Comment on New Study: At Least 15% of All Reddit Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public Opinion

• The_Picard_Maneuver@startrek.website ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • HarkMahlberg@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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  • CosmicCleric@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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 you want your AI bots to make.

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    • numberfour002@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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.

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      • CosmicCleric@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        That seems counterintuitive to me in the context of modern AI approaches.

        How so?

        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.

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  • CaptDust@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Had no idea they were generating names, joke of a site.

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