Reddit was one of the most human places on the Internet, until King Steven the Turd decided that it’s human interactions were a valuable resource that he could sell.
Now, it’s all just bots talking to bots to learn how to sound human.
AI Slop Is Ruining Reddit for Everyone
Submitted 3 weeks ago by Hubi@feddit.org to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.wired.com/story/ai-slop-is-ruining-reddit-for-everyone/
Comments
dhork@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
N0t_5ure@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The engagement bots constantly peppering my comments with inane remarks to draw a reaction is what drove me to Lemmy. I was there early on, and it was awesome. As its popularity grew, it became less nice, but I still enjoyed going there. In the end, I didn’t feel like commenting because I knew that I’d just get hit with stupid responses calculated to draw a response. It just felt harassing.
nulluser@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
peppering my comments with inane remarks to draw a reaction
They’re here, too.
I occasionally see comments to the effect of, “Oh, really? Can you tell me more about that?” That seem pretty likely to just be bots trying to generate data on certain topics for AI training. Thankfully, most people seem to ignore them.
PissingIntoTheWind@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Digg 2.0 jumper in 2009. I always thought there would be a new Reddit after 2014. But it took 10 years for Lemmy to show up.
dublet@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
No, there’s a lot of human bigotry too.
socsa@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Maybe in 2012. Once it started to be a right wing information warfare battlefield it got pretty insufferable. Like a lot of the niche content was still there, but the broader culture changed immensely.
aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
i loved reddit. I was on it since nearly the beginning. It’s a sad day where reddit has ended up. Aaron Swartz would be rolling in his grave if he could see where reddit ended up.
Sarcasmo@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Reddit was ruined for me a couple of years ago and AI wasn’t involved. I no longer interact there but I do still read Reddit occasionally. Personally I find it difficult to wade through hundreds of one-liners without forgetting what the post was about.
finitebanjo@piefed.world 3 weeks ago
I mean, yeah, I left during the first wave of API changes and before the company went public, but the AI has definitely made it completely unusable.
micka190@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Every sub I was active in has become one of two things:
- Bot spam
- Dead
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I find the usefulness of a subreddit is inversely proportional to its size (popularity). There are still some good ones but they are quite small.
I had hoped Lemmy would fill this void for me but it’s still too small overall such that the smallest communities are barely active at all. Thus I tend to just scroll the feed of everything and see what catches my eye, admittedly a much less useful way to spend my time since I get sucked into ragebait instead of discussing cool hobbies.
chaogomu@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Are you me? Because that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. I set my default browse experience to Top 6 hour and then scroll All.
I do miss the community aspect of Reddit. There were other users who I ran into regularly in the comments. And usually not in a hostile way.
Hell, there was one sub where I was invited to the mod team because of those interactions. I did that for a couple years and continued to be active in the sub until Reddit start pissing off mods. That and my main “friend” on the mod team had his account nuked by Reddit after he fell for a troll.
Reddit removed every comment he had ever made, including wonderful and well cited rebuttals of the right-wing bigotry of the day.
So yeah, I logged out of that reddit account and have never logged back in, instead I use a burner account and try not comment on anything.
makyo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah if there was a niche Lemmy sub for everything I would no longer visit Reddit at all but I can’t get my Nightreign fix here sadly
nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Libreddit FTW
jjlinux@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
That thing hasn’t been maintained for almost 3 years.
scarabic@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Someone should write a Reddit client that automatically hides the top two comments and all their children, because they’re inevitably stupid jokes that add nothing.
Oh right. No one can make new Reddit clients anymore.
SharkAttak@kbin.melroy.org 3 weeks ago
Now AI is also ruining reddit users ruining reddit!
pastermil@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
No, Reddit ruined Reddit for everyone. The AI slops are simply what replace the people who left.
GreenShimada@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The day they got rid of reddit gold and started cash grabbing hard was the day the writing was on the wall.
LaunchesKayaks@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They got rid of gold?? When?? I left reddot and came to Lemmy in the third-party apps exodus and haven’t even looked back
ibelieveinthehousehippo@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
It was when they fired Victoria for me
barnaclebutt@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah, also the people. The comment sections are cancer. Lame jokes from dickheads that don’t add anything.
MyMindIsLikeAnOcean@piefed.world 2 weeks ago
This is key.
If there weren’t bots…Reddit would make its own bots. Reddit dances a fine line of allowing the population to be a certain proportion of bots because they increase real engagement by picking fights with its real users, as well as creating never-ending “content” for people to read and vote on. They only ban bots when real users notice they are bots - which is less and less frequently - even though Reddit has the tools and information to ban them long before that point.
Reddit could easy eliminate almost all of them, but that would be expensive and they’d lose real users as a result.
pastermil@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Exactly. This is like blaming rats and cockroaches for dirty town.
No, they won’t be there (as much) in a cleaner town.
h3rmit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Yeah, after reading the article, it was like, oh, so the same fake stories but actually grammar corrected?
Also, most people who sre like “i have this tells tl detect AI” would not know at all whether something is AI or not lol
Grass@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
spez ruined reddit for everyone
PetteriPano@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
What? What did the moderator of r/jailbait do now?
Stern@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That one always rung a big hollow to me because of the timeframe of it. At the time he was made a mod there, invites didn’t exist. Folks could just be added to subs- it was actually a method for trolling. At the time, I could add Steve to r/SteveLovesDiddlingKids, for example, and he’d have no say in it. They changed it to an invite system after a subreddit called r/CrabBucket heavily abused it to force folks to stay.
That said, one can quite readily say that spez implicitly supported the jailbait subreddit when he left it up for several years knowingly (Including it being a subheader for reddit on google searches, and it getting nominated for subreddit of the year along with several votes for it.) and only got rid of it when Anderson Cooper did a report on CNN about it.
Psythik@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Creepy little shit.
LefterShark@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
reddit already ruined reddit for everyone long before AI was a concern.
aceshigh@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I mean that’s why we’re here…
DSN9@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
People still use reddit?
treesquid@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
And yet it still had room to get worse, and it’s still not even in its shittiest form.
TomMasz@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Reddit was ruined long ago, this just accelerates the decline.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Letting gallowboob “moderate” the basically the whole front page was an insane decision. Some of those guys were selling product placement.
The centralization of power to few mods was always a problem, but smaller communities got by.
The huge quality drop came when Spez felt he missed the IPO wave around 2018 and decided to growth hack the site. Then they finally killed most of them too with the API drama.
Popular and moving away from hot to best was also bad. They horribly failed to discipline abuse from the_donald for years…
New reddit is still not even usable from a phone. It crashes frequently and i swaer to God it only shows like 8 posts and just fucking loops through them (how have thry not noticed this, I only check 4 subreddits and its unbearable).
Hadriscus@jlai.lu 2 weeks ago
The dysfunction of the mobile website is most likely on purpose, to drive users towards the dedicated program
SirMaple__@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Joelk111@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Niche communities that simply don’t exist on Lemmy. If your only hobbies are tech, lemmy probably covers all of your bases, but there are nearly no niche non-tech communities here.
kent_eh@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
but there are nearly no niche non-tech communities here.
And if they do exist, there are 4 subscribers and zero posts in the last 6 months.
frongt@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
And regional communities. There’s not nearly enough people in the fediverse to support city or state communities. And only the most populous countries.
GenosseFlosse@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
They did exist before reddit as forums, however they where fragmented across different languages and websites. At some point Google started to show reddit more often, because it was more search engine optimized and mobile friendly. This means new users found reddit first, and old users where slowly pulled away from their forums into reddit.
Cosmonauticus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Can’t lie I miss r/sneakers. As an avid collector I miss the engagement
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
There’s also fun bullshit communities that refuse to migrate too. I listen to some of them on YouTube as they read the stories from there while I work on other things or drive.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Some are pretty limited even in reddit too
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Right now I don’t have a reddit account and I just lurk there, but if I really wanted to talk about, say, a specific TV show I like, or a Movie, or Anime, or a Book… that would not exist on the fediverse. It’s either just Reddit or maybe Discord.
If I wanna talk about stuff from a non-white perspective, the best place I’d really find my people outside the great firewall is Reddit.
I mean I the amount of Cantonese-speakers on Lemmy is like… single-digits
sengokuFrance@lemmy.kya.moe 2 weeks ago
As long as people keep going to reddit instead of starting a post about the latest episode, or movie, book, etc. there will never be anything here for people to talk about.
null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
I use redlib to lurk.
I find the drama subs like /r/AITAH entertaining. I know its all fake, but the groupthink responses are intriguing.
JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Let’s not blame AI for everything: Reddit had a lot of problems before AI became big. Repost bots are so common that you’ll see the same posts over and over again. Some of those twitter screenshots must have been posted hundreds or thousands of times. OnlyFans spam also works without AI. And we have had those bots spamming the same stupid comments before people were even thinking about GPTs.
lepinkainen@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Repost bots should be built in to Reddit tbh
Just take whatever was the top 5 a year ago and repost it at the same time
Karma guaranteed
nert@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
5 years? I see the same reposted on a daily basis. One guy was reposting his own rainwater drain video, different angle every week.
tynansdtm@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
While I agree being shitty is a human problem, shitty people are using AI to be shitty faster.
MyMindIsLikeAnOcean@piefed.world 2 weeks ago
We can absolutely blame AI for everything. The reason AI took over Reddit is because Reddit fired their human moderators in favour of AI moderation. It’s basically a vicious circle of bots learning how to avoid being banned, and auto moderation learning how they’re avoiding being banned…repeat.
…the obvious problem being that bots are valuable to Reddit because they increase real engagement…if there weren’t bots, Reddit would make its own bots to do basically the same thing. Reddit only wants to restrict bots to a certain proportion of the population, rather than eliminate them.
deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 2 weeks ago
Yeah, that happened way before the current AI slop bubble.
falseWhite@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Reddit is already ruined and has been for a while. And it’s been ruined by the greedy Reddit CEO.
_stranger_@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Reddit’s founder and investors killed reddit, the method they used is immaterial.
ccunning@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
What, dd /u/spez change his name to /u/AI_Slop?
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Reddit ruined reddit for everyone. AI has nothing to do with it. Well except Reddit making a deal with google to sell everything on their for training AI. But again that is Reddit ruining Reddit.
MedicPigBabySaver@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
Reddit already ruined Reddit. The AI slop is just the broken glass in the turd.
nosuchanon@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Reddit was the good place after the fall of Digg 2.0. Now Reddit has become the bad place.
tym@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Paywalling the API and therefore killing 3rd party apps killed reddit… banning anyone with an opinion killed reddit…
cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
spez is ruining reddit for everyone.
and venture capitalists.
emb@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yes. But, to perhaps a lower extent, this headline is also true if you change ‘Reddit’ to ‘the internet’.
ristoril_zip@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
oh no
jali67@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
AI slop is ruining everything *
_cryptagion@anarchist.nexus 3 weeks ago
Reddit was ruined long before AI came into the picture. that place hasn’t been good for a decade.
peaceful_world_view@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Fuck reddit
wulrus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’m reading AI content there, and when I post, I’m getting accused of being a bot / using an LLM. Fantastic.
IndridCold@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
You mean those pictures all over the front page of kittens with a caption like “I found this guy in a shoebox, in the basement, hungry. I fed him and named him Mortimer.” are not real?!?!
OctopusNemeses@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
one of the most human spaces left on the internet
Journalism once again demonstrating they are about 10-15 years behind on the times. Did they forget reddit completely broke back in 2016 when the_donald left the place in a permanent troll state.
I’m not going to read the article on account of time right now but I’m guessing it’s written as if reddit was invented yesterday and the prior 20 years of reddit history is didn’t happen.
kent_eh@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
It’s ruining far more than reddit.
Framptonian@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I used to have a reddit account and truly enjoyed it - but I quit when it became obvious that most of the site is simply run by bots that aim to stir the pot and divide people. I still read various reddit posts - but there is no longer any real knowledge to be gained. Mostly, I now just experience frustration, mistrust, and disappointment.
ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Reddit was the playground for ai slop long before commercial LLMs existed. Subredditsimulator was like 2014 or 2015 and people were fucking with markov chains and other shit that dated back to like the 90s or even 70s but that also had some people experimenting with rudimentary neural networks, though obviously none with the computing power of shit like chatgpt or gemini. And obviously that whole experiment was inspired in part by the fact that botted comments were becoming increasingly common and obvious on reddit in the years leading to it, so why not make a subreddit where everyone participating is a bot?
There’s no proof but openai researchers may have been fucking around on that sub. There was a fairly drastic increase in quality of posts in that sub around the time openai would’ve been making gpt1 (2018ish) and then they began aggressively scraping the entirety of reddit, quora, etc for content. Could just be a coincidence though and they’ll never confirm it even if it’s true bc redditors will flip shit
notreallyhere@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
no ; reddit is ruining reddit for everyone.
aramis87@fedia.io 3 weeks ago
I beg to differ: spez has ruined reddit for everyone.
Pringles@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Not for himself, as he just joined the billionaire club. I would probably have ruined it for a billion as well, if I’m being completely honest.
BanMe@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That’s when things started going off the rails yes. Remember Victoria and the good ol days?
BallShapedMan@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
⭐
aeronmelon@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
{lemmysilver}
jimmy90@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
nah reddit is fine for loads of things
better than lemmy in fact but then it has FOUR orders of magnitude more active users
objectorientedposter@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
no; no; no; no; no; no; no; no; no; no; no; no;