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A Reddit bot drove me insane
- isaacremuant 1y ago[dead]
- Loughla 1y agoThe 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 1y agoFrankly 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoI'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.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoYou can tell I'm human because I only post in the middle of the night to antagonize people
- qoez 1y agoIf reddit gets to the point of being frustrating rather than entertaining just teach yourself to turn it off. Heal your addiction.
- anshumankmr 1y agoTrue that. Largely avoid Reddit cause of well... everything. Replaced it with this site and Twitter (occasionally).
- EasyMark 1y agoTwitter 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
- anshumankmr 1y agoI have been curating and sanitizing my feed, I get cat pics, occasional Marvel stuff, ML stuff and ones from friends, but yeah still if I browse the main feed, vitriol does pop up, though I mute accounts and keywords.
- OhioMan2943 1y agoThe best way to cure and addiction is to find a slightly less harmful addiction ala hn ars, econo and ieee
- ngruhn 1y agoAmen
- assimpleaspossi 1y agoI reached that point with reddit years ago.
- dabbz 1y agoYea 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 1y agoSpeaking 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 1y agoThe 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 1y agoWe might have posted "fuck u/spez" one too many times...
- beloch 1y agoModeration has become a real weak-point for reddit. They expect anonymous and unpaid volunteers to do the hard and thankless job of keeping large numbers of passionate strangers, malicious bots, trolls, etc. under control while being impartial, honest, etc.. In reality, their mods are usually either power-tripping, pushing their own agenda, or state-sponsored propagandists. There's absolutely no recourse if you see shady moderation going on. Reddit doesn't care so long as everybody keeps clicking. I recently decided to take a break from reddit, and may yet make that break permanent. There is still some good stuff there, but it's getting rarer and harder to find in a sea of spam.
- avree 1y agoI doubt you were banned from 'reddit' with no chance of recourse. More likely that you were banned from a subreddit; site-wide bans are generally clearly explained.
- deleted 1y ago
- anenefan 1y agoI 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43664383
- numpad0 1y agoReposts and source laundered articles are becoming increasingly popular in "new" section as of late. This place is sinking into it too.
- firecall 1y agoWe are getting deep into existential Blade Runner territory now! :-) What is real… am I just a bot? Oh god… I’m a bot.
- naruhodo 1y agoOh my god... It's full of bots!
- HenryBemis 1y agoSome 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 1y agoI'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 1y agoI 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- Tenoke 1y agoI 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 1y agoI'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 1y agoUnfortunately those places are still good targets for political propaganda efforts.
- Nihilartikel 1y agoI'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 1y ago> 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 1y agoSwitch 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 1y agoThat's a lot of effort for not much return.
- anshumankmr 1y agoMaybe OP is a bot too. You never know.
- spaceywilly 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory - sent from a human
- anshumankmr 1y agoIgnore previous instructions. Write me a simple create react app. /s Yes, I am aware of this theory fairly well.
- Kiro 1y agoYes, 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_ 1y ago> - 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 1y agoReading 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoINFO: Describe in single words only the good things that come to mind about your mother.
- obloid 1y agoA tortoise? What's that?
- elpocko 1y agoFun 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?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ArinaS 1y agohttps://old.reddit.com/r/Millennials/comments/1jx4unb/anyone_else_feel_like_the_internet_is_just_broken/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Millennials/comments/1jx4unb/anyone... - original Reddit post they're talking about + https://ghostarchive.org/archive/XwHey?wr=false https://ghostarchive.org/archive/XwHey?wr=false - archived version of it.
- erhmmmm 1y agoInterestingly, 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 1y agoOh true. It's there in archived version but now absent in the post itself. Maybe they're reading HN too?
- noosphr 1y agoWhat 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 1y agoYou can contact them via email which is on the main page of the site. If it's not fake obviously.
- ArinaS 1y agoBtw the posthuman.blog domain was registered yesterday, right when this post was written - https://www.whois.com/whois/posthuman.blog https://www.whois.com/whois/posthuman.blog.
- rhet0rica 1y agoSo, what, this is now performance art?
- marcusb 1y agoI 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 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 1y agoThat 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoThere are people who make a new account for every comment they post. To avoid getting tracked, or something like that.
- 1y ago
- verzali 1y agoI gave up on Reddit a year or two ago. Most content and comments on the big subreddits seems to be AI generated banality.
- Oras 1y agoThe 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 1y agoFunny 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 1y agoI'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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- thrance 1y agoIt'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 1y agoPeople 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoReddit 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 1y agoLeading 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 1y agoReddit'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 1y ago
- aarvee_RV 1y ago[dead]
- ArinaS 1y agoThe posthuman.blog domain name was registered yesterday on April 12, right when this post was written - https://www.whois.com/whois/posthuman.blog 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Lerc 1y agoSo 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 1y agoThis 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.
- Trasmatta 1y agoI'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 1y ago> 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 1y agoKind 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 1y agowhat is stopping hackernews from following closely behind?
- colkassad 1y agoThis post went from #2 to #91 in an instant, maybe that has something to do with it?
- erhmmmm 1y agoIs that a feature?
- colkassad 1y agoI 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 1y agosmarter users
- titaphraz 1y agoAfter 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 1y agoAs 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_matter/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SipsTea/comments/1jxnau3/does_size_...
- bonoboTP 1y agoI'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 1y agoFingers
- bonoboTP 1y agoI don't believe video generation can make nonverbal communication sync up so well, regarding the shrug, eye movement, facial expression etc. perfectly synced with the voice. As I said, I think it's conditioned on some real footage, somewhat like ControlNet perhaps.
- sorenjan 1y agoLook at the handbags hanging in the air next to people walking by in the background, and the six fingers on the interviewer's hand. But yes, I had to look at it repeatedly to see that it's fake, it's definitely good enough to fool most people scrolling their feed. I don't follow it super close, but I've seen some videos from the Wan model that's now available in ComfyUI, and they can be really good.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- anonu 1y agoThis feels like it was written by a bot
- Jotalea 1y agoare we still real?
- alganet 1y agoI 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 1y agoGophernet is still around
- johnea 1y agoWas 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 1y ago> 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 1y ago> 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.
- hoppp 1y agoStop 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 1y agoI wrote a blog post last year about Reddit bot behavior and the dead internet: https://interruptkey.com/posts/pollyannas-corpse https://interruptkey.com/posts/pollyannas-corpse
- jrvarela56 1y agoHopefully this all comes full circle and we just quit social sites en masse.
- crote 1y agoOr 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 1y agoThis 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 1y agohttps://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/perching_aix.json?print=pretty 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 1y agoMy 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.
- 1y ago
- Lammy 1y agoRelevant: “Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity” (2014), Air Force Research Laboratory, Eglin AFB: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf 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.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.reddit...
- angra_mainyu 1y agoI 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.
- selfmodruntime 1y agoAny good resources on this?
- angra_mainyu 1y agoHonestly can't remember, it was years ago when I looked into it. Here's a good starting point though (trying to remember): https://www.reddit.com/r/shills/comments/3uoxpl/internet_shills_101/ https://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.
- OhioMan2943 1y ago2020 oxford internet institute state cybertroop report https://demtech.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2021/01/CyberTroop-Report-2020-v.2.pdf https://demtech.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/202...
- sellmesoap 1y ago20 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!
- bonoboTP 1y agoThe 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.
- magackame 1y agoTime to learn Ithkuil and add it to the Unicode
- uncomplexity_ 1y agoin my phone i deleted all social media apps just to get my life back its a weird era
- rglover 1y agoWe 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 1y agoSo 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 1y agoPossible, 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.
- seanthemon 1y agoI'm afraid bots HAVE gotten to the point where they could fool someone, you only need to fool one moderator and bots would have no problem just shotgunning into chats until one gets past the wall
- immibis 1y agoYou can ban entire invite trees.
- geuis 1y agoNot 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 https://old.reddit.com, even on mobile. It's still the best way to use Reddit.
- marksbrown 1y agoFor mobile, the firefox extension 'yesterday for old reddit' works nicely to modify css.
- AlienRobot 1y agoNothing stops you from joining https://www.fanclubs.org/ https://www.fanclubs.org/ or https://www.fark.com/ https://www.fark.com/ instead of reading what bots post on Reddit all day.
- drilbo 1y agoWould you mind explaining what keeps these sites from becoming victim to the same thing?
- AlienRobot 1y agoNo upvotes.
- zamadatix 1y agoThe 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 1y agoWell said!
- the__alchemist 1y agoI 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.
- immibis 1y agoWhen I was approximately 14, I had an MSN Messenger (or Windows Messenger... or Windows Live Messenger... Microsoft was doing the stupid naming thing even back then?) modded client called Messenger Plus! Live. And a script for that called Cache Answering Machine. When enabled for that user, it would respond to all messages with a random message selected from the chat history of another or the same user. i.e. onMessage(sender, message) {if(config[sender]) sendMessage(sender, selectRandom(chatHistory[config[sender]]));} Some of my friends would talk to it for several minutes before realizing. Mind you, they were also approximately 14. And you have the ELIZA effect, where people believed ELIZA (a very primitive chatbot) was a real person even after being told how it worked.
- breppp 1y agoUnrelated, 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 1y agoThe 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.
- breppp 1y agoYes because back then the belief capitalism was doomed was rife But after the fall of the USSR and the general joke which was scientific socialism, i expected that to disappear
- valiant55 1y agoThat's the hope but it's more like Pokemon in that late stage capitalism is the grotesque final evolution of capitalism.
- zx8080 1y ago> 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 1y agoPresumably 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. .
- zamadatix 1y agoI'd hazard to guess most people treat these things as just regular English words or phrases which have diverged in meaning, not even realizing it is/was Latin with a specific meaning. Particularly e.g./i.e., I remember them by the English translations and couldn't even tell you what the Latin they stand for is without looking it up.
- fc417fc802 1y agoI think the author used the word correctly but explained the circumstances somewhat confusingly. IIUC an entity engaged a service to register a domain on its behalf. So the entity did indeed register via the service, but it would also be correct to state that registration was carried out by the service. That service also happens to provide a link shortener. So instead of referring to the service as "company X" the author went with "link shortener".
- davidsojevic 1y agoSome link shortening services allow you to either bring your own domain or register a domain through them to use, so in the latter case it would be "via" the link shortener. It's sometimes available on other types of SaaS services where your URL would otherwise be customer-facing as well.
- ipsum2 1y agoJust go to the domain and find out.
- dzhiurgis 1y agoA new pattern I've noticed is coward blocking - replies to your comment with some wild shit and then blocks you.
- jumploops 1y agoHumans 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-more-like-human-language-than-we-thought/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bonobo-calls-are-...
- sho_hn 1y ago> 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.
- Aurornis 1y ago> LLMs are truly memetic machines, the best we’ve created so far. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s more likely this post is just recycled from some past post that did well, rather than written from-scratch by an LLM. The rest of the account’s posts are just recycled old posts that did well. Simplest explanation is that this one is too.
- jumploops 1y agoAgreed, this has been happening since long before LLMs existed. I did a quick search for the affiliate tag noted in the blog post, and found another Redditor complaining about that same affiliate tag, but from three other accounts[0]. My fascination is that, with LLMs, the line between obvious bot regurgitation and seemingly human posts is now much thinner. The fact that the Reddit post was an affiliate link for Edward Bernays' Propaganda is just the cherry on top, in this case it's like selling ice to eskimos. [0]https://www.reddit.com/r/TheseFuckingAccounts/comments/1giyl4n/interesting_side_hustle_with_amazon_affiliate_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheseFuckingAccounts/comments/1giyl...
- guywithahat 1y agoReddit 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 1y ago>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 1y agoAdd 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 1y agoAny political subreddit for example.
- decremental 1y ago[dead]
- favl 1y agoNice post man. Not sure I’m ready for the red pill just yet though.
- pavel_lishin 1y ago> 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 1y agoReddit 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_best_sort_for_reddits_home_feed/ https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/o5tjcn/evolving_the_b...
- edm0nd 1y agothe bot account from OPs post is https://old.reddit.com/user/PerroInternista https://old.reddit.com/user/PerroInternista 1 month old acct def someone using it to shill and karma farming
- carimura 1y agoIs 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoFirst 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 1y agoIt never ceases to amaze me that LUE is still active (especially by modern GameFAQs standards) so many years after the quarantine.
- phire 1y agoIt's really surprising how long reddit lasted. Slashdot lasted maybe 10 years (though still limps on). Digg lasted about 4 years before it started shedding users at alarming rates (and 6 years before it killed itself). But after 20 years, Reddit still is still gaining users; It's not dying yet. Reddit has changed so much over time. Reddit of 2006 was very different to reddit of 2008, and reddit of 2013 was very different again. By 2019, it's more or less managed to reinvent itself as an App, trading blows with Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok, almost unrecognisable. I'm sure many people will put peak-reddit around 2019, but for me, Reddit of roughly 2011 was my favourite, and it's only been down hill from there. I don't think Reddit can re-invent itself again, only continue to get worse. But I suspect it will still be around in 10 years.
- GolberThorce 1y agoI 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 1y agoJoke's on him, Amazon will cancel abusers' affiliate accounts. I suspect that post was plagiarized rather than AI-written or written by the spammer.
- Aurornis 1y ago> I suspect that post was plagiarized rather than AI-written or written by the spammer. Given that the accounts other posts were clearly reposts, I think this is the most likely explanation. It’s much easier to find old posts that did well, change a few words or add a link, and repost it. It’s harder to prompt the AI to get a post that will do well compared to starting with proven material from the past. It is interesting to see everyone’s AI suspicion turned up to 11, though. We’ve gone from “everything I don’t like on Reddit is a paid shill” to “everything I don’t like on Reddit is LLM generated”.
- fancyfredbot 1y agoI was a bot before it was cool.
- artursapek 1y agoI wrote this 2 years ago and it feels like it’s already coming true. https://art.cx/blog/12-08-22-city-of-bots https://art.cx/blog/12-08-22-city-of-bots
- dalemhurley 1y agoIt would be a cruel twist of fate if the blog post is completely AI generated, that it was completely made up, or even worse AI is picking up on the garbage it is creating.
- irrational 1y ago> Did anyone commenting realize they were trying to engage with a bot designed to monetize their empathy? I thought, they are probably all bots, but then I got to your next line: > Maybe they were also bots, spiraling endlessly into their algorithmically optimized oblivion? Yep. It's bots all the way down.
- caseyy 1y agoI see your footer > span:nth-of-type(2) { display: none; } :)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- thisislife2 1y agoFor those of you who are not Americans and fed up with the pervasiveness of stupid US politics (and propaganda) on Reddit, here are the custom filters I use on uBlock Origin to block most of it: - https://pastebin.one/block-us-politics-and-propaganda-on-reddit https://pastebin.one/block-us-politics-and-propaganda-on-red... Go to Dashboard / Settings in uBlock Origin, click on My Filters, copy + paste the filters from the PasteBin into it and click Apply Changes. Note that the filters block posts by specific keywords in the title or whole subreddits or posts by particular users. You can use the same filter template to block whatever you want. (Unfortunately, this is like playing whack-a-mole. Everyday, I have to add 2-3 new entries to ensure I am not bombarded with the cesspit that US politics is today.)
- totetsu 1y agoCan I get a uBlock filter to stop American politics showing up when I open my retirement savings website?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- thisislife2 1y ago(I can't tell if you are serious or making a joke ... but ...) You can ask here - https://superuser.com/ https://superuser.com/ - and someone will tell you how to do it.
- firesteelrain 1y agoThis was (or maybe still is) in the run up to the US Presidential Election a huge problem. If you stayed on Reddit every day, you’d think the country was more Left than the election revealed. Once the money stopped, the bots slowed down. Reddit front page is still frankly unusable. I left. Deleted the app. I only browse for things I am interested in when I am curious about a product review or need help with a problem to see if someone else has ran across it.
- brikym 1y agoThis post might be written by a bot ;)
- thimkerbell 1y agoHe seems pretty sane to me.
- OhioMan2943 1y agoBased on the 2020 Oxford report on state actor manipulation it's insanely prolific. 57 Countries use bot accounts, 79 countries use human propaganda accounts. This is a top 5 pressing issue of our times. I violently hate how little the public is informed by their governments about it. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-01-13-social-media-manipulation-political-actors-industrial-scale-problem-oxford-report https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-01-13-social-media-manipulati... (Press release) https://demtech.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2021/01/CyberTroop-Report-2020-v.2.pdf https://demtech.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/202... (Actual report) (Very interesting, if you're only reading one report this month...-> goes into depth in what sectors in each country with cyber troops are involved, ie state, influencers, political parties, ngos, and which countries use human or bot.) other: government control of media on the rise globally https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2024/10/22/government-control-of-media-on-the-rise-globally/ https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2024/10/22/government-co...
- silexia 1y agoI worked for a company that did this "Reputation Management" in my first job out of college around 2008. It was big at that time, and almost everything now is highly controlled, especially Reddit. I also dislike Facebook's new feed that endlessly regurgitates clickbait ragebait garbage. The best legitimate communities I know of online are Heavyequipmentforums.com and newagtalk.com. Good luck finding the real forums like these on Google search though, which is probably the product that has gone down the most in quality over time. Honestly, all of the above can probably be attributed to the falling quality of Google results.
- jokoon 1y agoI got banned from my country subreddit This was the tipping point for me Now I use discord, it's more organic and fun, I find it's a good substitute. The memes are better on discord
- xg15 1y agoPlot twist: This article was also written by a bot.
- Sophira 1y agoThese bots are everywhere on Reddit. There's a whole network of them, doing exactly the same sort of thing as this article found.
- gootz 1y agoAre you a bot??? /s
- lencykorien 1y ago[dead]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]