I’m not used to seeing this with so many pixels.
I find it has a nice understated impact
And they said the bears were the ones posting obnoxious huge images!
It’s so much worse than 15%.
Member-only story
Medium wants me to pay them to read a story from “Homeless Romantic” who is listed as a “Ph.D. Rocket Surgeon & Aspiring Troglodyte”?
Are they fucking high?
well, whomever describes themselves in such a manner clearly is.
It’s been a wonder that site ever got traction as something credible to get info from and not just a weird mesh of editorial, blogging, and long winded shitposts…
edit: That being said, fuck reddit.
I’ve always seen it as a site for random people to shitpost. Who takes Medium seriously as a credible source?
For me, it was often a place where a lot of qualified people would essentially write blogs because hosting their own site for it would get utterly ignored by google. The last few years though I’ve got more utter morons than people who can write a good article, even for generic questions that they could straight up copy and paste from another site.
Are they fucking high?>
Yeah, probably
The ebike subreddit is modded by the owners of Lunacycle. They actively remove posts about bad customer service/other issues from Lunacycle. I witnessed them name and shame some random redditor and accuse them of fraud because they posted screenshots of email correspondence that pointed out shady dealings on Luna’s part.
They use the general subreddit for electric bikes to funnel everyone into ordering from them.
during the massive purge of rebellious mods, there was a huge opening for corporate shills to move into places where previous mods had kept them out. this phenomenon was widespread in many fan and specialty subs. Reddit admins were more than happy to let this happen, as corporate shills were also more than happy to be cooperative with Reddit admins.
Everything about Reddit’s most recent changes has been openly about cracking the place wide open for corporate marketing. Everything good about it was because of how genuine it was, and it was genuine because for a very long time, the attitude was to shield it against corporate influence.
That’s the only reason it became such a valuable place for search results: as the forums and blogs around the Internet went silent and corporations ravaged individual websites, reddit was a bubble of genuine interaction. It’s not just Google’s shitty algorithm, it’s also because the Internet itself got injected with shit, and reddit was a safe haven. A deeply flawed one, but still, notably less fake and corporate than the web pages around it.
That’s what gave it value.
Spez knows this. The admins have known this the whole damn time. That’s why there used to be rules against self-posting content. That’s why celebrities were only allowed to promote things in AMAS. To head off attention seeking, marketing, and corporate influence.
But the time came to make money, and they’re burning it all down to accomplish that.
I will never not share this blog because it hits the nail so cleanly on the head it sails straight down to the core of the earth:
Stop talking to each other and start buying things
It’s not just about ads, it’s about the corruption of public spaces. The death of social media is when someone tries to start making money off it at the expense of its genuine human interaction, which can not exist in that environment unmolested, and will cascade into the platform’s collapse over time. it’s enshitification, yes, but it’s also something else: “dehumanation”. The drowning of the human element of your social platform through profit seeking.
I’ve been through too many exodus, this post hits hard and true. Been using the net since 95 and have been a community refuge too many times. I’m really hoping federation takes off because I’m tired of rebuilding. Not sure I’ll try again if this doesn’t pan out.
Hate to break it to you but it will likely happen again. Meta is already encroaching on our new corner of the web, they’ll either eat it or it’ll die out on its own as funding doesn’t really exist here
That was an incredible read, thanks for sharing it. Please keep sharing it!
Informational tragedy. Really is.
This hurts us as consumers, patients, thinkers, feelers. :(
I’m calling 1 year on the over/under for the introduction of blue check marks.
You mean Reddit gold check marks
You mean narwhal bacon badges.
In a similar more minor vein, the Snowpeircer (tv show) sub was administered by the showrunners.
They were mostly subtle about it, but quietly removed lots of posts after a week or so that didn’t fit show promo.
I’m pretty sure they’ve abandoned it now that the show is in limbo.Since before the exodus or after?
Before and worse after
I had no idea. I am well aware of Lunacycle’s toxicity from endless-sphere.com.
Is all bad online behavior “trolling” now? Isn’t “shill” a better word for someone who is paid to surreptitiously promote something?
No, all bad online behavior now is “bots.”
At least that’s how people in the comments on lemmy and Reddit label them.
No, all bad online behavior now is “bots.”
At least that’s how people in the comments on lemmy and Reddit label them.
I, and others, have distinguish between shills and bots.
Usually people use shilling as an alternative to astroturfing by paid human beings, while bots are just AI/programming posting.
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It seems to correlate with the rise in general awareness of LLMs like ChatGPT. It seems like just the threat/possibility of ChatGPT being used has already distorted discourse online.
I always saw it as someone who only repeats talking points verbatim is essentially a robot. If I can’t tell if you are a human posting, or an automated response is there a meaningful difference?
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Shut up, bot!
Edit: Shitty typo
He’d probably need a strong sphincter muscle to manage that.
Lol, how did I miss that
Shill is a banned word on reddit still right?
No idea!
There’s no way it’s a banned word. /r/neoliberal has a “neoliberal shill of the year” award where they vote for their favorite economist based on social media posts, books released that year, etc.
There was a time when you’d get hit with a [Removed by Reddit] for calling people shills but that was a while back I guess
Back in my day trolling meant something. It meant you cared enough to actually form a real argument that withstands scrutiny, just to setup for the rug pull. The better your polemic, the more engagement as people debated if you were for real or not.
Shitposting controversial hot takes or dog whistle memes is mid af, do better
From my understanding trolling meant exactly what it says it is: Trolling. I think people for some reason get this mixed up with trolls - as in the fantasy type monster. But I think it actually has to do with the fishing termtrolling where you cast out your line, and see if you can get somebody to take the bait. Once they take the bait, you take em for a ride.
Actually, that’s also where the name of the mythical creature comes from. They’d set up bridges that offer convenient shortcuts as bait for humans
From my understanding trolling meant exactly what it says it is: Trolling. I think people for some reason get this mixed up with trolls - as in the fantasy type monster. But I think it actually has to do with the fishing termtrolling where you cast out your line, and see if you can get somebody to take the bait. Once they take the bait, you take em for a ride.
When the word is used on the Internet it’s meant in the fantasy monster way. Specifically it comes from the story of the troll underneath the bridge, interfering with people trying to cross the bridge.
polemic
po·lem·ic /pəˈlemik/ noun a speech or piece of writing expressing a strongly critical attack on or controversial opinion about someone or something. “his polemic against the cultural relativism of the Sixties”
mid
You can just add “troll” to the pile of words twisted into meaning “people I don’t like”.
Is all bad online behavior “trolling” now?
People like throwing buzzwords regardless of their meaning.
it is not “now”. It is exactly as it was being used in 2020, when the article was written, by the mass media. They were calling “troll” everyone they were disagreeing with.
You’re kidding yourself if you think they aren’t also on Lemmy.
You can assume they’re everywhere but at least Lemmy is still a small enough target for now that it’s not completely enshittened (yet)
Too small. We only have users with individual agendas still.
May I talk to you about my lord and saviour, Gandalf?
Lemmy probably isn’t big enough for the ad bots to be worth it yet. Lemmy is more infested with right wing astroturf shills pretending to be leftists and pushing “both sides” nonsense.
What are you talking about? We’re not active on Lemmy. We don’t even have time to be here, we’re too busy enjoying a refreshing Starry
Okay but actually imagine preferring Starry over Sprite.
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This is research from before the API changes. Loads of astroturf efforts were easy to notice, there must have been more subtle ones.
I always wonder whether the famous post about vacuum cleaners was paid for by the company he recommended. If it was, they got their money’s worth - that redditor was convincing.
A lot of the shill marketing is very hard to prove. A lot of the dialogue gets mixed in with commentors that have genuine brand loyalty.
It’s far too easy for a marketing team to acquire a high karma account and blend in. We’ll never get a truly clear picture of how much Reddit is astroturfed.
It is incredibly cheap and easy to artificially bump a post to the top of a decent sized subreddit. I’ve seen it done before and the cost per impression/click puts most advertising to shame. And this was being done unsophisticatedly by some dude and a cheap bot. Now imagine what major corporations can do with all the resources to burn.
Only 15%? More like 99%! The most recent Gaza genocide was truly an eye opener for me.
at least its such functionally, if not in actual numbers
No it’s much more
I’m OPs defense, it do say “at least”.
Hi OPs defense, I’m dad.
Hi dad, I’m Mail man.
Ah damn, how much are they paying you
I know lemmy is fundamentally critic of reddit, but let’s not forget if lemmy ever achieves a significant weight in humanity’s attention, it’s not immune to such disease. The problem is systemic, not inherent of a specific platform. Any place with a lot of eyes will be susceptible to manipulation, even more so now that we have tamed artificial intelligence to write texts just about anything. We as a community need to think about countermeasures to fend this off
Isn’t that just astroturfing and they’ve been doing it forever there?
You mean that wasn’t some random wrestling fan or music fan I was chatting with? Fuck reddit.
In all seriousness, it was awesome 2 years ago, but the mods are fucking it up really bad. Lemmy FTW.
Not just mods, but the entire Capitalistic model.
Yes, mods are nuts on reddit.
At least here this is some accountability with the modlog.
I popped over to Reddit for the first time since third party apps were cruelly shut down. It’s clear that Reddit has sunk to new lows. Obviously trolling and a marked decrease in the quality of content
what I noticed is that posts have huge amounts of upvotes, even from small communities, and often no comments or when it does have comments its often very basic stuff, almost AI like
Well, if you’re going to defraud investors by pumping up your numbers before your IPO, you might as well go all out.
They aren’t even trying with those usernames, lazy.
Yeah, looks like the default “word_wordnumbers” usernames that reddit gives you if don’t change them.
I wonder if that would be an easy way to detect botting by not filling in that field for them.
Yeah, looks like the default “word_wordnumbers” usernames that reddit gives you if don’t change them.
This change is when I knew Reddit was going down the shitter. Automatically handing out default usernames instead of requiring you to pick your own. The only people that could possibly help are a) people with absolutely no imagination whatsoever, b) bots, and c) people making a dozen alts to puff up their main.
Had no idea they were generating names, joke of a site.
Yeah, looks like the default “word_wordnumbers” usernames that reddit gives you if don’t change them.
Funny enough, this started happening on YouTube (comments) as well, around the same time.
The issue with sites starting to use numbering as part of the default username only started happening after AI posting became a thing, because an Achilles heel is the fact that AI can’t come up with enough believable unique names for all the posts they want their AI bots to make.
an Achilles heel is the fact that AI can’t come up with enough believable unique names for all the posts you want your AI bots to make
That seems counterintuitive to me in the context of modern AI approaches. I’m wondering if you could elaborate on that a bit more.
That seems counterintuitive to me in the context of modern AI approaches.
How so? Elaborate?
I’m wondering if you could elaborate on that a bit more.
This seems sufficiently explanatory to me, especially the italicized part…
AI can’t come up with enough believable unique names for all the posts they want their AI bots to make
Unbelievable usernames becomes an easy identifier/tag for identifying bot post.
Edit: since this comment got downvoted (as the assumed reply) I thought I would elaborate a bit more.
Basically, we name our user accounts to fit the society we live in’s norms, it’s naming conventions.
If you just run a bunch of vowels and consonants together, that does not make a username, at least not one that people will recognize as a valid one created by a human being.
Part of how bots are effective is in the quantity of bots that are used. Since it’s near zero cost to spin up a new bot to make posts/comments, many can be made.
However people can track the validity of a user name as being a bot versus human by the quantity of the posts/comments the username makes (only so many hours in a day, and human beings are busy with other things besides just posting on Lemmy), so no one single bot can make too many posts/comments at one time.
Because of this, you need a large quantity of unique names, one for each of your bots, and they have to be believable ones by humans, so they’re not identified as bots.
I can’t believe 8 people had the exact same idea for a post at the same time, that’s crazy
/s
You know what else is random and probably related to their paid content? Their sorting doesn’t work right anymore. Posts in “hot” are regularly like more than a day old but then also some are brand new like minutes old. But if you sort by top 24 hours…same posts. Sometimes the order is different but easily 75% of the posts are the same. A 24 hour old post with no new comments is “hot”? A one hour old post with 20 comments is in the top posts of the past day?..OKAY
It could be incompetence. Lemmy.world has similar and significant issues with sorting as well and I presume you’re not also implying that paid content has anything to do with lemmy sorting.
Go back to Reddit astroturfer.
Is that recent? I haven’t used Reddit since a few months and that phenomena was previously only on promoted posts (read, ads)
like 2 months ago
I think it was there for a while, it’s just gone full mask off mode and become particularly noticeable now
And another 50% is trolls working probono to be try and convince people that racism is the only way forward
And the other 50% is AI bots, just trying to keep people engaged.
That’s a 115% - dayum, that’s a lot of users! :D
I know it’s crazy.
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And a significant part of the remainder are repost bots recycling old popular posts and comments in order to farm karma, which will eventually be sold to OnlyFans spammers, political ops, and corporate shills.
I’ll see the same post on 2 or 3 subs and it will just be something I saw a year or more ago.
