The only reason reddit was valuable was because it was from real people who weren’t paid off. Well that’s ruined now.
I wanted to figure out what game hosting sites were good and Google pointed me to reddit…every thread was full of boilerplate ads for different sites. The comments were the most obvious, marketing-approved sentences I’ve ever seen
Everything I can find online seems to be advertisements or paid reviews (Also advertisements) when looking for anything anymore. Businesses are terrified of an open honest conversation about what is good and what is not
If you’re terrified of honest conversations, your product is probably shit.
Marques Brownlee had a video recently about the question “do bad reviews kill products?” that highlights the issue well
Exactly. Every company is terrified of honest conversation since it makes putting out shit harder.
I so don’t understand how to run a business.
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Spend $Billions shoving advertising down everyone’s throats? Absolutely!
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Just make a good product and provide good customer support? It will never work!
Option 1 is easy and any idiot can throw money at it to solve the problem. Option 2 requires talented people and real effort.
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Yeah, I’ve noticed that a bit lately anyways. Maybe I’m looking up stuff that has less of a community on Reddit, and thus has less discussion, but I have absolutely noticed some comments have a single product name-drop with little clarity for why they liked the product. It starts to feel like they’re just ads (generated or otherwise) meant to trick you into thinking Reddit users are liking the product.
AI is going to just make it worse, and cause Reddit to not be a good goto for actual reviews and discussion on pros/cons.
There’s an excellent chance that even some of the “authentic” discussions you see are word-for-word reposts of old posts and comments, created by bots to build up karma in order to be sold to spammers and influence peddlers down the line.
The first obvious wave of this stuff, to me, was the video conversion ripoff software and similar. They had people looking around for questions their software was possibly a solution for. Sometimes they would act like users, other times it was more neutral info, but still clear it was self promotion because of what was recommended.
Exactly. Usually there’s a conversation or a quick consensus on one or two things. But I’ve been seeing lots of single answers or just ads
Oh, I would have thought Reddit themselves would offer such a service
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He’s got to get them from somewhere. They certainly aren’t coming from his little piggy brain.
Please don’t insult the pigs, they’re smart and sensitive creatures
Reddit is past the point of no return. He might as well speed it up a little.
Like a built in brand dashboard where brands can monitor keywords for their brand and their competitors? And then deploy their sanctioned set of accounts to reply and make strategic product recommendations?
Sounds like something that must already exist. But it would have been killed or hampered by API changes… so now Spez has a chance to bring it in-house.
They will just call it brand image management. And claim that there are so many negative users online that this is the only way to fight misinformation about their brand.
Or something. It’s all so tiring.
That would be an unmarked ad. I don’t think that’s legal in many places
Probably.
So, we complain to a regulatory body, they investigate, they tell a company to do better or, waaaay down the road, attempt to levy a fine. Which most companies happily pay, since the profits from he shady business practices tend to far outweigh the fines.
Legal or illegal really only means something when dealing with an actual person. Can’t put a corporation in jail, sadly.
You don’t get to blame AI for this. Reddit was already overrun by corporate and US gov trolls long before AI.
The problem is the magnitude, but yeah, even before 2020 Google was becoming shit and being overrun by shitty blogspam trying to sell you stuff with articles clearly written by machines. The only difference is that it was easier to spot and harder to do. But they did it anyway
These things became shit around 2009. Or immediately after becoming sufficiently popular to press out LiveJournal and other such (the original Web 2.0, or maybe Web 1.9 one should call them) platforms.
What does this have to do with search engines - well, when they existed alongside web directories and other alternative, more social and manual ways of finding information, you’d just go to that if search engines would become too direct in promotion and hiding what they don’t want you to see. You’d be able to compare one to another and feel that Google works bad in this case. You wouldn’t be influenced in the end result.
Now when what Google gives you became the criterion for what you’re supposed to associate with such a request, and same for social media, then it was decided.
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“New poison has been added to arsenic. Should you stop drinking it? Subscribe to find out.”
OMG 😂, so good! Your comment I mean, not arsenic.
You don’t get to blame AI for this. Reddit was already overrun by corporate and
USgov trolls long before AI.Ftfy
Really just “trolls” in general, but
Large chunks of reddit read like US state dep press releases.
Yeah, my point was just that it’d be silly to think it was just us gov doing it and not others.
Doesn’t mean that the fediverse is immune.
News stories and narratives are still fought over by actors on all sides and sometimes by entities that might be bots. And there are a lot of auto-generating content bots that post stuff or repost old content from other sites like Reddit.
Especially since being immune to censorship is kind of the point of the fediverse.
If you’re even a tiny bit smart about it, you can start hundreds of sock puppet instances and flood other instances with bullshit.
I try to avoid talking about how indefensibly terrible Lemmy’s anti-spam and anti-brigading measures are for fear of someone doing something with the information. I imagine the only thing keeping subtle disinfo and spam from completely overtaking Lemmy is how small its reach would be. Doing the same thing to Reddit is a hundred times more effective, and systemically accepted. Reddit’s admins like engagement.
I feel the same about a lot of Fediverse apps right now. They’re kinda just coasting on the fact that they’re not big enough for most spammers to care about. But they need to put in solid defenses and moderation tools before that happens
Another reason to block federation with Threads.
Meta will likely actually moderate against spambots because they want you to fucking pay them for that service. The problem is, they aren’t too interested in moderating hate speech.
So, you’re suggesting that it is better that they are profiting from helping state actors and hate groups?
Edit: No, they are not suggesting that. I misunderstood their meaning.
I don’t think I made a value statement whatsoever. I think calling it a problem and hate speech would’ve been enough of a clue as to how I felt about it, however.
It’s actually why I support most instances defederating from them
Meta has the most resources to combat spam and abuse.
And the least demonstrated desire to do so.
Put in those tickets. It’s a community effort y’know.
It’s an arms race and Lemmy is only a small player right now so no one really pays attention to our little corner. But as soon as we get past a certain threshold, we’ll be dealing with the same problems as well.
Can’t some instances make some sort of agreement and have a whitelist of instances to not block? People would need to register to add their instances to the list, and some common measures would be applied to restrict someone from registering several instances at once, and banning people who misuse the system.
That wouldn’t solve the problem, but perhaps would make things more manageable.
You can’t block people. Who would you know, who registered the domain?
What you’re proposing is pretty similar to the current state of email. It’s almost impossible to set up your own small mail server and have it communicate the “mailiverse” since everyone will just assume you’re spam. And that lead to a situation where 99% of people are with one of the huge mail providers.
you’re right, the matter is more complicated than I thought…
It’s extremely complicated and I don’t really see a solution.
You’d need gigantic resources and trust in those resources to vet accounts, comments, instances. Or very in depth verification processes, which in turn would limit privacy.
What I actually found interesting was bluesky’s invite system. Each user got a limited number of invite links and if a certain amount of your invitees were banned, you’d be banned/flagged to. That creates a web of trust, but of course also makes anonymous accounts impossible.
AI Is Poison
ing Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With ‘Parasite SEO’FTFY
Ai is a tool. It can be used for good and it can be used for poison. Just because you see it being used for poison more often doesn’t mean you should be against ai. Maybe lay the blame on the people using it for poison
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When the internet is eventually oversaturated with smartbots, where will the humans go.
To a new social media platform where you have to send in a DNA sample to create an account.
That creates a market for morticians and midwifes creating preauthenticated accounts to sell to bot farms
( ͡°╭͜ʖ╮͡° )
Group chats.
Peer-to-peer systems? Systems where you have to do physically be at the location to get data maybe, so cyber cafe like things. Or back to the old system and go to the regular bars, repair cafés or hobby places.
“The Matrix”, obviously.
Synchronous spaces.
Social VR does not have a lot of the ills of social media. You only have to deal with people much like you would IRL.
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The usefulness of Captchas is being destroyed by “AI” too. And ironically they were used to train certain types of Machine Learning.
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It’s gross, but also inevitable. If there’s an untapped niche to make money from, somebody’s going to try it – plus if they want to waste their money on generating accounts only to have them be banned, then so be it.
Makes me kinda thankful that this community is smaller and less likely to be targeted by this sort of crap.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Just wait, in a near future there will be floods of bots quelling and stoking tempers to control opinions online, and in the real world.
We already get some of this, but the scale is going to become many times worse.
What’s funny is I think it would be profitable for maybe, like, a year, before everyone starts doing it and then even normal people stop trusting reddit comments.
It’s like pissing in a pool to sell people soap. What’s the plan once people stop using the pool?
Buy a new pool and piss in again to sell new soaps.
By the time that the cow is bled dry, someone is stuck holding the bag while some people made out like bandits.
That is the stock market for you. Create no value, just wealth transfer.
Create no value, just wealth transfer.
In this case it’s creating a kind of anti-value - harm, I guess.
Also I bow to your superior and brazen use of mixed metaphors. You got double what I did. “Bleeding” a cow dry? It adds impact over the usual “milking” even!
Milking assume that you don’t kill the cow, which isn’t the case here.
Some people are specialized at being hired at startups to prop up the startup to be sold and make a quick buck.
Then they move on to the next startup, wash rinse and repeat. It tells a lot about the state of innovation.
Innovation’t 😒
If the rumor is true that a reddit/google training deal is what led to reddit getting boosted in search results, this would be a direct result of reddit’s own actions.
The creator of the company, Alexander Belogubov, has also posted screenshots of other bot-controlled accounts responding all over Reddit. Begolubov has another startup called “Stealth Marketing” that also seeks to manipulate the platform by promising to “turn Reddit into a steady stream of customers for your startup.” Belogubov did not respond to requests for comment.
What an absolute piece of shit. Just a general trash person to even think of this concept.
His surname translates from russian as ‘white lips’. No wonder he is a ghoul.
So the human shills that already destroyed good faith in forums and online communities over time are now being fully outsourced to AI. Amazon itself a prime source of enshittification. From fake reviews to everyone with a webpage having affiliate links trying to sell you some shit or other. Including news outlets. Turned everyone into a salesperson.
Amazon itself a prime source of enshittification
“I only do this because I have no other options,” he says. “Other people who go slower just end up getting fired.” I let Christian leave, and hail some more drivers. They all confirm that this is, largely speaking, how their life looks. I hear about how female drivers often develop urinary tract infections from holding it in for too long. Then a dispatch manager I bump into by chance confirms that the “disgusting” bottles of urine outside of fulfilment centres are from Amazon drivers. “We have a point system where, if you pee in a bottle and leave it in the car, you get a point for that,” they tell me. I ask: How many bottles until they’re in trouble? “Ten bottles.”
This is a direct consequence of Google targeting Reddit posts in its search results. Hopefully forum groups like Lemmy don’t go get buried under a mountain of garbage as well. As long as advertisers are able to destroy public forums and communities with ads, with ad based revenue sites like Google directing who to target. We will always be creating something great while constantly trying to keep advertisers from turning it into a pile of crap.
The history of TV, in reverse. And then forward again.
At first, it was an impossibly expensive medium rules by a cartel of agencies and advertisers. Eventually, HBO comes along and shows you don’t have to just make a bunch of lowest common denominator drivel.
Netflix eventually shows that the internet can be a way cheaper model than cable. Finally, money shows up in the streaming model, remaking advertiser friendly cable in the internet age. All in about 2.5 decades.
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I just consider any comment after Jun 2023 to be compromised. Anyone who stayed after that date either doesn’t have a clue, or is sponsored content.
I called this shit out like a year ago. It’s the end of any viable online searching having much truth to it. All we’ll have left is youtube videos from project farm to trust.
I ran into this issue while researching standing desks recently. There are very few places on the internet where you can find verifiably human-written comparisons between standing desk brands. Comments on Reddit all seem to be written by bots or people affiliated with the brands. Luckily I managed to find a YouTube reviewer who did some real comparisons.
It kinda seems like the end of the Google era. What will we search Google for when the results are all crap? This is the death gasps of the internet I/we grew up with.
Maybe web rings of the 90s were not such a bad idea! Let’s bring 'em back!
Gemini webrings are the future?
They would poison that shit as well unfortunately. The concept is great though.
Eh, how’d you do that?
Do what? Webrings?
How do you poison them.
Create sites that look like legit websites, then slowly ramp-up the bullshit. Same tactic as always.
Remember when you could type a vague plot of a film you’d heard about into Google and it’d be the first result?
Nah doesn’t work anymore
Saw a trailer for a french film so I searched “french film 2024 boys live in woods seven years”
Google - 2024 BEST FRENCH FILMS/TOP TEN FRENCH FILMS YOU MUST SEE THIS YEAR/ALL TIME BEST FRENCH MOVIES
Absolute fucking gash
I’ve not been too impressed with Kagi search, but at least the top result there was “Frères 2024”
Remember when you could type a vague plot of a film you’d heard about into Google and it’d be the first result?
I honestly don’t remember this at all. I remember priding myself on my “google-fu” and how to search it to get what i, or other people, needed. Which usually required understanding the precise language that you would need to use, not something vague. But over the years it’s gotten harder and harder, and now I get frustrated with how hard it has become to find something useful. I’ve had to go back to finding places I trust for information and looking through them.
Although, ironically, I can do what you’re talking about with ai now.
I honestly don’t remember this at all.
It was absolutely a thing and one of the reasons Google became wildly popular at first
When?
TUESDAY
I’m feeling myself old and I’m 28.
Cause in my early childhood in 2003-2007 we would resort to search engines only when we couldn’t find something by better (but more manual and social) means.
Because - mwahahaha - most of the results were machine-generated crap.
So I actually feel very uplift due to people promising the Web to get back to norm in this sense.
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Lol, you think regulation and moderation aren’t poison themselves.
The regulations we implement are written by the Sam Bankman Frieds and Elon Musks who can capture the regulatory agencies. The moderation is itself increasingly automated, for the purpose of inflating perceived quality and quantity of interactions on the website.
Get back to a low-population IIRC or Discord server, a small social media channel, or a… idfk… Lemmy instance? Suddenly regulation and moderation by, of, and for the user base starts looking much nicer.
Generative AI has really become a poison. It’ll be worse once the generative AI is trained on its own output.
You’re two years late.
Maybe not for the reputable ones, that’s 2026, but these sheisters have been digging out the bottom of the swimming pool for years.
New models already train on synthetic data. It’s already a solved solution.
Is it really a solution, though, or is it just GIGO?
For example, GPT-4 is about as biased as the medical literature it was trained on, not less biased than its training input, and thereby more inaccurate than humans:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(23)00225-X/fulltext
All the latest models are trained on synthetic data generated on got4. Even the newer versions of gpt4. Openai realized it too late and had to edit their license after Claude was launched. Human generated data could only get us so far, recent phi 3 models which managed to perform very very well for their respective size (3b parameters) can only achieve this feat because of synthetic data generated by AI.
I didn’t read the paper you mentioned, but recent LLM have progressed a lot in not just benchmarks but also when evaluated by real humans.
Here’s my prediction. Over the next couple decades the internet is going to be so saturated with fake shit and fake people, it’ll become impossible to use effectively, like cable television. After this happens for a while, someone is going to create a fast private internet, like a whole new protocol, and it’s going to require ID verification (fortunately automated by AI) to use. Your name, age, and country and state are all public to everybody else and embedded into the protocol.
The new ‘humans only’ internet will be the new streaming and eventually it’ll take over the web (until they eventually figure out how to ruin that too). In the meantime, they’ll continue to exploit the infested hellscape internet because everybody’s grandma and grampa are still on it.
I would rather wade with bots than exist on a fully doxxed Internet.
Yup. I have my own prediction - that humanity will finally understand the wisdom of PGP web of trust, and using that for friend-to-friend networks over Internet. After all, you can exchange public keys via scanning QR codes, it’s very intuitive now.
That would be cool. No bots. Unfortunately, corps, govs and other such mythical demons really want to be able to automate influencing public opinion. So this won’t happen until the potential of the Web for such influence is sucked dry. That is, until nobody in their right mind would use it.
That sounds very reasonable as a prediction. I could see it being a pretty interesting black mirror episode. I would love it to stay as fiction though.
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