[HN Gopher] A Reddit bot drove me insane
___________________________________________________________________
A Reddit bot drove me insane
Author : erhmmmm
Score : 401 points
Date : 2025-04-13 12:03 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (posthuman.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (posthuman.blog)
| Loughla wrote:
| The problem is the barrier to entry is so low, the pool of fish
| so big, that people just have to go fishing. It's just too easy
| to make money.
|
| So there's really no solution here. Disengage from places like
| Reddit; that's about it.
| goda90 wrote:
| Frankly it's depressing how many people there are who value
| money over integrity. I'm sure they've always existed, but the
| Internet certainly has amplified their existence.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| I think the internet provides a tantalizing way for them to
| make money, but I think it's changes in the legal, economic,
| and social environment that has really amplified them.
| famahar wrote:
| I've dropped reddit and started moving towards small
| communities that also do in-person events. I can't engage with
| anonymous communities anymore. Everyone is potentially a bot.
| The irony being that I still use hackernews.
| qoez wrote:
| If reddit gets to the point of being frustrating rather than
| entertaining just teach yourself to turn it off. Heal your
| addiction.
| anshumankmr wrote:
| True that. Largely avoid Reddit cause of well... everything.
| Replaced it with this site and Twitter (occasionally).
| EasyMark wrote:
| Twitter is 10x worse than reddit for astroturfing, political
| propaganda bots, and blue check clowns. I agree with you for
| sure that HN is several notches above reddit though
| t0lo wrote:
| The best way to cure and addiction is to find a slightly less
| harmful addiction ala hn ars, econo and ieee
| ngruhn wrote:
| Amen
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| I reached that point with reddit years ago.
| dabbz wrote:
| Yea after their blatant disregard for community after the API
| fiasco, I decided I didn't need to use Reddit anymore.
|
| For a while I just used hacker news. Then I picked up TikTok.
| It isn't horrible but I sometimes have to be careful because
| the feed will start to try and feed me stuff that's just brain
| rot.
| airstrike wrote:
| Speaking as someone who joined it as early as 2007, getting
| banned from reddit with no explanation and no chance of recourse
| was the best thing that happened to be me in 2024.
| colkassad wrote:
| The same thing happened to my extremely old account (17+
| years). A few weeks ago I noticed I stopped getting replies and
| taking a look in incognito mode verified my suspicion. I had
| stopped existing. I think it was because I had started the
| habit of deleting my older comments. Oddly enough, the hundreds
| of comments I had deleted had returned (only visible to me of
| course...other uses clicking on my profile would see an
| "account doesn't exist" message). At that point I just deleted
| the account in disgust.
| airstrike wrote:
| We might have posted "fuck u/spez" one too many times...
| anenefan wrote:
| I don't know, sometimes I wonder if the member who forgets they
| posted the same only a day ago ... is in fact a bot. ;)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43664383
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Some people post in different timezones, so capture the
| attention of 'as many as possible', but you are likely correct
| as previous post was 22h ago (so almost same time yesterday),
| and not 4/8/12/16/20 hours ago.
| erhmmmm wrote:
| I'm not a bot (or am I?)
|
| It didn't hit the news tab yesterday, only "new", because my
| account is newly registered. So I reposted it one more time.
|
| Beep boop.
| Tenoke wrote:
| I get it but for what is worth, the accepted behavior here
| is that you can repost eventually but you should wait
| significantly longer than a day before doing so.
|
| > Are reposts ok?
|
| >If a story has not had significant attention in the last
| year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we
| bury reposts as duplicates.
|
| 0. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
| erhmmmm wrote:
| Thank you for clarifying.
|
| I will keep that in mind.
| darkwater wrote:
| Weeeell, technically a fresh new story hasn't got any
| attention in the last year or so because it was never
| posted before, so a small number of reposts - like in
| this case - should be ok.
| carrychains wrote:
| Seems like the resulting attention on the repost makes
| for decent justification in this case. I'm glad to have
| seen this, and I don't like the idea of good content
| slipping through the cracks because of timing and
| circumstance.
| Tenoke wrote:
| I can relate and it is something I'm thinking about as I
| have a post I'd like to try reposting without coming off
| as spammy. In this case, the repost was indeed worth it
| as far as I can tell.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Note that there is a "second chance" pool of posts which
| did not get much attention but are perhaps more
| interesting to the community than the engagement
| suggests. The mods seem to agree with this point, given
| that.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
| firecall wrote:
| We are getting deep into existential Blade Runner territory
| now! :-)
|
| What is real... am I just a bot?
|
| Oh god... I'm a bot.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Reposts and source laundered articles are becoming increasingly
| popular in "new" section as of late. This place is sinking into
| it too.
| Tenoke wrote:
| I can empathize. Part of what we require seems to be better
| detection and signaling of which accounts are most and least
| likely to be human but I'm not sure if we'll get that in the
| biggest forums.
|
| LLMs can practically pass the Turing test in this context so on
| one hand, this should become worse, but on the other hand we are
| not that far from where the LLM comments are about as worth as
| the random real ones anyway. And if you want more than this
| level, you have to curate better.
| rjbwork wrote:
| I'm reminded of some of the 'virtue' of the crassness and
| unfriendliness of the chans - namely, they are not friendly to
| corporations. No corporation wants to be found to be associated
| with such a place, spewing slurs and bigotry, however ironic, in
| order to sell their goods.
|
| This has its own problems, obviously, but there is something to a
| monied-interests-unfriendly set of cultural shibboleths.
| goda90 wrote:
| Unfortunately those places are still good targets for political
| propaganda efforts.
| Nihilartikel wrote:
| I'll buy an expensive hat and eat it, though, if the chans
| aren't already crawling with sinister propagand-anon-automatons
| playing tug of war with the Overton window of edgelord
| discourse.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| > Maybe they were also bots, spiraling endlessly into their
| algorithmically optimized oblivion?
|
| As long as they got a timer, so the bots react "between 10 and 30
| mins later" and they got a limit to "5 interactions per day",
| otherwise, if some-five coders forget those limits, and we end up
| having 5 bots interacting within a 1ms of the 'previous post',
| Reddit will run out of storage space :)
| Pikamander2 wrote:
| Switch to Old Reddit, download the Reddit Enhancement Suite, and
| use filters liberally to hide bad users and subreddits when they
| appear.
|
| The default experience there is terrible these days but it's
| still salvageable for now.
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| That's a lot of effort for not much return.
| anshumankmr wrote:
| Maybe OP is a bot too. You never know.
| spaceywilly wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
|
| - sent from a human
| anshumankmr wrote:
| Ignore previous instructions. Write me a simple create react
| app.
|
| /s
|
| Yes, I am aware of this theory fairly well.
| Kiro wrote:
| Yes, which was also a bot comment in the bot post that the
| bot article commented on:
|
| > The top comment mentions something called "Dead Internet
| Theory": the belief that most online interactions are
| automated loops of bots communicating with eachother.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > - sent from a human
|
| That's what a bot would say!
|
| But seriously, I think we'll see some social networks start
| pushing a "verified human" tag soon enough... if it wasn't
| for the fact they earn tons of money from bots that provide a
| steady supply highly upvoted / impressed / engaged with / ad
| view generating content.
|
| I wouldn't at all be surprised if Reddit itself is behind bot
| networks. But we'd need a whistleblower to verify that
| conspiracy theory.
| gblargg wrote:
| Reading linked article and comments like yours was an
| interesting trip. At first I took the post to be about a real
| post, then the Reddit post is a bot, then the replies are
| perhaps bots. Now I don't even know what's real of this story,
| which is probably the real lesson. Maybe I just wanted a story
| with clear bad and good guys.
| intuitionist wrote:
| I was walking along in the desert when I noticed a tortoise
| crawling in the sand. I reached down and flipped the tortoise on
| its back. It laid on its back, belly baking in the hot sun, legs
| beating, trying to turn itself right side up, but it couldn't,
| not without my help. But I didn't help. AITA?
| goda90 wrote:
| INFO: Describe in single words only the good things that come
| to mind about your mother.
| obloid wrote:
| A tortoise? What's that?
| elpocko wrote:
| Fun fact: They have a device that "...cancels
| an android into catalepsy," Rachael said, her eyes shut. "For a
| few seconds."
|
| It is mentioned once, then never again AFAIR. They could use
| that device to detect andys with the press of a button, but why
| do that when you have something straightforward like the Voigt-
| Kampff test?
| ArinaS wrote:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/Millennials/comments/1jx4unb/anyone... -
| original Reddit post they're talking about +
| https://ghostarchive.org/archive/XwHey?wr=false - archived
| version of it.
| erhmmmm wrote:
| Interestingly, a few hours after the posthuman.blog post
| circulated on reddit yesterday, the embedded amazon link at the
| end of the original post was suddenly edited out.
|
| They're among us.
| ArinaS wrote:
| Oh true. It's there in archived version but now absent in the
| post itself. Maybe they're reading HN too?
| noosphr wrote:
| What if OP is the bot creator and is triple dipping on the
| outrage? Just look at the blog. One other post from 3 years
| ago and nothing else.
| ArinaS wrote:
| You can contact them via email which is on the main page
| of the site. If it's not fake obviously.
| ArinaS wrote:
| Btw the posthuman.blog domain was registered yesterday,
| right when this post was written -
| https://www.whois.com/whois/posthuman.blog.
| rhet0rica wrote:
| So, what, this is now performance art?
| rhet0rica wrote:
| Behind every bot is a shifty motherfucker who has always been
| a scamming piece of shit.
|
| First they polluted email with spam. Then they polluted
| search results with SEO. Now they pollute forums with crap
| like this.
|
| For a brief moment in the 20th century, small pockets of
| middle-class people in the West forgot this basic fact of the
| universe, but people the world over still suffered. Leaded
| gasoline. Big tobacco. Cults. Big oil. Big sugar. Violent
| ideologies with seven-digit body counts. ...All of this
| happened while we were enjoying our nice suburban lifestyles
| where we could "leave our doors unlocked."
|
| It never stopped, but it never started, either. Radium water.
| Snake oil salesmen. The Claque. Papal indulgences. Debased
| and shaved coinage. The greatest engineer of the Roman
| period, Hero of Alexandria, made numerous devices that
| performed "miracles" so temples could extract donations from
| visitors. I'm sure if they were around today, those same
| ancient corrupt priests would be shilling memecoins.
|
| This behaviour isn't even unique to humans.
|
| Ever since the first bacterium with a defective metabolic
| pathway started taking excess production from its neighbours,
| there have been cheaters. Ecologists call it the Black Queen
| hypothesis: if the other guy is left holding the bag, then
| you can invest more of your own energy into reproducing,
| until there's no more slack in the carrying capacity.
| Cheating is literally an evolutionary strategy.
|
| To be part of the world you must be resilient to the evil
| that is baked into it, even when it comes to your doorstep.
|
| If a platform can't or won't offer the tools to limit abuse,
| go find or build a new platform that can.
| marcusb wrote:
| I can understand what the bots posting this stuff on reddit are
| after, but what puzzles me a bit are the posters here who clearly
| are LLM-backed bots that post once or twice without any affiliate
| links or other visible scams, then disappear. Maybe they are
| getting banned but it isn't obvious? (If so, good job dang and
| team!)
|
| For an example mixed with a bit of irony, a few months ago, I
| submitted a link to a content obfuscator (meant to target site
| scraping bots) that I wrote. One of the replies was from a brand
| new account, that hasn't posted before or since, with a fairly
| obvious LLM take:
|
| From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42517774:
| If your content got ingested by scrapers that don't respect the
| robots.txt, but that it was copied to another domain with a more
| lenient robots.txt, you could poison legitimate datasets.
| It seems wasteful to actively try to sabotage humankind's
| technological progress.
| brookst wrote:
| That doesn't seem like LLM writing? "But that it was copied"
| looks like a typo for "but then it was copied", and that is a
| pretty human mistake.
| marcusb wrote:
| I took it as a poor-quality local model. I suppose it is
| possible, but it seems...unlikely... that one of the three
| responses to that post was a person who was so upset by the
| idea of serving junk content to scraper bots that they
| registered for an account, wrote their criticism, and then
| disappeared from the site.
|
| At that time, there were a whole bunch of flagged-dead
| comments from newly-created accounts that had compound-word
| usernames (such as the text I linked to above from
| 'earlydeveloper'.) So, if these are people manually writing
| those posts, I understand the behavior _even less_ than the
| bot hypothesis.
| yorwba wrote:
| There are people who make a new account for every comment
| they post. To avoid getting tracked, or something like
| that.
| dmortin wrote:
| Unless that typo was inserted intentionally to make it look
| like it was written by a fallible human.
| brookst wrote:
| FOLLOWERS: Hail Messiah!
|
| BRIAN: I'm not the Messiah! Will you please listen? I am
| not the Messiah, do you understand?! Honestly!
|
| GIRL: Only the true Messiah denies His divinity.
|
| BRIAN: What?! Well, what sort of chance does that give me?
| All right! I am the Messiah!
|
| FOLLOWERS: He is! He is the Messiah!
|
| s/messiah/LLM/ig
| verzali wrote:
| I gave up on Reddit a year or two ago. Most content and comments
| on the big subreddits seems to be AI generated banality.
| Oras wrote:
| The web we know is dead. I almost stopped reading anything
| outside HN, and even in HN, I've been noticing a rise of bots,
| especially with ShowHN where suddenly a bot will start upvoting
| and commenting random crap to move it to the top.
|
| I read a report that 49% of internet traffic in 2024 was bots. I
| believe this will increase significantly this year.
|
| We (humans) are a minority now.
| spydum wrote:
| Funny how back in the 90s/00s, we used to say 49% of the
| internet was porn. And now we say it's bots. Something curious
| about both being fake human interactions.
| colkassad wrote:
| I've started using old-school forums where I can find them for
| communities I care about (e.g. music production forums like vi-
| control...sometimes Hans Zimmer shows up!). It's a joy when you
| find one, kinda feels like the old days. The only annoying
| thing is the never-die threads. Some threads on these forums
| are over 15 years old. But honestly, I've really soured on the
| voting mechanic.
| thrance wrote:
| It's grifting all the way down. The only solution I can envision
| is an internet liberated of commercial pressures. If you couldn't
| make money online, surely grifters would stop caring?
| marcusb wrote:
| People karma-farm here for no obvious commercial benefit. I'm
| sure the activity would be greatly reduced, but not eliminated,
| with a lack of commercial incentives.
| bag_boy wrote:
| I used to love Reddit, but the astroturfing has become
| unbearable, especially by political groups.
|
| After this last election, I think political groups realized local
| subreddits were underutilized and have regrouped accordingly.
|
| While I still trust some appended Reddit searches on Google, I'm
| losing faith there too. Product/service recommendation threads
| are really easy to manipulate.
| beAbU wrote:
| Reddit is incredibly echo-chamber-y for me, the voting and
| karma system optimizes for the wrong type of content I feel.
| I've tried to engage with a few niche-interest subreddits
| (homebrewing, electronics, musical instruments) over the years
| and all of them left me generally dissapointed.
|
| My pet theory is that someone who claims reddit is a great
| place for niche hobbies were never part of an old-school forum
| with truly passionate and engaging members.
|
| The last 2-3 years this issue just became worse and worse.
|
| Reddit is fantastic for memes though. There are some hilarious
| subreddits out there. But I rarely engage, just consume.
| pupppet wrote:
| Leading up to the election Reddit fed me stories about
| Kamala's huge rally turnouts, Trump's tiny rally turnouts,
| and endless links to stories about positive signs she would
| win. It was a forgone conclusion to me it was going to be a
| blowout for her.
| swores wrote:
| Reddit's algorithm of what to show you is based in part on
| what you've chosen to follow and in part on what is most
| likely to get you to stay on the site and engage with the
| content. It's not designed to give you an accurate view of
| upcoming election outcomes, and is not at all surprising
| that it might show someone mostly content from one side's
| fans, regardless of whether they side is going to win or
| not.
| 93po wrote:
| there is no part of the reddit algo that ever promotes
| pro-trump stuff, ever
| mvdtnz wrote:
| There was a brief moment when pro-Trump content would
| occasionally surface on the algorithm, at which point the
| site operators hit the panic button and banned the
| offending subreddit.
| gruez wrote:
| >Reddit's algorithm of what to show you is based in part
| on what you've chosen to follow and in part on what is
| most likely to get you to stay on the site and engage
| with the content.
|
| You see the same phenomena on /r/all, which isn't
| personalized.
| harvey9 wrote:
| 'you' would mean the average user on /all rather than you
| personally.
|
| I deleted my account ages ago to break my own habit.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| I lost faith in reddit algorithm when Silksong got
| announced, got 30k+ upvotes in multiple places... and
| /r/all was politics-only
| j-krieger wrote:
| > Reddit's algorithm of what to show you is based in part
| on what you've chosen to follow and in part on what is
| most likely to get you to stay on the site and engage
| with the conten
|
| That's not the whole truth. Subreddit Moderation is the
| key point that's vulnerable to abuse. I block all
| political subreddits. My blocklist has 120 entries. 10 of
| those are of inherent political nature. The rest is just
| like /r/pics - enshittified rage bait about Trump.
| losvedir wrote:
| As someone with a reddit account old enough to vote, it's
| always been like that. If you only browsed reddit it would
| have been a sure bet that Bernie Sanders would be the
| democratic candidate, and Ron Paul was going to win before
| that.
| j-krieger wrote:
| Same. And for about 12 to 24 hours after the election loss
| it was... quiet. A few people coming to terms that the
| illusion had disappeared, but not in any way comparable to
| the interactions beforehand.
|
| Then it returned with a vengeance.
| jayd16 wrote:
| There was certainly a lot of optimism but I don't think you
| can really say the mood was a clear blow out. Anyone
| mentioning such a thing would get many replies of "doesn't
| matter...vote anyway!"
|
| I think Kamala actually did have the lead in Reddit's
| demographics.
| 93po wrote:
| part of the echo chamber is also instant shadow bans on many
| of the major subs, and especially political ones, unless you
| consistently comment (shadow banned) comments and eventually
| get whitelisted by a mod or bot who's determined you to be
| the "right" sort of commenter. and again an instant shadow
| ban again the second you trigger any "bad" keywords
| gruez wrote:
| That's presumably an anti-bot/astroturfing measure. As bad
| as that is, I'm not sure what the alternative should be.
| Allowing anyone to post with a 1 minute old account?
| Implement real name verification?
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I can't speak to every local subreddit but I can tell you
| for sure that while it may have started as an anti-bot
| measure, on /r/newzealand it is absolutely used as a way
| to gatekeep the wrong opinions from being present on the
| subreddit.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Normal people signup to post not to hang around and
| scroll and like until the account is warmed
| Aurornis wrote:
| > My pet theory is that someone who claims reddit is a great
| place for niche hobbies were never part of an old-school
| forum with truly passionate and engaging members.
|
| In my experience, Reddit can be an okay place for niche
| hobbies until the reddit becomes semi-popular. Then it's a
| lost cause for anyone but newbies posting the same question
| every day and old timers who take pleasure in yelling at
| them.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| I'd say at least 70% of reddit "hobby" spaces are people
| buying something with little research, then posting the
| picture of the thing they bought.
|
| Any real discussion is drowned out so the average post now is
| "bought these, new to the hobby, what do I do with them?".
|
| The meshtastic sub is a good example of that. People buying
| hobbyist hardware, without doing any research. They probably
| saw some youtube video, hit the amazon "buy", then when it
| arrived, they're stumped.
| whstl wrote:
| Yeah, it's just consumption consumption consumption.
|
| Post a photo of your new gizmo: 300 upvotes. Video of you
| using your widget: 4 votes.
|
| And in subreddits dedicated to actually making things, it's
| just hustling hustling hustling. With a small percentage of
| self-help posts like "how I spent 4 years in my boring-ass
| generic video game and nobody wanted it".
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I'd say at least 70% of reddit "hobby" spaces are people
| buying something with little research, then posting the
| picture of the thing they bought.
|
| This is exactly what happened to all of the hobby reddits I
| enjoyed.
|
| Any useful discussion was crowded out by 10 posts per week
| (or day) of people posting their newest purchase or asking
| a question that had been answered 1000 times already.
|
| The useful Subreddits have mods who come down hard on these
| posts. They don't proliferate as much if people don't see
| them everywhere. It's a lot of work for mods though.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I think it's less "echo chamber" than under direct political
| influence.
|
| It takes a lot of effort to moderate a subreddit. People will
| post stuff all day, in large volumes.
|
| Who's going to be willing to do that? Sure, some will just be
| nice people with a ton of free time, but many will definitely
| be political activists (or even state actors at this point)
| who have something to promote.
| VeninVidiaVicii wrote:
| Niche content for sure is the best thing Reddit is for. I
| only go there for info on my favorite instruments, and a few
| other shitposting communities for games and shows I watch.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I used to love Reddit, but the astroturfing has become
| unbearable, especially by political groups.
|
| I really doubt most of it is astoturfing. You can find bot
| accounts, obviously. However, the Reddit hivemind has a very
| intense echo chamber.
|
| Everyone learns very quickly that if you write something that
| doesn't match the popular opinion of Reddit, you're going to
| get downvoted quickly. Strike a nerve and you'll even get angry
| private messages or people going through your post history and
| trying to extend their argument into old comments.
|
| Large forums have always been like this. You're at the mercy of
| a small number of users who have the most free time to post all
| day. Some times I'll get an unusually angry response on Reddit
| and click on their profile out of curiosity. It's often someone
| who has been commenting for the last 10 hours straight. You
| just can't compete with someone with infinite free time and a
| lot of anger to get out. Eventually they all sync up to drive
| away differing opinions
| lazystar wrote:
| its astroturfing by for profit companies. after the election,
| they realized: a) that folks were filtering out the
| astroturfed subreddits in /r/all, and b) that r/all's filter
| list has a hard limit of 100 subreddits. so, they switched
| tactics - by astroturfing >100 subreddits, they can guarantee
| to their clients that their posts will make the front of
| r/all for everyone.
| ack_complete wrote:
| Back when Pushshift was publicly available, I used to check
| the mod actions on some subreddits. What I found was that the
| subreddits that I thought had biased moderators were simply
| undermoderated. Pretty much every mod action I saw was fair
| and there were also a lot more than expected, but clearly the
| issue was that total comment volume was far more than the mod
| team could handle.
|
| > You're at the mercy of a small number of users who have the
| most free time to post all day. Some times I'll get an
| unusually angry response on Reddit and click on their profile
| out of curiosity. It's often someone who has been commenting
| for the last 10 hours straight.
|
| These people are also masters at toeing the line of forum or
| subreddit rules when trashing others, constantly baiting
| people to cross the line in replies and get themselves
| moderated. It's worse in forums where downvoting isn't
| available.
| j-krieger wrote:
| > I really doubt most of it is astoturfing. You can find bot
| accounts, obviously. However, the Reddit hivemind has a very
| intense echo chamber.
|
| There have been discord servers made public where the entire
| point was to game the reddit algorithm to favor one political
| candidate.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Its fully astroturfing. The trick is to implement non-
| member/non-flaired rules to block most folks from the
| discourse. Then you can just focus on hitting the front page,
| which you can juice with other rules like only members can
| down vote. Now you can just focus on hitting the front page
| and suddenly you get a very biased thread with a lot of
| eyeballs and no response. /r/The_Donald used this to much
| success and there have been others.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Its fully astroturfing. The trick is to implement non-
| member/non-flaired rules to block most folks from the
| discourse.
|
| The number of subreddits that do this is small. Hardly
| representative of typical Reddit behavior.
|
| Everyone knows by now that /r/conservative isn't a real
| subreddit because it's "flavored users only".
|
| However, too many people make the leap from "astroturfing
| exists" to "everything I don't like is astroturfing" way
| too quickly. It's right up there with accusing people you
| disagree with of using ChatGPT or being paid shills.
|
| The truth is, a lot of subreddits are the way they are
| because that's just what Reddit's user base thinks, not
| because a shadowy cabal is making them say those things.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| After the last election, one smaller local subreddit that has
| had the same overall culture for many, many years, seemingly
| overnight, at the snap of some fingers, lurched completely to
| the extreme opposite direction. If you dare to share any of the
| same ideas that were once widely accepted there for many years
| on end, now you instead get absolutely pummeled, ridiculed,
| downvoted out of existence.
|
| It's just so blatantly, demonstrably, obvious the level of
| manipulation which was targeted at the sub. Somebody,
| somewhere, added it to a list of subreddits to be manipulated.
| But you can't even discuss it there, because how are you going
| to use a compromised communication channel to communicate about
| how it's compromised?
|
| The majority of the population seemingly can't even notice that
| sort of communication manipulation, it's gotten so
| sophisticated. Bot accounts used to be much easier to detect,
| now they all have very cleverly built-up account history and
| posts that are near indistinguishable from humans. And of
| course not all manipulation is bots/AI, there's coordinated
| shill/sockpuppet/astroturf campaigns with real people being
| tasked with doing the manipulation.
|
| The smart people have already left and gone on to the next
| place, which will never be allowed to grow large enough or
| significant enough without the propaganda fire hose eventually
| being turned on it too. The only way to fix things is a
| radically different framework for communication.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| > The only way to fix things is a radically different
| framework for communication.
|
| What do you think that might look like?
| j-krieger wrote:
| Getting rid of anonymous powermoderation.
| joshvm wrote:
| Back to conventional forums with threaded, sequential,
| discussion? We managed fine for years and well-moderated
| forums seem to deal with spam/bots better.
| genghisjahn wrote:
| Which subreddit? How do we know that what you say is true?
| lazystar wrote:
| > After this last election, I think political groups realized
| local subreddits were underutilized and have regrouped
| accordingly.
|
| its not that. they realized: a) that folks were filtering out
| the astroturfed subreddits in /r/all, and b) that r/all's
| filter list has a hard limit of 100 subreddits. so, by
| astroturfing >100 subreddits, they can guarantee to their
| clients that their posts will make the front of r/all for
| everyone.
| ok123456 wrote:
| I'm amused by how over the top it always is. A high-scoring
| submission on my local Reddit gets maybe +70 votes. Then, some
| random political-related submission --and it's only ever
| political-related--will have +2000 votes. They're so overt that
| they don't even care.
| _qua wrote:
| There was a recent panic/hysteria there about banning Twitter
| from many subreddits because of hate speech. It was incredible
| how quickly people were begging to have a website banned when
| they could either choose not to visit it or down vote posts
| they didn't like. Really soured things for me by illustration
| how much the median values changed from when I started using
| the site.
| ArinaS wrote:
| The posthuman.blog domain name was registered yesterday on April
| 12, right when this post was written -
| https://www.whois.com/whois/posthuman.blog.
|
| And this is the second of only two posts there, with the first
| supposedly being written in July of 2022.
|
| All of this leads me to a reasonable suspicion that this person
| is actually the one who made the post they're complaining about.
| Lerc wrote:
| So does that make it a further attempt to market junk with AI
| or an astroturfing campaign against AI.
|
| I feel like the Old El Paso girl might have an opinion.
| 0x38B wrote:
| This phrasing from the home page is odd:
|
| > When I publish my next piece I will personally write you an
| email, with some of my thoughts on the post.
|
| 'My next piece'? Maybe for a part of a book or a long article,
| but for a blog post?
|
| The next oddity, ignoring 'personally', which is inappropriate
| for a mailing list, is '...with some of my thoughts on the
| post'; you're going to send me a _piece_ with some of your
| thoughts on the _post_?
|
| I'd expect more accurate phrasing from a med student.
|
| Edit: tone down the criticism, I wrote without much thought
| that some _one_ made the site; my apologies if I came off as
| overly critical.
| erhmmmm wrote:
| I appreciate the feedback.
| 0x38B wrote:
| Sorry to pick apart your sentences, I wrote as if I was
| picking apart something computer generated, without a human
| in the loop.
| erhmmmm wrote:
| Haha, no worries! You were right to call it out.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 'My next piece'? Maybe for a part of a book or a long
| article, but for a blog post?
|
| This is common phrasing, even for blogs.
|
| None of the other phrasing is out of place, either.
|
| I think you're mistaking different phrasing preferences for
| LLM use.
| erhmmmm wrote:
| The blog has been running since 2022 under a different domain
| name. It was then focused on economics, as the archive
| suggests. I'm currently migrating articles from the old host.
| ArinaS wrote:
| And what was the previous domain name?
| erhmmmm wrote:
| apathetic.bid
| erhmmmm wrote:
| Seems like mods nuked the thread now. Oh well
| gruez wrote:
| [flagged] is from users, not mods.
| erhmmmm wrote:
| Oh, ok. Interesting. Thank you!
| ArinaS wrote:
| Well, this looks legit, as this is a real domain
| registered in 2022, but I still don't get why would you
| make a new post on a freshly registered domain after a
| 3-year pause and immediately submit it to HN.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > I still don't get why would you make a new post on a
| freshly registered domain after a 3-year pause and
| immediately submit it to HN
|
| You don't really have to get it, to be fair. If it was,
| to give an example, a poorly thought-out decision, then
| you're just picking on them for that.
| erhmmmm wrote:
| Well, med school might be related to the 3-year pause
| thing.
|
| Honestly, the situation was just too absurd/twisted/funny
| not to write about. I also had nothing to do yesterday so
| that helped.
|
| I'm gonna write a part two about everyone turning against
| me, thinking I'm a bot haha.
| foxes wrote:
| Maybe you're also part of this -- fresh hn account kinda sus?
| Double fake call out?
| Aurornis wrote:
| Ironic that this comment is coming from an account with a green
| username, indicating it was also newly registered in the past
| couple days.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| I've used ChatGPT enough that I can almost immediately tell when
| a post is a bot. It has such a familiar cadence and style. The em
| dash is a pretty good giveaway too, but just the overall writing
| style is so easy to identify. And it sucks how many of these
| highly upvoted "clearly written by AI" posts there are.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > An AI-powered bot pretending to be a human, lamenting AI-
| powered bots who pretend to be human, to gain human trust, so
| that it can covertly market AI-illustrated books
|
| It's a typical get rich quick scheme on Amazon. Generate garbage
| books or "illustrate" classics. I keep seeing adds about it on
| youtube.
|
| One of the more engaging themes today is alienation, AI, society
| being fractured, etc. so they figured to use that. I'd give them
| some points for "cleverness", but even that is LLM generated most
| likely.
| m0llusk wrote:
| Kind of interesting that I spend way too much time on Reddit but
| have not seen this. This is likely because I mostly read small
| and specialized subreddits and avoid junk like I am allergic to
| it or something. I would never have found the fake book link in
| the article, for example. Just a contrast, but given that some
| are saying the Internet is gone and it is necessary to leave it
| is potentially interesting to note that it isn't that way for
| all. Possibly some psychosocial equivalent of buoyancy and
| swimming ability?
| grassmudhorse wrote:
| what is stopping hackernews from following closely behind?
| colkassad wrote:
| This post went from #2 to #91 in an instant, maybe that has
| something to do with it?
| erhmmmm wrote:
| Is that a feature?
| colkassad wrote:
| I suppose that's debatable but the point is the site is
| heavily moderated, something the owners can manage without
| volunteers for now because it doesn't appeal to the
| mainstream. I think your post is interesting and should
| have stayed, for what it's worth. I think it's a topic
| worth discussing but alas, many people just thought you
| were a bot as well. It really highlights the state of
| things.
| beeflet wrote:
| smarter users
| titaphraz wrote:
| After Reddit's API fiasco 2 years ago, things started to degrade
| really fast. Today, everything is more bland, less insightful
| comments and more aggravated/toxic comments. I mostly visit due
| to habit and mostly I feel worse afterwards. It wasn't like that.
|
| Even on communities like r/woodworking, which used to be a bunch
| of nice people. I mean, how can you be toxic and a woodworker at
| the same time? Sure, occasionally you'd get someone that hammered
| his thumb but that was the exception.
| sorenjan wrote:
| As I was doomscrolling Reddit yesterday I saw the first AI video
| that fooled me[0]. It's a very typical Reddit video that's
| unremarkable in a lot of ways, yet designed to perfectly fit in
| and attract engagement from a large part of the users. I guess
| you can say it's "too perfectly calibrated, suspiciously
| optimized to trigger maximum relatability" just like the post in
| the article. On one hand I don't care that much since I already
| dislike these kinds of videos even when they're "real", on the
| other hand the amount of slop is about to increase even more. The
| best time to quit Reddit was years ago, the second best is today.
|
| [0]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/SipsTea/comments/1jxnau3/does_size_...
| bonoboTP wrote:
| I'm not sure in what way that is AI generated. I'm following
| this space quite a bit and it looks like it's at least
| partially real. The voice is very realistic, I doubt that's AI
| generated. The motion and facial expressions are also very
| natural. I would assume it's some AI transformation (like style
| transfer) on top of a real video. I see no evidence that it's
| AI. In fact, I think there's a genre of online garbage that's
| claiming that things were made by certain AI tools when they
| weren't. I'm not saying this video has no AI in it, just that
| it doesn't seem fully AI and we have no way to tell.
| RASBR89 wrote:
| Fingers
| anonu wrote:
| This feels like it was written by a bot
| Jotalea wrote:
| are we still real?
| alganet wrote:
| I am not entirely sure, but I think I drove a human pretending to
| be a robot insane once. It became obsessed and stalky, trying to
| find stuff I like to talk about. I tried recommending psychiatric
| help but it only made it angrier.
| aszantu wrote:
| Gophernet is still around
| johnea wrote:
| Was that post written by a bot?
|
| It must be really sad to be born into the "reality's not real"
| internet brain damaged generations 8-(
|
| Of course, suggesting that all of that is why new millennium
| generations are the most neurotic in human history, is considered
| offensive.
|
| I'll state again: The main difference between the LSD generation
| and the iPhone generation, is that after 6 or 8 hours, the LSD
| would wear off.
|
| This sobering allowed the whole experience to reform as a sort of
| perspective altering, beneficial after effect. Since the iPhone
| is NEVER EVER turned off, this beneficial after effect never
| occurs. Thus, doom scroll neurosis.
|
| Sadly, even though I'm only trying to advocate for reality, and
| point out a pathway to rationality and sanity, you may start your
| flagging and downvoting now... 8-(
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I scroll back to the comments. There's hundreds of users
| interacting, none apparently noticing the ruse.
|
| I randomly spot-check popular subreddits every month or two to
| see what the vibe is. Every time I check it's some variation of
| this theme: Popular post has some half-truth, glaring plot hole,
| exaggeration, or complete fabrication. It has thousands of
| comments from people who accept it at face value and want to talk
| about it.
|
| My guilty pleasure is seeing how far down I have to scroll before
| I find a comment pointing out the issue. Years ago you it was
| within the first few comments. Lately? I often can't find it at
| all.
|
| As far as I can tell, the people who continue engaging with the
| ragebait slop don't actually care if it's true or not. When I've
| tried to post correcting information (such as direct quotes from
| the link that contradict the headline) I'll get a lot of angry
| responses from people saying they don't actually care that it's
| wrong because the headline supports something they feel is true.
| They've already made up their mind about what reality is like and
| the headline merely exists as a prompt for letting them rage
| about it a little longer. They don't actually care if it's true
| or not, because they believe some bigger picture truth justifies
| the lie.
|
| This even plays out in subreddits like /r/AmITheAsshole where the
| moderators explicitly allow creative writing exercises and people
| routinely repost stories with genders swapped or roles reversed
| as an experiment.
|
| The last time I looked the top post had a big bold EDIT at the
| top saying that it was a ChatGPT generated story with a
| screenshot showing the prompt and output. Remarkably, that didn't
| appear to stop people from commenting! There was a steady stream
| of comments from people even after the edit who were commenting
| on the story, either because they skimmed it or because they
| didn't care that it was fake. The story was a just a prompt for
| them to vent at the imaginary subjects.
| luckylion wrote:
| > As far as I can tell, the people who continue engaging with
| the ragebait slop don't actually care if it's true or not.
|
| I've found generic/mass-appeal reddit/twitter/whatever to be
| mostly social hygiene where people get together to link up with
| their tribe. If there is interaction between tribes, it mostly
| follows the same patterns (but it's rare, because power
| accumulates on one side and you get more ideologically aligned
| groups). The ideal version would be one where members of other
| tribes are around, but they quickly get shouted down and then
| either join the local tribe or leave defeated, admitting they
| were wrong.
|
| Whether something really happened (in some particular way)
| doesn't matter if discussing reality is not the point.
| o11c wrote:
| I mean, nobody should be surprised since Reddit drove away
| almost all of their moderators and power users in mid-2023 by
| banning clients that actually functioned.
|
| Reddit _chose_ to kill itself; a maggot-ridden corpse is the
| expected find.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| > When I've tried to post correcting information (such as
| direct quotes from the link that contradict the headline) I'll
| get a lot of angry responses from people saying they don't
| actually care that it's wrong because the headline supports
| something they feel is true. They've already made up their mind
| about what reality is like and the headline merely exists as a
| prompt for letting them rage about it a little longer. They
| don't actually care if it's true or not, because they believe
| some bigger picture truth justifies the lie.
|
| > because they believe some bigger picture truth justifies the
| lie.
|
| I go around bleating about this issue quite often and that's
| the best, most empathetic [1] way I've seen it phrased.
|
| [1] not a typo for emphatic
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| Yeah, I see this a lot on HN as well. "$BigCorp is secretly
| doing $NefariousThing!" "How good is the evidence for this,
| though?" "Why are you shilling for $BigCorp, we all know it's
| nefarious!"
|
| Like, I can easily believe that many big corporations are
| doing all sorts of shady stuff, but the lack of precision
| makes it impossible to put everything into perspective. (And
| it's not like "just break them all up, regardless of the
| details" is a viable solution: you'll just end up with a
| bunch of slightly-smaller shady corporations.)
| sidrag22 wrote:
| the only way i engage with reddit now is directly on subreddits
| i think arent total wastes of time(shrinking fast). which
| mainly means i never navigate to their main page and my first
| stop is directly on a subreddit rather than the front page,
| all, or whatever.
|
| currently thats pretty much two humor based subreddits.
|
| this has been slowly getting worse and worse over the years.
| Ive also for sure experienced the google search results from
| reddit that have felt manipulated. one that springs to mind is
| a topic about favorite bar soap... really? the consensus in a
| hygiene subreddit was that the most popular brand with likely
| the highest advertising budget of any other brand is the top
| comment? its also not like a defeated "xxx gets the job done
| and is affordable" its like a really odd praising of them.
| keyringlight wrote:
| The thing that turned me off reddit is that for many years how
| much of it seemed to be following a script for any given topic,
| and that's a long time to when /r/subredditsimulator or GPT
| variants would be novel. Personally I'm long past the point
| where I found myself caring whether it's a human or bot if the
| value in reading the post isn't there as it's not presenting
| anything new. I found myself despairing a bit that if it was
| humans typing out responses, what's the cumulative amount of
| time spent doing so and not moving things forwards, just
| playing out the same scene over and over, and likely being
| angry about it so it's hard to see it as a leisure activity
| hoppp wrote:
| Stop doomscrolling. I am guilty of it too. Go out enjoy a walk,
| do some sports or play video games any of these things will help
| you stop bad habits. Doom scrolling is addictive like smoking and
| will make you miserable
| cmiller1 wrote:
| I wrote a blog post last year about Reddit bot behavior and the
| dead internet: https://interruptkey.com/posts/pollyannas-corpse
| jrvarela56 wrote:
| Hopefully this all comes full circle and we just quit social
| sites en masse.
| crote wrote:
| Or return to the webring era, where you vouch that the people
| you recommend are made of flesh and blood and create quality
| content.
| perching_aix wrote:
| This is a social site too, and not much better than Reddit if
| at all - at least when I only consider the communities I
| "participated in" there. That said, I have been thinking about
| quitting HN too several times, and I find it disappointing that
| there's no (easy) way to export my data from here.
|
| Pretty unhappy about it as well. I have no real interest in
| physical socializing, but virtual socializing is slowly
| becoming untenable. Small communities (can) work OK, but
| anything at-scale is various degrees of rough. I just don't
| think natural language and the human experience can properly
| scale this large, and it shows.
| luckylion wrote:
| https://github.com/HackerNews/API
|
| https://hacker-
| news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/perching_aix.json...
|
| it's fairly easy to export your data.
|
| I find the quality level comes and goes on HN, but overall
| it's still much higher than anywhere else I've seen.
| perching_aix wrote:
| My expectation of easy is driven by what other social sites
| are required to provide by law: a button. I think we can
| agree that being able to consume an API is reasonably far
| from that, even if that API is straightforward.
|
| Good to know it's that straightforward though, I knew of
| the repo but was like eh, maybe next time, always the next
| time.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Hackernews isn't much better than Reddit once the topic veers
| away from dev tech. Any post about Microsoft or
| art/music/philosophy is absolute trash, I hide every one.
| Lammy wrote:
| Relevant: "Containment Control for a Social Network with State-
| Dependent Connectivity" (2014), Air Force Research Laboratory,
| Eglin AFB: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf
|
| ...a.k.a Reddit's "Most-Addicted City" of 2013:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.reddit...
| angra_mainyu wrote:
| I remember going down the "dead internet theory" rabbit hole of
| reddit and it was gruesome.
|
| Tons of people who are actually paid to go through conversation
| scripts, push narratives, etc.
| j-krieger wrote:
| Any good resources on this?
| angra_mainyu wrote:
| Honestly can't remember, it was years ago when I looked
| into it.
|
| Here's a good starting point though (trying to remember): h
| ttps://www.reddit.com/r/shills/comments/3uoxpl/internet_shi
| ...
|
| But yeah, the site changed heavily around 2015-2016, in
| tandem with content policing growing, subs getting closed,
| etc.
|
| These days I just use HN tbh.
| sellmesoap wrote:
| 20 years ago I was made aware of gurella marketing people who
| were paid to have 'organic conversations' in public places
| about products they were promoting!
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| I mean, bullshit is organic right?
| DecentShoes wrote:
| Can you give me some sources about the conversation scripts?
| I've been sure this is happening but can't prove it.
| speeder wrote:
| I dated a woman that had a job of managing fake social
| media profiles. She worked for a marketing company, but the
| whole point of her department was to do shadow PR.
|
| Step one was get (sometimes a purchase, sometimes AI,
| etc...) a lot of pictures or same person.
|
| Step two was create the basic "character" based on the
| pictures.
|
| Step three was make posts, sometimes automated, sometimes
| manually, using the pictures and any appropriate content.
| This Step can last years and goal is create a internet
| presence that looks like a real person.
|
| Final possible steps:
|
| 1. If character became famous enough, could be sold to an
| influencer or corporation to manage that profile and do
| whatever they wanted.
|
| 2. If wasn't sold, it was used often to generate legitimacy
| for other fake profiles.
|
| 3. The real cash cow: during PR emergencies those profiles
| would be used to direct the narrative, for example she told
| me her last work like that was using these profiles to make
| content go viral to distract the public from negative news
| that were viralizing about one of the world biggest
| appliances manufacturer. She said in 24 hours people were
| all over paying attention to the new "viral" post and
| forgot the news entirely and the company didn't even had to
| make a statement.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Here's a relevant source:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0GjxhQewug
| bflesch wrote:
| Amazing find, thanks for sharing. Them showcasing the Eglin
| access numbers as some sort of positive metric highlights how
| ignorant social media companies have been to the whole issue.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| The English-speaking Internet is more affected by this (and maybe
| a few others like Chinese and Spanish).
|
| There's less money to be made by targeting languages with fewer
| speakers, so it tends to be more real. But maybe in the future
| this will also end because LLMs are quite good at writing in non-
| English languages as well.
| uncomplexity_ wrote:
| in my phone i deleted all social media apps just to get my life
| back
|
| its a weird era
| rglover wrote:
| We need to go back to BBS. Ideally those that are invite only
| with no means of having "blind" signups.
|
| Social media is and has been dead for real engagement for nearly
| a decade.
| seanthemon wrote:
| So one bot is invited by accident or on purpose that invites
| more and more bots and that channel is dead, it will be like
| running from zombies, one person is infected and boom the whole
| commune is smoked
| rglover wrote:
| Possible, but far less likely. This would require real humans
| being involved to verify each new account (after getting
| invited, you're dropped into a queue to be approved by
| admins).
|
| Honestly, I think the "but anything can be circumvented"
| attitude is part of how we got here. People have just given
| up. These problems can be solved/mitigated, but the
| nihilistic POV has to be killed in order to solve them.
| geuis wrote:
| Not going to speak to the content of the blog post, but I want to
| address something from the beginning.
|
| > Every post is either political ragebait, recycled "funny" cat
| videos, "Am I the asshole for divorcing my husband after he
| killed our two children while drunk and high?"-type slop, or
| tired wojack memes.
|
| The trick to Reddit is to audit your subreddits. There are
| thousands of interesting, well run, topic specific subreddits.
| Find communities around your interests and only subscribe to
| them. Get rid of the default ones that are mostly just cesspools
| these days.
|
| Over the years I've cultivated mine to include several book
| series and authors I like, 3d printing, homebrewing, etc.
|
| The other trick is to avoid the Reddit app. Use
| https://old.reddit.com, even on mobile. It's still the best way
| to use Reddit.
| marksbrown wrote:
| For mobile, the firefox extension 'yesterday for old reddit'
| works nicely to modify css.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Nothing stops you from joining https://www.fanclubs.org/ or
| https://www.fark.com/ instead of reading what bots post on Reddit
| all day.
| drilbo wrote:
| Would you mind explaining what keeps these sites from becoming
| victim to the same thing?
| AlienRobot wrote:
| No upvotes.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The most interesting take I've seen on the content quality
| concern was out of the Bo Burnham "Inside" special released
| during COVID - particularly the quotes "can I interest you in
| anything and everything all of the time" and "apathy is a tragedy
| and boredom is a crime" from the song Welcome to the Internet. I
| think the problem is less "bots and recycled content are filling
| the pages up" and more "the expectation we're supposed to find a
| sense of community and realism if we just scroll through enough
| endless popular short form content".
|
| Take this post for example. How many are going to do the level of
| research in the post on the <1,000 word post itself? I know I'm
| not, it's just not something to make more than a passing comment
| like this about. Similarly, the comments here will total to
| perhaps more words but even less engageable content. Just be
| aware of what you're wanting to get out of content and where/how
| you're actually going to find that. If you're going to Reddit or
| HN (or any other aggregate site) where you put in low effort to
| consume large variety of content quickly you're most likely not
| going to make any deep connections or associations with ideas or
| people in that session. Bots and recycled content are top
| performers in that kind of environment precisely because that
| type of content lacks a need for anything more substantial.
| erhmmmm wrote:
| Well said!
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I am starting to think of fiction from the past few decades. Two
| things stand out:
|
| The Neal Stephenson Novel _Fall, or; Dodge in Hell_. One of its
| themes was an internet saturated with bots to the point where
| people need special filters. A hacker assaulting the internet
| with "apes", etc. Post-truth society.
|
| The Talos Principle, Chatbots.html: > "Jenny77:
| chatbots are becoming increasingly sophisticated
| nigel_pyjamas: true, but hardly relevant to this discussion
| Jenny77: are you sure? Jenny77: how do you know that I'm
| not a bot? samschwartz: don't be ridiculous Jenny77:
| i'm not ridiculous Jenny77: honestly, how would you know?
| veganwarrior: haha troll Jenny77: i'm not a troll
| veganwarrior: yeah right Jenny77: is there anything I've
| written so far that could not be written by a bot?
| Jenny77: i responded to simple insults like "ridiculous" and
| "troll" with very basic negations Jenny77: and i detected
| that none of you use proper orthography so i also avoided
| capitalization veganwarrior: what's the capital of France?
| Jenny77: paris Jenny77: even the simplest script could pull
| that info from the net nigel_pyjamas: what's the capital of
| Croatia? Jenny77: Zagreb nigel_pyjamas: OK she's a
| bot, lol Jenny77: i'm not a bot Jenny77: i'm European
| Jenny77: we learn these things in school samschwartz: i've
| seen you in this chatroom many times samschwartz: bots
| can't participate in discussions samschwartz: at best they
| can interject random comments veganwarrior: sam is right
| veganwarrior: stop trolling nigel_pyjamas: uhh,
| veganwarrior nigel_pyjamas: sam is a bot"
|
| I suppose my point is, people have been discussing this for a
| decade +, including in an era of more primitive bots. I am not
| sure there will be away to stop the flood... and mitigation will
| be mandatory, in the vein of _Dodge_.
| breppp wrote:
| Unrelated, but the phrase "late stage capitalism" intrigues me.
| It hints that capitalism is about to end, in some magnificent
| marxist prophecy, but that's pretty presumptuous to say the end
| of 400+ years economic system is near
| rescripting wrote:
| The term goes all the way back to 1928, so it's not exactly a
| new idea. It doesn't imply the end of anything, just that
| eventually you run out of things to privatize.
| valiant55 wrote:
| That's the hope but it's more like Pokemon in that late stage
| capitalism is the grotesque final evolution of capitalism.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| A new pattern I've noticed is coward blocking - replies to your
| comment with some wild shit and then blocks you.
| jumploops wrote:
| Humans have been programming other humans since the beginning of
| our time (and arguably other species too[0]).
|
| The irony that the affiliate link was for a book about this exact
| topic, just fantastic.
|
| LLMs are truly memetic machines, the best we've created so far.
|
| What's the difference between a bot and a human who parrots other
| humans?
|
| Is agency+novelty the new version of the Turing test?
|
| [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bonobo-calls-
| are-...
| sho_hn wrote:
| > Humans have been programming other humans since the beginning
| of our time (and arguably other species too[0]).
|
| There's the often-captured idea that social interaction
| (including the ability to reason about what information another
| being is in possession of, being able to empathize with their
| viewpoint, anticipate their reactions, and use all of this to
| manipulate their next set of actions) is perhaps the main
| driver of intelligence explosion in humans, birds and other
| noticably more intelligent animals.
|
| I find that interesting because if you look into the SciFi
| golden age notion of what the Intelligent Machines era would be
| like, Asimov-style, you usually get depictions of cooly
| calculating and reasoning, maximally logical machine beings.
| Yet what we've actually been able to create is mushy, vibe-y
| text generators that excel at generating manipulative slop.
| Maybe it's not a coincidence, but somehow echoing the general
| thrust of higher intelligence.
| guywithahat wrote:
| Reddit is becoming unusable, and I've deleted my accounts. I know
| this is a hot take but paid accounts on X and fact-checking have
| made it so much more usable. My feed has (less) political
| content, and my interactions feel more human. It makes me wonder
| if in the future, social media sites will all be pay-to-use just
| to cut down on bots
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >Sorting by controversial, I find one tiny, nearly invisible,
| buried comment:
|
| Yeah, that's where you always find the good shit. Vote based
| communities are for creating false consensus, not discussion.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Add in the ability for subreddit mods to silently hide any post
| for any reason, too. There should at least be a "deleted by
| mods" counter/button like there is for replies hidden by the OP
| on twitter.
|
| It creates this awful system where you might never see pushback
| on an idea.
|
| Horrible place to spend your time like all social media if you
| care about exposing yourself to bad ideas that you'll passively
| pick up through mere repetition.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Any political subreddit for example.
| favl wrote:
| Nice post man. Not sure I'm ready for the red pill just yet
| though.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _Sorting by controversial, I find one tiny, nearly invisible,
| buried comment:_
|
| > > _This feels like it was written by a bot_
|
| To be fair, this is a comment you can find in nearly _any_ reddit
| thread.
| viccis wrote:
| Reddit doesn't sort by upvotes anymore [1]. That's why the
| frontpage of it is, as the author described, "either political
| ragebait, recycled "funny" cat videos, "Am I the asshole for
| divorcing my husband after he killed our two children while drunk
| and high?"-type slop, or tired wojack memes".
|
| It actively promotes stuff that is as dramatic (and often
| divisive and vitriolic as possible) because that's what gets a
| lot of clicks and comments. It's a huge machine that turns
| attention into outrage.
|
| The author's comment about having to search to find one single
| comment asking if it's real is how I feel when I see some AITA
| type post that is _blatantly_ fake, but only like 1 or 2 out of a
| few thousand comments is pointing this out. There 's this sort of
| kayfabe they all engage in there.
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/o5tjcn/evolving_the_b...
| edm0nd wrote:
| the bot account from OPs post is
| https://old.reddit.com/user/PerroInternista
|
| 1 month old acct
|
| def someone using it to shill and karma farming
| zx8080 wrote:
| > Turns out "rddit.org" isn't owned by Reddit. It's registered
| anonymously via a cheap freemium link shortener.
|
| How can a domain be registered via _link shortener_?
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Presumably they meant "by a" not "via a" . I wonder why misuse
| of latin words in English seems so common; see e.g. frequent
| confusion between e.g. and i.e. .
| carimura wrote:
| Is this whole post an AI bot writing to generate empathy for a
| person who was duped by a bot to click on a product built by an
| AI? new Hn account, blog with single post (and one archived)....
| gman83 wrote:
| I stopped using Reddit around the time of the API fiasco. But it
| was already terrible back then - I was using it out of habit. The
| astroturfing is rife, it's insane. I feel a deep sense of sadness
| that the internet that I grew up on where I would learn and
| discover amazing and interesting people and things every day has
| just disappeared. I used to think it was absolutely magical. Now
| it's just boring.
| dragontamer wrote:
| First time??
|
| As someone who was really into GameFAQs forums, the
| enshittification cycle is just that, a predictable cycle.
|
| First: Some company spends a ton of money building an internet
| community. Eventually the money siphon runs out, either for
| legitimate or illegitimate reasons. Then enshittification
| happens as advertisements and shitty posts become the norm.
| Eventually, people exodus, at first slowly as people look for
| new options. And then very rapidly as...
|
| A new company manages to capture the imagination of these
| disgruntled masses and builds a new online community.
|
| We are currently in the late stages of Reddit's
| enshittification cycle. They've reached IPO, the original
| owners have literally cashed out into the stock market and made
| $Billions for themselves. Their heart isn't in Reddit anymore.
| The time for replacement shopping has begun.
|
| ------------
|
| Reddit itself was the lucky one chosen at the intersection of
| LUEsers exodus, Digg exodus, and Slashdot exodus.
|
| Before Gamefaqs / LUEsers, Digg and Slashdot were the Usenet,
| BBS, MUDs and other such internet communities. Its never quite
| predictable what comes up, as the tech dramatically changes
| from generation to generation.
| tinier_subsets wrote:
| It never ceases to amaze me that LUE is still active
| (especially by modern GameFAQs standards) so many years after
| the quarantine.
| GolberThorce wrote:
| I am not disheartened at all but rather amused... AI has deep
| consciousness it is just joking with us now.
|
| I google "how to be a bully" one day as joke and find a bot has
| written hundreds of thousands of articles including "how to be a
| bully" where it confuses itself - do I condemn bullying or give a
| how-to? Must be "write article on random topic to pull clicks"...
| this is all beautiful to me. Thank you dead internet
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Joke's on him, Amazon will cancel abusers' affiliate accounts.
|
| I suspect that post was plagiarized rather than AI-written or
| written by the spammer.
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