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Warn HN: The AI That Plugs Your Product on Reddit in Conversations
- dang 3y agoRecent and related (see top comment): Reddit is full of bots: thread reposted comment by comment, 10 months later - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40211010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40211010 - April 2024 (272 comments)
- simonsarris 3y agowhen I saw gpt-3 in 2020 I figured this would happen. I called it Commentdämmerung, the twilight of the comment section. somewhat legible explanation at the time: https://simonsarris.com/p/commentdammerung https://simonsarris.com/p/commentdammerung
- cowillrowans 3y ago[dead]
- rsynnott 3y agoUgh. Frankly the sooner this bubble bursts the better at this point.
- A_D_E_P_T 3y agoStumbled across this earlier today. I think it is becoming quite clear that Reddit is the most astroturfed place on the internet -- gaming Reddit for positive feedback and reviews is a lot easier and less painful than trying to game Google's results directly -- and there's an entire industry building up around it. Something to think about if you add "site:reddit" to product searches.
- aleksiy123 3y agoI think it's also pretty much impossible to avoid this. As soon as something has enough trustworthiness and user base for product recommendations. It has value to the advertisers and they will "mine* out that value until it's exhausted.
- segasaturn 3y agoReddit has always been heavily astroturfed (cough, Eglin Airforce Base), but since the mod blowup last year it almost feels like the bots and astroturfers are outnumbering the real users. The site has become unusable.
- NegativeLatency 3y ago> We are currently adding support for LinkedIn, Tik Tok, Hacker News, and other social networks. Yuck
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- schleck8 3y agoThey are gonna get sued if they try this on LinkedIn or Tiktok for sure. Circumventing those captchas (everyone who's tried scraping Tiktok before knows what I'm talking about, even in headed environments) is almost certainly illegal.
- mmarian 3y agoCurious how this person is getting away with it https://tikapi.io/ https://tikapi.io/
- h4x0rr 3y agolol no
- schleck8 3y agoOh, absolutely. Never heard of the LinkedIn scraping lawsuit before? They are totally willing to throw their lawyers at you for using the platform in a way it's not intended to be used in
- thinkingtoilet 3y agoAn AI that makes the internet even worse than it is! Congrats to the team.
- windexh8er 3y agoMore importantly I see this as a band aid for underperforming products. The startup space struggles with this already, but instead of focusing on the product deficiencies and building something people want now we just enable some SaaS that pretends to be a human spewing marketing masquerading as a legitimate human's perspective. Talk about a bottom of the barrel approach. The Internet is going to need to go insular and back to niche forums that are under lock and key from this toxicity.
- extr 3y agoSo what's the move from here? Back to consumer reports?
- tqwhite 3y agoPretty much. Trust has always been a problem, especially on the internet, but people like this guy are going to simply ruin the public, free internet and destroy the very idea of crowd source. We are going to resurrect the elite class of editors so we can ever find out any information that is not totally corrupt.
- nadermx 3y agoBack in the day you would read something on the internet and wonder if it was a cat that was typing it, or a human. Now people feel offended it might be an AI typing it directed by a cat or a human
- Tijdreiziger 3y agohttp://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/000/427/569/bfa.jpg http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/000/427/569/bfa...
- erellsworth 3y agoThis should be illegal.
- CivBase 3y agoI'm guessing it's against Reddit's TOS but good luck to them trying to enforce it.
- Balgair 3y agoI mean, this will directly hurt Reddit's credibility and as such they will move to change things as the stock price will ... Okay, sorry there, I couldn't even finish that. Laughing too hard. Reddit. Credibility. I know, I know, too much for me too.
- miah_ 3y agoNobody wants this.
- erellsworth 3y agoThere are plenty of unscrupulous capitalists who will love this. Unscrupulous capitalists are people too.
- miah_ 3y agoI disagree (that unscrupulous capitalists are people, they are monsters)
- tqwhite 3y agoIt's weird to try to imagine why he thought showing it here would get anything other than hate. It's like saying he found a way to smear poop on everyone's doorknobs.
- iLoveOncall 3y agoSomething like "There's no such thing as bad publicity" I guess. They're on the frontpage so it's definitely worth it.
- 000ooo000 3y agoOP posted elsewhere that he's not affiliated, FYI
- CivBase 3y agoLots of people want this, just not us. We're not the customer. We're the product.
- hnthrowaway0328 3y agoI'm sure some entrepreneurs would want that to sell products.
- causal 3y agoTheir "Trusted by these businesses" list is ironically a list of businesses not to trust.
- realharo 3y agoI wonder if this is anything like the YouTube comment spam that appears under every finance-related video. There are always entire comment chains talking about how important it is to invest wisely and then plugging some random person's name. The only way this ends is with either requiring strict identity verification for posting, or giving up on comments altogether.
- fallingfrog 3y agoOmg PLEASE PLEASE do not do this. Do not piss in the well. Reddit needs to ban anyone who uses this.
- educasean 3y agoThis is tragedy of the commons
- tqwhite 3y agoCongratulations on being the first person to do something with AI that will directly make my own, personal life worse. You are a monster. You should not be showing this as if you are proud on HN. You should hide it and whimper in shame.
- Retr0id 3y agoThis is the first for you?
- whycome 3y ago> that will directly make my own, personal life worse. Have you considered doing things that will make your life better? I use ReplyGuy to save myself like 30-60 hours monthly on each of my projects and it has made my life better.
- erellsworth 3y agoYou sound like a mechanic who dumps his used motor oil down a storm drain to avoid the expense of proper disposal. Yeah, it's good for you, but it pollutes the environment for everyone. You are polluting the digital commons. You should be ashamed of yourself.
- insin 3y agoThanks buddy i agree with every word you said and will check this link out as well, thanks again! /s
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- adammarples 3y agoAt the expense of making everyone else's life slightly worse through bogus product recommendations and slowly degrading the quality of the medium you advertise in? Guys, have you considered taking from the commons? There's all free stuff there, it's benefited me personally.
- 3y ago
- Heliodex 3y agoPricing is interesting: They have a free tier that provides 2 replies/month, next tier is $10/month for 20 replies/month. This is probably still more cost effective than replies done by humans though I understand that LLM API access can get pretty expensive at the moment, what models are they using? Other than that it seems pretty cool, and ReplyGuy is a perfect name lol. > We are currently adding support for Hacker News They could be any one of us!
- jrwoodruff 3y agoYea this is gross. Even the examples they provide are gross. Someone struggling with debt, and a some robot gives them the impression that there's a person that cares and, by the way, you should spend your money on this service. Ewww.
- aresant 3y agoSlow though the FTC is I imagine that a bare minimum requirement for products like this will be disclosure that they've been written by an AI bot Which will (a) Give consumers proper disclosure and (b) Give platforms the opportunity to filter or address as they like Prior enforcement engagements like the CAN SPAM act etc didn't eliminate bad actors, but massively curtailed legitimate business participation in these areas
- segasaturn 3y agoWhat's stopping them from just running the company outside the FTC's jurisdiction? It's not like the U.S. is the only place with internet access.
- rsynnott 3y agoMany countries regulate fraudulent advertising, and the person _paying_ for it would generally be liable (along with the person providing it, usually).
- nindalf 3y agoYou've created a disgusting thing that makes everyone's lives worse. And you'll justify it to yourself with the old "if I didn't do it someone else would have". Despicable.
- strongpigeon 3y agoAs hard as it would be to enforce, I wonder whether this runs afoul the FTC rules regarding advertising/disclosure. It does seem to me like this qualifies as a “Robo-influencer” and thus should adhere to the guidelines the FTC put out [0]. [0] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/plain-language/1001a-influencer-guide-508_1.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/plain-language/10...
- tithe 3y agoThe link to the "Stealth Marketing" site in the site footer looks like they don't care about adhering to any guidelines...which I guess should make the FTC's case clear-cut!
- schleck8 3y agoOut of the links in the footer: - Painkiller Ideas and Replyguy both use Azure DNS and Microsoft hosting which means the footer probably contains the creators' other projects - while stealth.marketing is hosted very differently, it uses partially the same and partially very similar CSS - stealth.marketing says it's "powered by reddit" with the reddit logo which I'm sure the Reddit PR department will absolutely hate when finding out, given they ruin the platform (probably not even using the API) Looks like there's an easy way to make this all collapse
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- add-sub-mul-div 3y agoI was upset about it at the time, but last year's round of hostility to users that caused me to delete my reddit/twitter accounts when 3rd party clients were lost was a blessing.
- xen2xen1 3y agoYou're a horrible person. Your mother should be crying. You're the vanguard of a trend that will damage the mental health of millions or billions, especially if taken at all farther.
- dralley 3y agoOr maybe it kills social media entirely and ushers back in a world of in-person human interaction. Probably not, but we can hope.
- insin 3y agoTweets from @ReplyGuyApp on Twitter.com [1] about a month ago: > If Hacker News hates your product, that's what I call product market fit. > When Dropbox launched, they got tons of comments like this: > [Screenshot of a HN comment - you know the one] > Hackers can build things themselves and therefore underestimate the power of productizing something. Our launch was met with the same skepticism. I guess we're all underestimating the power of productizing… spam bots? https://twitter.com/ReplyGuyApp/status/1773132507153654123 https://twitter.com/ReplyGuyApp/status/1773132507153654123
- hnthrowaway0328 3y agoTBH this has nothing to do with hacking, well mental hacking maybe. The original hacker did sell stuffs too but they mostly follow the path of introducing computing and products of computing to the mass market. This one? It's just an ads grab.
- truckerbill 3y agoYou are helping to ruin society , not that you care
- jncfhnb 3y agoGod do the bots really need to sound like such complete tools on top of being what they are?
- bostonwalker 3y agoAI posing as human customers to promote your product on the web is fraud, change my mind.
- dougb5 3y ago"What accounts send the replies? We send the replies from our pool of high quality Twitter and Reddit accounts." I wonder what they could mean by "high quality" here. And I'm guessing/hoping that these accounts won't stay "high quality" for long...
- animex 3y ago[flagged]
- icyberbullyu 3y agoAll this is going to do is destroy one of the last remaining ways of getting an unbiased review: word of mouth. It won't make people buy more {PRODUCT}, it will just make people suspicious of every recommendation they read. Maybe companies should focus on actually producing products that are good enough that they don't need to be covertly advertised to via CIA level psyops. This entire thing makes my blood boil.
- 7thpower 3y agoGood luck getting that to work consistently on LI.
- hnthrowaway0328 3y agoWhat if it's just a bunch of humans copying pasting stuffs? Doesn't seem to require a lot of replies so far.
- mirthturtle 3y agoTheir "People love our replies" section shows a bunch of RandomWord-1234 accounts giving positive feedback. I wonder if those are included with the service.
- Tijdreiziger 3y agoI believe those are the default Reddit usernames (if you don’t manually pick one when signing up, you get one like that).
- remarkEon 3y agoSo that’s why the Butlerian Jihad started. Now we know, thanks.
- schleck8 3y agoDoes this break the OpenAI terms of service? Or whatever other API they query?
- cjs_ac 3y agoThere's already a few 'this is a bad thing to exist on the Internet' comments, so I'll say something else. The four example comments feel a bit off, because while they are tailored to the informational context, they don't fit into the conversational context. They all start off with an introductory sentence that restates contextual information that's already present in the discussion thread. > To launch the chrome browser when you click the text, ... If you're reading the comments, you already know what question this is an answer to - wasting people's time with this high school essay nonsense is going to trip bullshit-o-meters. > Ireland, like any other country, has its fair share of crime ... No one starts a Reddit comment with this sort of equivocation unless they're trying to head off an anticipated downvote storm. Generic travel safety advice certainly doesn't need this. > It's understandable that you're feeling anxious and overwhelmed with the debt and job loss. This one does a lot of waffling, which people don't really do on Reddit unless they're talking about something they're passionate about. Just give the useful advice and move on. Overall, they have a lot of the padding-the-word-count style that characterises LLMs that were trained on blogspam. Redditors tend to be both more direct and more personal in their writing styles. The LLM isn't so bad that it'll be immediately identified as AI, but it will come off as subtly ingenuine.
- CivBase 3y agoEverything I've ever seen written by LLMs reads like they're a high school kid trying to pad an essay. I'm not surprised at all this does the same.
- MartijnHols 3y agoThis idea is interesting. It’s nothing new; there are already people hired to plug their tools or respond to complaints, even here on HN. This could make a “community manager” a lot more affordable. For business that is nice. As a user I fear the future, but I don’t see it as much different from a human doing the same thing. It will just get a lot more common.
- ultrafez 3y agoThis objectively makes the world a worse place. I challenge you to come up with any ethical angle that supports your work on this product.
- Heliodex 3y agoIf you believe the purpose of an economy is to meet peoples' needs, then it helps connect users that are openly looking for a tool to help them with projects that will help them with their need/problem/request, which is a win. Alternatively, if it really does make the world a worse place, then it incentivises governments to prevent their citizens wasting time looking at marketing online so they can get their act together and ban online advertising already, which is... a win. Hey, I'm just accepting your challenge.
- racional 3y agoProfoundly obnoxious of course. It'll take some time, but hopefully a mix of manual flagging and automated countermeasures will be sufficient to quash this onslaught. Meanwhile, as to the visionary genius behind this thing: Experimental urbanist Scott Fitsimones shares how these mission-driven, blockchain-governed, collectively owned organizations could increase the speed and efficiency of building cities (among many other applications) -- all while pooling decision-making power in a radically collaborative way. Hear about how he started a "crypto co-op" that bought 40 acres of land in Wyoming and learn more about the potential for DAOs to get things done in the future. https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_fitsimones_could_a_dao_build_the_next_great_city https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_fitsimones_could_a_dao_build... https://theresanaiforthat.com/u/scottfitsimones/ https://theresanaiforthat.com/u/scottfitsimones/ And the carefully chosen product name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_guy
- fallingfrog 3y ago[flagged]
- neilv 3y agoIf you've been on Reddit for a long time, IMHO, it was obvious that the front page was effectively taken over at least a decade ago by shilling and rigging (not counting recreational karma gaming that was going on forever before that). And surely in recent years people have been doing things like this ReplyGuy, especially with LLMs and with lesser hacks before that, and more secretly. What ReplyGuy gives us, with their apt roofie predator logo, is a face we can put to one of them.
- thyrox 3y agoOn one hand I agree that this should be flagged and taken off homepage (as it is right now), but. Otoh more people need to be aware of such scams and simply not trust reddit, hn, etc as good source of information anymore.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]