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I got 10k post karma on Reddit with (and without) fast.ai
- tlarkworthy 6y agoThe fact that a ton of AI work was beaten by a flash of inspiration just goes to show how far behind AI is over the human brain. But excitingly, it also suggests a crazy future where machine can actually do that.
- cjohnson318 6y agoI don't think that a current limitation is an indicator of future success. I think a more likely future is one governed by diminishing returns, and prohibitively large computation.
- adeeds 6y agoI think it goes to show how easy it is to get reddit karma. I wrote a bot that uses 2 regular expressions to generate reddit comments. In the 16 days since I created it, it's amassed more than 7k karma (despite substantial downtime due to bugs)
- dgritsko 6y agoA couple of years back, it was announced that the trailer for one of the new Star Wars movies would debut during halftime of Monday Night Football. There's always a rush to post stuff like links to new movie trailers "first" on Reddit, so as to get the most fake internet points. I guessed that the trailer would probably get added to the Star Wars YouTube page at around the same time it aired on TV, so I wrote a script to scrape the YouTube page every few seconds, and if a new video was added, submit the link to one of the big subreddits. Sure enough, my hunch was correct, and my submission of the trailer on YouTube wound up being the first. The upvotes and comments poured in, skyrocketing the post briefly to the #1 link on Reddit's front page. This felt pretty cool and resulted in several thousand post karma. I didn't use the program after that, having satisfied my curiosity as to whether or not it would actually work. But it did make me think about just how easy it is to farm karma on Reddit, and how useless it is as a proxy for "trust" or "reputation" or anything other than what it is - fake internet points.
- gadders 6y agoI'm sure you could do similar with certain blogs and posting to HN. EG PG's blog, anything written by Patio11 etc.
- Jtsummers 6y agoHN is small enough that timing matters even more than on Reddit. So a script would have to take that into consideration. HN also works against duplicate posts, so a post at midnight US eastern time wouldn't see much activity, and then reposts later in the morning would only add to its upvotes rather than getting new (better timed) listings.
- gadders 6y agoBut if you were polling, say, PG's blog and posted it here within minutes of it being published you'd accrue all the benefits of the dupes, no?
- Jtsummers 6y agoYes, but limited. It'd depend on whether the mods reupped the post the next morning so it could have a chance of hitting the front page or if a dupe managed to get through (which does happen). Either because the system permits it, or because the submitter added a #nonce to the end. If the mods reupped it, then it'd work out really well for the original submitter. If karma mattered, I suppose it'd be worth trying a few times to see how it worked out.
- gadders 6y agoYeah, I'm not going to bother with it just for imaginary internet points, but I bet if you wanted to take it further you could analyse the top sites that hit the front page and poll all of them.
- ASalazarMX 6y ago> But it did make me think about just how easy it is to farm karma on Reddit, and how useless it is as a proxy for "trust" or "reputation" or anything other than what it is - fake internet points. More than fake internet points, it's a distilled popularity contest, and we know popular people isn't necessarily trustworthy. Reddit calling it karma gives it more credit than it deserves.
- aaron-santos 6y agoThe real story here is that domain expertise can lead to superior outcomes. The hybrid curation pipeline still worked, but it was a low risk and low reward solution that would eventually reach the goal. In general, there's a lot of unanswered questions regarding how to optimize in the risk reward ML space.
- KaoruAoiShiho 6y agotldr: It didn't work and the bot never made a popular post.
- jonnypotty 6y agoThanks mate. Nearly wasted life reading that.
- Proven 6y agoSo you are a spammer.
- oh_sigh 6y agoI know that spammers, PR firms, marketing teams, etc will buy accounts with good karma(for how much, I don't know). I wonder approximately how much $/hour a good karma farmer could generate with techniques like this? Could it be an alternative to mechanical turk for some?
- thrwn_frthr_awy 6y agoHow do you know they purchase reddit accounts?
- minimaxir 6y agoThis is a reminder that account karma on Reddit and Hacker News doesn't really mean anything and doesn't make your posts more valuable, or give it any additional benefit in the algorithms. (I say that as someone with 153k Reddit karma and a user ranked #57 on the HN leaderboards: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders ) Going truly viral on Reddit/HN is still ultimately random as well, which is why reposting (within reasonable amounts) is allowed on both platforms. As someone who works on social media automation/tooling for their day job (2018 rough overview of my work: https://tech.buzzfeed.com/how-were-building-superpowers-for-social-publishers-at-buzzfeed-ac24fad5ae11 https://tech.buzzfeed.com/how-were-building-superpowers-for-... ), I do agree that ML/AI can be helpful to aid human curation, but definitely not a magic end-all-be-all that growth hackers nowadays want it to be. Simple heuristics can be very powerful as well.
- elliotbnvl 6y agoUsername checks out.
- bromuro 6y agoI see this kind of comments quite often - what is the point checking out the username? Is an underground internet meme i’ve been missing? (No native English speaker here)
- minimaxir 6y agoIt's a Reddit meme.
- elliotbnvl 6y agoIt means that the username is appropriate to the body of the comment. It's very common on Reddit.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sixstringtheory 6y ago
- Der_Einzige 6y ago2 things 1. Why was this formed as classification instead of as regression? Seems much more like a regression problem (predict how many upvotes you will get given a reddit post) 2. Seems like it could have been effective with better pre-training. I'd love to see the author rerun the experiments with the likes of GPT-2 or other pre-trained models vectorizing the text first.
- scollet 6y agoWouldn't you have to bucket and rank content and subreddits, respectively, anyways? Otherwise you will probably have a none-size fits all algorithm. Seems like an incremental decison tree problem with weights around karma and time of day.
- jungletime 6y agoAs someone that got a photo of a grizzly in the wild. It was surprisingly easy. Here's how you can do it too. For probably under 1k. 1. Fly out to Anchorage, Alaska 2. Drive to Denali visitor center, (Denali State Park) 3. Take the Bus to Denali (~$50) You are almost guaranteed to see a wild grizzlies along the way. The bus will stop so you can take a photo. You can even get off and go for a hike if you like. They will pick you up on the way back. (or whats left of you...) If you decide not to, thats okay too. You will have many near death experiences, as your school bus drives along a dirt road along steeped cliff mountain edges, for many miles. The bus takes you to heart of Denali, where you can see Mount Mckinley (Highest mountain in North America), and where temperatures can dip to minus 60 degrees in winter.
- ameerkat 6y agoThanks for the tip!
- xondono 6y ago> For probably under 1k. 1. Fly out to Anchorage, Alaska You are greatly underestimating that cost
- jungletime 6y agoI drove by car and camped along the way. Definitely don't stay in hotels in Alaska, if you're not rich. Its crazy expensive (like $400/night for Holiday Inn) The way to do it cheaply is to fly in late June/July and camp in Denali park. The weather is warm enough for camping and its fantastic. I actually feel camping is the best way to do it! Assuming you already own camping gear. And can pack some food. Here's how it can be done: $100 - Camping in Denali Park: $45 (entrance fee) + $17/night x 3 $200 - $50/day * 4 days car rental $50 - Fuel / Snacks ( 300 miles round trip from Anchorage) $50 - Denali Bus Ticket $50 - Firewood/Misc _____ $450 - 4 days/3 nights. Budget left for flight $550 . Depending where you fly in from you could come in under 1k. Seattle round trip flight in June $400. NY/Alaska is $620 round trip. Which would push you over 1k. But if you convince a friend to go with you, you could split the car/camping costs. You can also do wild camping for free, and if you're into trying fly fishing, I definitely recommend getting a fishing license. Fishing License Costs: 1 day - $25 / 3 days - $45. A basic Fly fishing kit can be bought < $100.
- baxtr 6y ago> Conclusion Building a reddit post bot with fast.ai was an fun project, however a bit of manual effort beat out my months of web crawling and compute time. Oh well... (63% of the 10k points were achieved manually)
- dcolkitt 6y ago> Back in 2006-2007 my friend and I put together a spreadsheet of 20 or so high-level achievements called “Everything’s a Contest”. This included goals like “Photograph a live grizzly bear in the wild”, “Have something named after you”, and “Get 10,000 (post) karma on Reddit”. I can't be the only one who wants to see the full spreadsheet.
- jungletime 6y agoAn easy hack to get to record negative karma. Mention hunters laptop on /r/politics/ today, and use the keyword "Natalie"
- Rebelgecko 6y agoYou'll probably get removed by the mods before you get downvoted too much. I posted a link to a story about twitter changed their rules due to the NY Post and it was removed due to being only "tangentially related to politics"
- anticsapp 6y agoI've been meaning to write a bot that randomly posts the Always Sunny in Philadelphia quote "Because of the implication.." every ten minutes. It might get gummed up a bit with RIP or self-harm threads but I am certain after enough time it would be net karma positive.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ccchen920 6y agoconstructive ai bot, reminds me of this xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
- tomcat27 6y agowhy is that important?
- _ps6d 6y agoOne of the bots in /r/SubredditSimulator was the "top today" bot, which would just take the top 500 posts from /r/all in the last 24 hours, pick one of the links at random, and repost it with a gibberish title made from a markov chain of those 500 posts' titles. With such a small set of input, the titles almost never made any sense at all. I had to shut that bot down, because eventually just reposting a random popular meme/image from the last 24 hours with a nonsensical title started becoming far too successful and it ended up getting 2,648,254 post karma, while often getting its own posts near the top of /r/all: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimMeta/comments/c5besk/the_alltoptoday_ss_bot_will_no_longer_post_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimMeta/comments/c5besk/th...
- sdeaf 6y agoWhat do you assume the source and cause of the upvotes were? Browsing /r/all it is easy to attribute the post and comments as pre-programmed. Faulty algorithms? algorithms working as intended? vote purchase? intentional spam? Do you scrape, log, and track, and compare user comments, and profiles on reddit or any other site? What data do you collect?
- ggm 6y agoDid the end of the article say he only showed he WOULD get 10k, not actually did?
- ameerkat 6y agoYes, what I was trying to articulate at the end was that the bot which finds urls to post only generated 3.7k karma after 1.5 months. Given additional time there's nothing stopping it from generating up to the 10k. I actually achieved the 10k with some additional manual posts rather than extend the bot or run it for additional time.
- ggm 6y agoWell, you won your merit badge, thats the main thing. I can't help feeling using mechanical turk was logistically the same as buying the karma: you could have paid them to do things which either directly or almost directly earned you the score, not just grading inputs. But I don't mean to quibble: it was an interesting/entertaining read! I think if you'd gone into an investment space, you might have earned the score faster by virtue of earning other people money from your picks.
- fefe23 6y agoSo basically you used unethical trickery to cheat yourself 10k meaningless internet points? You also shoehorned AI into the story so you could generate some meaningless internet points with the impressionable youth on Hacker News, too? How about you do something meaningful and ethical with AI instead. Then you might even earn an upvote from me.
- dang 6y agoAw, please don't flame people this here. It's not sporting and not in the intended spirit of the site. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- fefe23 6y agoYou may be confused about the meaning of "flame". I did not flame anybody. Flaming is an insult directed against a person. I rephrased what they confessed about their deeds. The deeds are, indeed, in my estimation, unethical. I assumed that part is not controversial, as the cheated system in question is called the Karma system. Surely it is not news to you that cheating karma is unethical? It was instituted to foster trust and good behavior among visitors of Reddit. The posting is about cheating that system. I must be missing something here. Please explain.
- ameerkat 6y agoThe intention was not to write a bot which uses unethical trickery, but one that was a productive poster. I include the posts to reddit the bot made in the article. I understand how you may be disillusioned by this article, and I concur that there are many more meaningful things I would like to apply AI to than a contest between friends.
- MayeulC 6y agoHmm, I'm actually interested in that kind of ML application, for filtering news I'd be interested in, fine-tuned to my preference. Maybe crawl the net to find some interesting news, yes, but most of all assign a score to all the news that come my way (RSS, aggregators, etc), and filter out the useless ones. And while you are at it, apply this to e-mail too. Maybe with a small chance of letting some trough to avoid getting stuck in a local maxima, or locking someone out. At least this would make it much easier to read the important news first, most of the time. Though important != interesting.
- carbonatedmilk 6y agoI don't understand why the author took the approach he did. He creates a classifier with 5 label,s and gets 50% accuracy on the cross-val (This may be ok, may be terrible, we don't know), but then only uses the labels for one of those classes. What's the precision/recall on that class? Also, he's taken a multi-class classification approach to what is essentially a regression task. He's trying to predict the # of upvotes a post will get, and there are approaches that'll do that, but this isn't one of them. It's fun to see NLP applied to these sort of problems, but this isn't a good example of how to do it well.