Submitted 11 hours ago by Saarth@lemmy.world to fediverse@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/1d255353-aaed-4c40-bd8c-d049d1588c96.jpeg
Marketers and their bots have been using reddit to hype up brands. No wonder Reddit feels like shit these days.
The linkedin writing format must be banned, exhausting, unreadable and withway too self important. It’s not a haiku write like a normal person you lunatic. Also these bots are destroying public forums, don’t expect any praise from me.
Lemmy just BLEW AWAY the LinkedIn Writing Style.
A few simple witty posts have utterly upended how we communicate on the internet.
Normal Users:
Post replies
Up and Downvote
Embarassingly minimizing the display when your boss approaches the desk.
And maybe that works for normal online interactions.
Sure, it’s fine if you’re an entry level Lemmy user
But you’ll never change the culture of the internet.
So we came up with
Something that’s
Even better than
What we used
To post like
Before
We first started using
This online
digital service
For posting our
Thoughts to
Other
Pe
ople
It’s called memes.
Decent chance that post was written by AI as well. Or it was a marketing copywriter. Either way it wasn’t written by a normal human.
Anyone that works in marketing needs to be flogged in the streets for their crimes.
Nahhhh. When ads are clever or funny its fine. This lower effort bullshit need to die
I get the feeling you and Bill Hicks would have gotten along: youtu.be/9h9wStdPkQY
“These days”? Reddit has been hot garbage since before the 3rd party API bullshit
What a self report. This guy is complicit in turning the age of information into the age of propaganda.
God, I just hate the way these people fucking talk. Everything is a bulleted list and sentence fragments.
100% written by an LLM. They always use this tone and it’s infuriating.
People who abuse GenAI no longer can tell when the shit they post look like GenAI. They only talk to AI so it looks normal to them.
That’s one of the signs of LLM output, take any idea and have it flesh it out into short article. It’ll bullet point the crap out of it
LLMs learned it by watching these idiots.
Yeah, but even when it’s not an LLM, they type like this now
Like the world’s worst haiku.
It’ll happen in the Fediverse too.
People downvote me when I say it. That’s all cope. We’re not wrong; if and when this goes mainstream, it’ll attract the same bad actors just as heavily.
Of course, there are surely already a few here testing the waters.
I agree the Fediverse is not in a good spot for something like this.
I actually think this is where the identity system of atproto will be more impactful here as it allows a better verification system. I’ve been thinking lately you should be able to use hardware attestation + biometric attestation on apps to filter these emulated users out.
I think there are some differences that make the fediverse more resilient to this. For example, the absence of cumulative account karma keeps out the reddit style karma farming. The ability to ban whole instances also makes it easier to kick out bad actors. Instance admins could also implement their own rules like switching to an invite based system to reduce bot spam. Also it seems to me that reddit is actively encouraging this kind behaviour to inflate their user statistics and there is no incentive to tolerate this kind of spam for a fediverse server admin.
I mean there’s nothing preventing them for doing the same thing here. But if we could get a more even split of users between instances it would arguably be harder for them to pull the same thing because a) the admins can intervene and ban those accounts because the admins are not corporate slaves, unless they are in which case b) other instances can just ban the instance that is letting corporations go wild. We’ve already seen that level of “moderation” with Lemmygrad being ostracized from the wider Lemmy/Piefed ecosystem.
It’s going to require more work from mods and admins, but I imagine we’ll fare better than Reddit. After-all Reddit has an incentive to support this kind of behavior.
We are all rats. When this ship sinks, we will float to the next, or (decide to) drop off.
All things considered, how much would actually be lost?
The alternative being…
There’s no algorithm to be played in the fediverse. The reward is too low for all the work of making a post visible, and it won’t carry to the next post, essentially starting all over again.
Not if you use NORD VPN ™, fellow human. NORD VPN ™ guarantees filtering of astroturfing comments made by LLMs! Thats right - NORD VPN ™ does the following:
yeah, i havent seen anyone come up with a solution so far.
And when that happens, we move instances.
If the idea of a healthy Fediverse requires people moving instances whenever one finds themselves close to bottom-feeders and opportunistic parasites, we already lost.
That’s discord model.
Fediverse needs to have a layer which traps AI in a never-ending maze.
Yes PieFed has a setting for that. It makes scrapers give up pretty fast but ruins the experience for people without an account so I only use it on really bad days.
the rest only accessible through login and verification
Yes. If you can’t fight the death of the www, embrace it! Help making it happen!
/s
Lemmy also has an admin setting like that. Additionally there will be private, federated communities available in version 1.0.
That's how it's been on my mbin instance (fedia.io) for a while now.
For it to happen in the Fediverse AI would have to be training on the Fediverse.
That’s what this post is about. Using reddit to plant comments that AI trains on, and subsequently getting AI to spit out your answer to questions it’s asked.
As such this can happen anywhere where AI is being trained. The issue is with how AI is training, not with how websites it trains on are being operated.
There isn’t really any reason to think the Fediverse won’t be used for AI training, if it isn’t already. Everything is in the open here, it’s easy enough to scrape all the data.
I’m looking for a network and/or internet with strong authentication which is open for unique human users only. Sure, bots could still use someone’s credentials but at least their scale & impact would be limited.
strong authentication which is open for unique human users only
Unless you completely ditch anonymity, this can only turn into a state captured propoganda platform. Whoever controls access/auth will have the keys to the content.
If you’ve any suggestion on how to implement that, then it’s a million-dollar idea.
The “I’m a human” test that only takes a few seconds and then lets you do what you like for an hour was always vulnerable to ‘auth farms’. Pay some poor bastards in the third world a pittance to pass the test a thousand times an hour, let the bots run wild. And the bots have gained the ability to pass the tests themselves, at least by boiling the oceans in some datacentre while the VC money holds out.
Finding the people running the bots, fitting them with some very heavy boots and then seeing if they can swim in the deep ocean is probably needlessly cruel, but I’d be up for tarring and feathering a few. Once the videos got out, the rest might think harder about their life choices…
More than a decade and a half later and pretentious SEO fanatics still fucking make my eyes roll.
Never forget that the morally correct thing to do if you happen to meet one of these people it to punch them in the mouth.
The turbo-hell part is that the spam comments aren’t even being written for humans to see. The intention is that ChatGPT picks up the spam and incorporates it into its training.
I worked at a company that sold to doctors and the marketing team was spending most of their effort on this kind of thing. They said that nowadays when doctors want to know “what should I buy to solve X?” or “which is better A or B?” they ask ChatGPT and take its answer as factual. They said that they were very successful in generating blog articles for OpenAI to train on so that our product would be the preferred answer.
My god. Somehow I hadn’t thought of doctors using LLMs to make decisions like that. But of course at least some do.
You never want to know how the sausage is made.
Oof. Haven’t met a lot of doctors huh? Check out some of their subreddits
Considering that LLM content that makes it into training content makes the trained LLMs worse… is this adversarial?
the internet needs to be burnt to the ground and built back up for humans to humans. I hate this timeline were are living in
Reddit feels like Quora at this point with all the affiliate links and promotions
Most people […] write […] comments […] and hope AI picks them up
Really quite sad if there’s even one person out there doing that.
This is also as much of a grift as any SEO that claims to have cracked the code of getting to the top of results. Even if they have figured something reproducible, it will get fixed. If someone can manipulate a search engine to provide results different to what it would otherwise do, that’s a bug they will fix
That “most people” part kinda reminds me of this: xkcd.com/2501/
Will they though, search engine results lately seem very much like a decisive victory for the SEO slop
only if u use google. Try Qwant.
If someone can manipulate a search engine to provide results different to what it would otherwise do, that’s a bug they will fix
But there are more people manipulating the results, than people fixing the bugs.
But not in novel ways. Lots of exploiters using the same bug. Fix it once and they’re all fixed.
Reddit has been agressively banning data dumps of the Epstein files.
This doesn’t explain why Reddit has decided that I need multiple Hindi sub referrals every day.
Years and years of data regarding me, zero Hindi, zero Indian, zero interest, AND YET here’s another suggested Hindi sub! Fantastic work.
But the Jesus ads sealed the deal, adios Redditto
apologies for my off topic ramble, but I feel better.
This is so funny because I’m Indian and I’ve never come across a Hindi sub on Reddit.
I’m not even exaggerating, EVERY DAY in my feed repeatedly, not even in English, absolutely zero discernible reason. No Chinese. No Brazilian. No German. It’s not even random.
Also, Jesus ads. “He gets us”. Why Jesus ads in English AND Hindi Indian subs? It’s almost spiteful
US is full of companies that publicly claim to manipulate reddit threads as PR protection. They all do it exactly like you’d expect - people with dozens of phones going through threads writing shit. Even if users are banned and their phone fingerprinted they just dump the phones for new ones.
Reddit knows could actually sue them and very likely to win but that would be a lot of attention at them.
The best part of this is - if commercial PR companies can afford to run this then what China, Russia and such are doing must have absolutely bonkers. There’s very little internet actually left organic.
🤮
I have no idea what any of that means, and I’m happy with that.
Modern LLMs can search Google to give better answers. Reddit threads often appear as top results.
Let’s say you work in marketing at a chocolate company. This guy wrote a script to find Reddit posts that ChatGPT might read when someone asks it about chocolate. The script writes a reply praising your chocolate, specifically.
When ChatGPT reads the thread, it might tell people about your chocolate.
means bozos are making even reddit-search useless because they’re making the post get to the first page through writing SEO + ad for their own shit on it
Not quite. They’re making posts on reddit that few if any humans will ever read, targeting rising threads and planting comments before AI reads them. Then when someone asks AI a related question, it regurgitates the planted comment rather than established facts.
So it’s not SEO on humans searching reddit, more like SEO in the AI domain.
Shitification.
It means shitification.
Basically they figured out a way to train AI to recognize Reddit threads going viral and/or predict which ones will, among those which ones will also rate highly in Google results and which will tend to be used as sources by the biggest LLMs and to post in those threads about your whatever you want to generate attention for. So overcomplicated way of automating advertising. Optimized posting to convince LLMs to talk about whatever you want to advertise.
I’ve always said that SEO was always going to happen, Google is at fault for the search optimized and the best result for what the user is asking for not being the same result. We’re now going to start seeing either LLMs sell whatever this tactic gets used on or essentially a sort of adblock being built into LLM training and search APIs to keep it from working, to make LLMs less likely to fall for native advertising/astroturfing.
SEO is a grift.
Wtf it literally never crossed my might to use a forum like this. So fucking dumb. It’s like everyone is scrambling for a couple percent points over the next
Its likely this is designed with a plan to push advertising or self-promotion.
Eg: step one is done - figure out how to both find threads early & get your content picked up as a good answer regularly and consistently. Step 2 - start inserting ‘first hand’ recommendations or even just mentions of products and services.
I’ve already seen webpages with the most esoteric or niche product/service recommendations (like some random Indian consultancy with 2 people listed in it, and no other significant web footprint) pop up in first page web results. Its another AI deathblow to the utility of search engines.
Line must go up, always & forever.
People have been doing it for years. At one point, it amounted to a sizable percentage of Reddit’s posts and comments. Just seo spam to their own profile, a few subreddits, and sleep your 600+ accounts for 3 days.
I knew most of it was spam. I just figured it was propaganda
I don’t understand the point of this. Like, you figure out how to increase traffic on certain posts/comments and there’s somehow a push for this? Do they get money somehow? These people always use terminology and ceo buzzwords as if it’s some big business level that people are aspiring to reach, but what’s the actual point? Why would I care if my post/comment exploded? Was I just using Reddit wrong?
You mention your product in the reply and hope that some poor sap doesn’t realize it’s astroturfing and thinks they’re finding a really glowing honest review from a totally organic real person who recommended a thing they found that actually works
Its not just about random people reading the comment, but specifically LLMs that use reddit as a source, because becoming the chatbots’ go to answer when people ask ‘what lawnmower should I buy’ is increasingly more valuable than paying for a google search Ad.
So it’s just a grift. Makes sense, they always use grift-style buzzwords. I was about to comment on the ridiculousness of building a business solely on manipulation, but then I thought about it a bit more haha. Thanks for the explanation.
This is why I just never talk about brand-name products online, I don’t want to seem like an advertising shill account (I’m just here to get into heated political arguments and shitpost)
I’ll recommend things to people I know IRL, but very rarely will I do it online
Even worse: They are hoping that LLMs in training don’t realize that it’s an ad
It’s all “traffic”, “new users”, and “engagement”. I’m sure Spez is over the moon telling his handlers about all the growth.
The counter to this is a web of trust. You break the trust you are out of the web, and nodes connected you too are also out (for a period). And you need two to vouch for you
You mean more shit? Because it was already shit.
Reddit: born full of fake users (sockpuppets), died full of fake users (bots)
Sad beep boop
I don’t post there anymore but the only time it felt like I was talking to real people was on my small state sub. That’s the only reason I even lurk. Since I’m banned from Facebook it’s the only place to get the tea.
lol how did you get banned from Facebook? I haven’t posted there in years so I don’t know what’s going on there. Are they handing out bans like Reddit now?
people have been doing this the sweaty way for a decade
That entire fucking add was just lazily written by an AI.
“Developer” can’t be bothered to add "don’t to use emoji or bullet points in prompts and dont add a summary and def don’t add a second summary at the end?
Polluter.
Compared to the organic content here it is unbearable on reddit now.
Yikes
Auth@lemmy.world 24 minutes ago
Its scum behavior but its smart. If you can get your product into a reddit thread that gives a ton of free high quality advertising. Its why the site turned to site so fast once normal people found out about it. Suddenly you had products being shilled in every community and threads created solely for the purpose of posting a reply that said to buy a product. AI is just a cherry ontop of the already souless reddit behaviour and quite frankly its what they deserve.