bots/scripts are used to create them and then farm karma/points to be allowed to post. Someone like me with a single account for years must always be sure to fllow the rules, this bots/trolls are always aggressive, spread false shit and do not care if banned, and seems reddit is fine with same troll making many accounts and use them for bad stuff.

Because some subreddits require you have some karma before commenting, more karma to be allowed to post I assume this trolls use scripts to post random stuff to get this karma points. There are bots that find popular past submission and post the same thing again to get the karma points.

So EU or USA needs to tell reddit that they are responsible for the shit posted by bots and we will see tehm inventing ways to stop 99% of them/

652• 2 years ago

To be fair, Reddit is actively trying to prevent bots. How do I know? I scrape Reddit threads directly via old.reddit.com URLs and even the most sophisticated scraping tools like BrightData, Undetected Playwright (and Puppeteer), and others just don't work on Reddit threads anymore as of a few months ago.

I now have to use .json at the end of the URL to get the content, but I suspect that'll stop working at some point.

EcommerceFlow• 2 years ago

This will only get worse as the incentives shift from purely "propaganda" to actual financial incentives. The SEO spammers are coming for Reddit.

You'll start noticing comments that have been edited months or years after the original, that insert links for a particular product/service. I've already seen this for a variety of IPTV comments I was searching. I'd imagine this is mostly done via mass outreach.

On a different note, I'd imagine the pushback had this been "right wing" propaganda being caught to be 100x with mentions of criminal activity, even more censorship, etc.

moi23882• 2 years ago

This is why all service will go to pay per use

pompino• 2 years ago

I think a bot posting content is no worse than a human posting comments in their own echo chamber. I see a lot of snootiness from HN, but HN is also heavily in decline due to certain political agendas preventing free discussion.

pixl972• 2 years ago

This really depends on the community....

Imagine you live in a community that has half the houses painted yellow and half the houses painted blue. Suddenly you start seeing posted that all yellow houses should be painted blue. The HOA puts it up for a vote, and there are 5000 votes pro blue.... when there are only 250 houses in your neighborhood. I mean, if you lived that neighborhood you'd be up in arms about why the HOA didn't do the bare minimum about the situation.

This is the same for bot content. Suddenly the views of one person out number everyone else...

"You should be mad! You should be really mad all the time. Look, there are thousands of people that are really mad, and if you're not mad you're the dumb minority that's not paying attention. Here are 1000 people that are all mad around you and doing something about it, you need to do something too. Yea, remember that 'real person' that talked to you on 'forum' and you got along with them, they are so totally mad!"

Until we give up on thinking 'internet people' are real, internet people will have a far higher impact on our lives than they should.

plipt• 2 years ago

Speaking of preventing free discussion: I don't currently see this very discussion on the front page of HN.

Yet there are newer submissions with fewer points shown there

dotnet00• 2 years ago

Although the comment by comment aspect is new to me, I did see a lot of blatant bot posting/repost karma farming that slid under the table back when I was an active user. I remember several times when I happened to be looking up a post, only to come across posts of the exact same content, exact same text, different account, made months apart and/or on different but related subreddits. Sometimes I'd check the account out of curiosity and find that all of that account's posts were like that.

I think these would be a lot more obvious if Reddit's own integrated search was better.

incomingpain• 2 years ago

I was testing this back in the winter. I missed the original dead internet theory discussions and was curious.

From my point of view, reddit is pretty dead, not sure there's any real conversation going on there. Of it's own doing, of course. Censor and create echo chambers and people leave. Even the people who would ideologically align with the echo chamber become bored of the lack of conversation and move on.

It's interesting, what's the point? Is reddit preventing a digg-like crash by producing fake bots. Reddit api yahoo changes suggest it's not external.

Now, I also looked into what they seem to be investigating on how to fix it. Their approach seems to be idiotic at best. Like they don't acknowledge what even caused this to them.

Now the dead internet theory isn't accurate. It's very obvious facebook and X are real conversations. It's just a matter of hasbeen social media pretending they didn't die is kind of a new thing.

Irickole• 2 years ago

It’s also the worst with advertising. Running CPC campaigns is useless now as bots will be pushed to your ads blowing through your ad spend.

wnevets• 2 years ago

Repost spam has been a problem on reddit for a lot longer than LLMs have been accessible to the public. I'm always confused when I see people on HN marvel at how amazing reddit is, most of the top subreddits are filled with regurgitated garbage.

r0ckarong• 2 years ago

Why is it that people just don't care? I expected reddit to go under after the whole IPO debacle and protest but it just sticks around and now props itself up with recycled content. Why won't people leave for somewhere else?

pteraspidomorph2• 2 years ago

Many of the most interesting people did, which also affects the ratio of useful to recycled content. A lot of people are comfortable with the current state of the platform - good for them that they're happy where they are!

Venn1• 2 years ago

According to the "15-Year Club" badge in my profile, I've been on Reddit for, well, 15 years.

It's gone from that weird little Digg clone with a tiny comment section (the good convo was on Slashdot #onionbelt) to a meme site and eventually (with the addition of subreddits) a genuine information repository.

The Blackout in 2023 hit the site in a bad way. Most of the tech subreddits I followed have sice dispersed to various Lemmy instances and fizzled out.

avensec• 2 years ago

There are comments in this thread calling attention to this post's HN placement. I know this is a little off-guideline, but it feels right to ask as a new question instead of piling on to the tone of those threads.

I am curious why this post is (currently) #148 on HN with 218 comments and is three hours old. It is surrounded by "one day ago, zero comments" posts. Given the context of the original post, it feels right to be curious as to why this is buried.

(Note: Went from 148 to 153 while I wrote this comment)

93po• 2 years ago

my typical response to this is to plug hckrnews.com which makes browsing HN significantly better for me. and it means you don't have to worry about weird ranking algos

cholantesh• 2 years ago

~~Reddit~~ the internet; just look at Facebook and Youtube comment sections, they're full of bots calling each other dear and talking about how powdered elephant tusk cured their migraines and investing in powdered elephant tusk helped them keep their house.

thisgoesnowhere• 2 years ago

This is engagement farming.

You write a bot that is able to look for similar content from the past and copy paste the top comments and replies. THis has been happening since the beginning of time. I remember seeing this on college humor.

This is a super easy non expensive way to get an account with a ton of karma.

butterNaN• 2 years ago

I used to specifically add "site:reddit.com" to search results - it has lost its utility quite drastically over the last year or so. So much so that I have down-ranked reddit in my search results.

barfingclouds• 2 years ago

How are those both having the exact same order ranked of upvotes? Seems possibly fake to me

shrimp_emoji• 2 years ago

4chan solved this with r9k.

Reddit is full of bots: thread reposted comment by comment, 10 months later

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