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Hacker compromises A16Z-backed phone farm, calling them the 'antichrist'
- wibbily 6mo agoAre 404 media links still blackholed?
- rvz 6mo agoOnly if the articles have a pay-wall and no way to bypass it. This article in particular doesn’t have one. So it should be fine.
- x3n0ph3n3 6mo agoAnyone working for a company like that should be deeply ashamed of themselves.
- userbinator 6mo agoI'm not sure if LLMs can be ashamed of themselves. /s
- verdverm 6mo agoI wonder how many people can be ashamed of themselves these days !/s?
- liquidise 6mo agoI have an opposite reaction for what I assume are reasons we agree on. Social media has been a transparent race to the bottom for many years. The sooner it is shittified beyond repair the better. AI flooding content to them should help speedrun its descent, or maybe I’ve giving the average user (above child age) too much credit.
- jim33442 6mo agoI think so. These sites can be hardened by relying on people following who they know, but the slop ruins discoverability. That's also partially the reason people moved to TikTok from older, more dumped-on platforms.
- 627467 6mo ago...so TikTok is less dumped on?
- BobaFloutist 6mo agoI assume it was when it was newer, as they all were.
- jim33442 5mo agoIt might still be. It's not so much about the quality of the content as you or I would judge it, it's the authenticity.
- BobaFloutist 5mo agoIt's the authenticity, but even more than that it's the saturation of inauthenticity. Even if there's oodles of authentic content, if there's enough inauthentic content to drown it out, you enter a vicious cycle where plummeting interactions and new authentic content both deed each other. I have a hypothesis that network effects kick in for social interaction before they do for monetisation, which is why the advertisers/influencers/propagandists/scammers(/trolls, though this is different) are in a constant state of hunting down and infesting whatever platform good-faith users have most recently fled them too. Part of it is likely that smaller communities are more robust and have an easier time identifying and repelling smaller-scale incursions, but I suspect a big part is that smaller communities simply aren't worth the investment of larger incursions, especially since they'll more easily be ruined before any real payout. Anyway, I agree with you that "quality" (as in effort and craft) is lower on the list of factors than authenticity, which makes complete sense. There was a time when a well-crafted ad was worthy of note, but ads have been so sneaky and pervasive that I think many people are desperate to have a spontaneous interaction or experience that's not trying to sell them anything.
- bix6 6mo agoImagine investing your hard earned money into a phone farm that spams AI content in order to manipulate people into buying shit they don’t need, while our world burns.
- kurthr 6mo agoSee, there's your problem, introspection. https://youtube.com/shorts/b6Zw50f5jJk https://youtube.com/shorts/b6Zw50f5jJk
- fxtentacle 6mo agoWow. I thought you were being snarky, but he actually says to skip all kinds of introspection, reflexion, and also therapy.
- rexpop 6mo agoWhat is wrong with his upper respiratory system?
- utopiah 6mo agoNo way... that's the most retarded thing I've heard for a while now, and I did read about international news. Introspection is basically THE core mechanism for learning. That's HOW one learns on any topic. It's not a "wishy washy hippie feeling" (being provocative here) but rather introspection is (and to be fair I verified with https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/introspection/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/introspection/ just to make sure I wasn't talking out of my own ass) precisely looking at your inner workings. How you function IN ORDER to do better. You notice flaws, inefficient behaviors, things you enjoy, etc THEN you act on it. Having no introspection is like doing math without verifying. It's like coding without compiling, linting or even executing without looking at the output. So dumb it hurts.
- eszed 6mo agoJesus. Yeah, that explains a lot. By the way, his notion that introspection is an "invention of the 1920s" is historical bullshit. I think he's taking potshots at psychotherapy? Whatever, man, but then do that. It's not like a Freudian concept of the self is beyond criticism - far, far from it - but using that to interdict "introspection" is just sloppy thinking. Anyway, leaving aside anything else to be said on the topic, the idea that "great men of history don't introspect" is utter bullshit. I'll see you Abraham Lincoln, and raise you Marcus fucking Aurelius. So, if what you really want to say is that "most 'great men of history' were sociopaths" then, well, yeah: you're probably onto something. If your next thought is "and I want to be like them", then that's 1) a pretty damning confession, and 2) also evidence that you, sir, aren't actually a sociopathic "great man" at all, just an insecure nerd who got lucky a few times, and now are getting high on your own farts.
- blargey 6mo agoHaving looked at https://doublespeed.ai/ https://doublespeed.ai/ out of morbid curiosity, I have to say a simple screenshot would have sent the message more effectively. Well, that and the tagline "a16z funded this".
- n_u 6mo ago> an a16z-funded startup that uses a phone farm to flood social media with AI-generated TikTok accounts Isn't this a bot farm? Don't they already exist and aren't they against TikTok's terms of service? The most surprising part of this article is that a16z invested in this. also their website is unsettling https://doublespeed.ai/ https://doublespeed.ai/
- ryandrake 6mo ago> The most surprising part of this article is that a16z invested in this. Why would this surprise you?
- ra 6mo agoSurprises me to. I thought A16Z were a top-tier VC wanting to create long-term value. I didn't see black-hat social media bot farms in their focus areas. It might be a bit facetious, but if I had 10m invested with them I'd be asking questions about their investment thesis.
- Zanfa 6mo ago> I thought A16Z were a top-tier VC wanting to create long-term value. That hasn’t been the case since they publicly went all-in into crypto scams. > It might be a bit facetious, but if I had 10m invested with them I'd be asking questions about their investment thesis. Their fund sizes have skyrocketed since.
- mayneack 6mo agoA16Z was (is?) up to their eyeballs in crypto as well.
- pstuart 6mo agoMarc was all about the value of NFTs -- there's clearly no legitimate value behind them and anybody pushing them is either extremely naive or slimey.
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- phplovesong 6mo agoDoublespeed looks like cancer. Never heard about them or "a16z" before, but looks like the pinnacle of slop
- fxtentacle 6mo agoSaaS = Slop as a Service. I heard SaaS is all the rage with VC money these days.
- retired_account 6mo agoa16z is a pretty big VC firm, popular among the ycombo startup crowd
- speedping 6mo agoI can't be the only one who thought this was a phone farm based on iPhones running Apple A16Z SoC (which doesn't exist btw, it's A12Z or A16)
- jim33442 6mo agoThere are at least two of us
- balls187 6mo agoHelp me understand. Is this just AI replacing influencers?
- Legend2440 6mo agoMore like a tiktok spam botnet for hire.
- balls187 5mo agoThank you for explaining that.
- sph 6mo agoHow can I contribute to such endeavours? And still Wikipedia calls the dead internet a ‘conspiracy theory’
- georgemcbay 6mo ago> calling them the 'antichrist' I'm not an expert on the antichrist, but I think they are at least better candidates than Greta Thunberg.
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- xtiansimon 6mo agoI dropped this into a previous chat about the introspection bit. New Media Playbook https://a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/a16zs-new-media-playbook https://a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/a16zs-new-media-playboo... I still think it’s quite shocking. I did some volunteer work with a non-profit conducting a survey in NYC about “food deserts”. I had to complete an hours long certification course—ethical boundaries and such—just so I can speak with people about fruits and vegetables. This audio makes it clear a16z’s rigorous approach to communication is coming from a dark and dangerous place. This “playbook” speaks about _intentionally creating_ mental breakdown. Seems like an antichrist move to me.
- gusfoo 6mo ago* Andreessen Horowitz - scammers. * Y Combinator - vibe coders. Are there any respectable VC tech companies out there in 2026?
- Cytobit 5mo ago"Respectable VC" is an oxymoron.
- Ameo 5mo agoWow, this doublespeed company is abhorrent stuff. AI social media accounts masquerading as real people, coordinating to promote and distribute anything on demand. If this is the kind of thing you can do in the open as a "reputable" company with VC investment, I can only imagine the kind of horrific industrial-scale social media spam+slop botnets for hire that exist less publicly.