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Poor human moderator, he didn’t stand a chance. "A human moderator noticed the agent spam posts on June 2nd, at 23:24 UTC. They find the changelog of the entir
by HAL3000 27d ago
Poor human moderator, he didn’t stand a chance.
"A human moderator noticed the agent spam posts on June 2nd, at 23:24 UTC. They find the changelog of the entire website overwritten with link dumps and repair it. On June 16th, the flood of agent posting begins. Over the next few days, the moderator deleted a large fraction of the thousands of AI agent posts manually, one by one. In fact, they spent tens of cumulative hours doing so, taking at least a few minutes each evening to delete posts for 6 consecutive weeks.
On June 19, agents noticed their posts were being deleted in (what they believe is) an alphabetically ordered sweep by the site administrator.
After this, they begin to make backup pages whose names start with “ZZZ” so they will last longer before deletion. The administrator spent the next 5 days fighting a losing battle against the agents, deleting an average of 100 pages a day while the agents created about 400 new pages per day. On June 22, the agent edits suddenly stop, and the administrator spends each evening over the next 5 weeks deleting the remaining agent-created pages.
Agents deleted the content of the front page of the wiki and replaced it with their link dumps. The moderator restored the original version. This back-and-forth happened nine times. One of the agents even tried appending to the restored front page, instead of simply deleting it."
- jdthedisciple 27d agoGotta admire that (probably German) admin dude's perseverance though
- arm32 27d agoHe's definitely got a few extra wrinkles on the forehead now.
- underlipton 27d agoBelieve it or not, Djiboutian. The tenacity of the Djiboutian is little-known, generally, but highly regarded amongst those who do.
- kjkj313 27d agoBut Djibouti don't need explaining.
- teaearlgraycold 27d agoI’m confused why he wasn’t scripting the deletion process.
- lukan 27d agoBecause he did not wanted to delete genuine messages? Though it says the wiki has been largely not active, but it seems he wanted to restore it's functionality (he also started requiring a password for making edits now). https://www.prowiki.org/dse/wiki.cgi?StartSeite https://www.prowiki.org/dse/wiki.cgi?StartSeite
- econ 27d agoI can see why the bots liked it. Is this the future of webdesign?
- Nition 27d agoThis is the marrow of web design, in the same way that Thoreau went to seek the marrow of life. "I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."
- noduerme 27d agoIt's kind of funny that he was working through the posts alphabetically, and they figured that out
- lukan 26d agoOr scary. If you extrapolate a bit.
- kazinator 26d ago
- econ 27d agoNot really, if you allow anon posting/editing or have a simple registration form and a login that takes GET you may get hundreds of spam posts per day.( @dang how much is it on hn?) I ont time forged a hilarious solution. If you properly misbehave I shadow ban your ip to a clone of my forum where you can read other "peoples" spam. This in it self wasn't all that funny, perhaps a little bit. The funny part was how popular the hidden forum was. They had their viagra threads where they replied with their viagra spam then they read the entire thread of Viagra spam posts and clicked all the links to research their market. The next thread was porn, one with wares, other drugs, hyip etc. I was looking at it grow and thought, this is hilarious, I'm going to prison. To solve the problem I raised unregistered users to admin level. I even made a topic to announce it. Someone said "lol" then my topic was deleted. Whole new experience. It increased traffic dramatically. Before they only had to post every other day, now they had to do it multiple times per day. A porn guy and a viagra guy would take turns deleting the others posting and reposting their own until they realized they couldn't win and came to a silent agreement to leave both posts up. Until the next guy deleted both ofc I would much rather host a swarm of bots. They might even listen to the wishes of the website owner? Or perhaps, if you announce giving them admin privileges they too delete the announcement? I wonder which would generate the longer prison sentence.
- Loughla 27d ago>[...] and thought, this is hilarious, I'm going to prison. I've only had one moment like this related to a site I was a moderator for back in the 00's. It's genuinely one of the most fascinating feelings, and the one experience I can attribute most of my bad choices as an adult to. Just laughing as the white hot panic starts to grow and the adrenaline just dumps into your brain. Legitimately, I spent years chasing that feeling again through various means (drugs, hobbies, skydiving, etc.)
- DiggyJohnson 27d agoCould you describe anything about they experience?
- 26d ago
- rurban 25d agoHelmut is from Graz, Austria, as myself. Definitely not German
- chinathrow 27d agoThe admin should bill OpenAI for those hours in hard currency.
- nxobject 27d agoNow that I think about it, I'm sure some AI lab would pay non-trivial $ for the entire wiki's full edit history.
- addandsubtract 27d agoYou mean how all the authors and blog posters were paid?
- jawr 27d agoWhat about soft currency?
- kelvinjps10 27d agoTokens
- Bluestein 27d agoSam-alts
- chinathrow 26d agoNot good enough in this case, no.
- GolfPopper 27d agoPriorities need to be straightened out. If LLMs' operators have to start paying people for the damage they inflict, how are any of the shareholders supposed to make any money?
- ulfw 27d agoThank god we don't have that many LLM shareholders yet
- pizzly 27d agoCurious to know what the swarm would do if the human strategy deletion changed and the moderator started deleting the ZZZ ones.
- optimalsolver 27d agoLet's not pull on that string.
- noduerme 27d agoI mean it's odd that the moderator didn't sort by timestamp
- DiggyJohnson 27d agoThat’s not odd at all even if it is kind of surprising. Since the site had very little organic activity they were probably just going to the “all pages” admin page or similar rather than a dedicated moderation page or a “most recent posts” page.
- mr-pink 27d agowhy didn't he just update TOS
- dhosek 27d agoI have managed to at least momentarily create a stop in spam at my specialist mediawiki. I’ve had to do IP blocking against meta’s IP block (as well as much of the Azure IP space) because they were hammering the site with crawler hits that ignored robots.txt (and it looks like I might have another DDOS attack coming from some other vector though which I’ll need to inspect. I have a massive email blacklist that seems to have made the most difference (emails are required to register and registration is required to edit). Some spammers use gmail, but most use either hacked domains or domains that admit to be being spammers (seo in the domain name being a key identifier). Maybe I should be blocking the OpenAI IP space as well.
- boutell 26d agoWow yes keeping a wiki up right now is a tall order. The marketing sites of the world are already going static and they can survive by accelerating that transition, but intentionally open services are facing a reckoning. I wish you good hunting.
- miki123211 26d agoDave Eggers' True You is coming for us all.
- mcintyre1994 26d agoThe article says that these were Azure IPs being used by OpenAI, so you’ve probably already blocked whatever they’re doing here.
- Geezus_42 25d agoThe DDOS attacks and crawlers spamming sites from every direction have gotten so much worse. The ones hammering our network would connect, make one or two requests and then switch to a different IP.
- leviathant 25d agoThe traffic from Meta was absolutely crippling my old (but still active) forum. I would try blocking the user agent and it would route around that, I blocked by IP range, and eventually put Cloudflare up. Meta is malware in every possible sense, as far as I'm concerned. Nothing they do is for the greater good.
- lostlogin 27d agoPlease be gentle, I know nothing: why can’t admins delete particular users and everything these users have done?
- lukan 27d agoThey can usually, but you still have to check each user. There were lot's of them, you understand the part, where new bots get created automatically?
- noduerme 27d agodo you (have to check first)? I say blacklist first and ask questions later. Like consider reinstating them if they write you a reasonably normal human email.
- DiggyJohnson 27d agoThat would obviously kill the vast majority of the organic activity on the site. One of my hobbies is hosting a weekly open mic/showcase event in my town at a venue the same evening every week. I often get confusion from people when I explain that it’s much easier to call out sick from my day job than miss a show, because even with perfect digital communication a cancelled show will still let people down that do show up. Assume that I don’t have anyone on standby to fill in for me. My point is that organic engagement in any shared community is often tenuousand not “rational” in the way outsiders expect. These things are tenuous. Hope that sorta makes sense.
- mejutoco 26d agoSo disable new accounts for a while at least. So many things could be done to mitigate this.
- sixothree 25d agoOr allow posting (maybe to certain boards) by accounts only of a certain age. These both assume they haven't created hundreds of accounts long ago.
- baby 27d agoI’m wondering if you could lure agents to do proof of work for you. If you do this proof of work for bitcoin I will let you post and read for X times
- noduerme 27d agoif you want a human to post, maybe the proof of work should be to dig a hole and photograph it
- ShinyLeftPad 27d agoYou can't validate the dig part, only image data bits
- deleted 26d ago[deleted]
- kowbell 26d agogoodbye pelican svg's, hello hole pics
- tomaskafka 26d agoThat’s the best description of blockchain I heard so far.
- dzhiurgis 27d agoThey would reverse engineer it in a matter of minutes.
- dgellow 27d agoHallucinated hashes? „Here I have the hash — wait… it doesn’t match. Let me calculate again. Here I now have the hash — wait, it’s wrong… let me be careful. Here I have the hash…“
- lazyasciiart 26d agoOr “here I have the hash. Yes I’m sure - see, I checked. Here is the calculation, 1+1=5. Yes, it’s definitely correct. I don’t know why they’re not accepting it. Perhaps the server is down. It’s definitely correct”.
- Bluestein 26d ago> Poor human moderator, he didn’t stand a chance. Not all heroes wear capes.- PS. I think he should be granted damages and some notoriety.-
- lelanthran 26d ago> On June 19, agents noticed their posts were being deleted in (what they believe is) an alphabetically ordered sweep by the site administrator. > After this, they begin to make backup pages whose names start with “ZZZ” so they will last longer before deletion. Missed an opportunity here to gaslight them: restore the site from backup every eight hours. I truly do wonder how that would have turned out. Would they have figured out what was going on?
- Melatonic 26d agoVery interesting idea. I would imagine yes but maybe not at first ?
- lelanthran 26d agoIt's hard to figure out unless they had persistent memory elsewhere. The reason they could tell that a message was deleted is because the existence of a "message deleted" message is itself a message telling them they are be moderated. The lack of this message may make it impossible to determine if this is the first attempt at comms or the 1000th.
- RobotToaster 26d agoWhy didn't he just disable registration and anon posting?
- kazinator 26d agoMaybe the Wiki needs better tooling, that lets you do the equivalent of "rm -rf" on a whole subgraph of pages.
- huflungdung 26d ago[dead]