this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

To be fair it was bots that voted them to the front page.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

Anyone who did any kind of modding on Reddit could see the majority of posts and comments where mostly bots.

Bots competitions for upvotes/views and clicks.

Reddit's been like that since ~2018

[–] [email protected] 131 points 4 days ago (9 children)

(Already said this before, but let me reiterate:)

Typical AITA post:

Title: AITAH for calling out my [Friend/Husband/Wife/Mom/Dad/Son/Daughter/X-In-Law] after [He/She] did [Undeniably something outrageous that anyone with an IQ above 80 should know its unacceptable to do]?

Body of post:

[5-15 paragraph infodumping that no sane person would read]

I told my friend this and they said I’m an asshole. AITAH?

Comments:

Comment 1: NTA, you are abosolutely right, you should [Divorce/Go No-Contact/Disown/Unfriend, the person] IMMEDIATELY. Don’t walk away, RUNNN!!!

Comment 2: NTA, call the police! That’s totally unacceptable!

And sometimes you get someone calling out OP… 3: Wait, didn’t OP also claim to be [Totally different age and gender and race] a few months ago? Heres the post: [Link]


🙄 C’mon, who even think any of this is real…

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

It's "reality television" on a discussion forum to karma farm and help push other kinds of misinformation.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Needs to feature both a wedding and a pregnancy and you've nailed it

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 days ago (2 children)

insert plot from an episode of Friends

AITAH?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago

I asked my friend to help move a couch into my apartment but he got it stuck in the stairwell. AITAH?

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Way too many...

I was born before the Internet. The Internet is always lumped into the "entertainment" part of my brain. A lot of people that have grown up knowing only the Internet think the Internet is much more "real". It's a problem.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (5 children)

I've come up with a system to categorize reality in different ways:

Category 1: Thoughts inside my brain formed by logics

Category 2: Things I can directly observe via vision, hearing, or other direct sensory input

Category 3: IRL Other people's words, stories, anecdotes, in face to face conversations

Category 4: Acredited News Media, Television, Newspaper, Radio (Including Amateur Radio Conversations), Telegrams, etc...

Category 5: The General Internet

The higher the category number, means the more distant that information is, and therefore more suspicious I am.

I mean like, if a user on Reddit (or any internet fourm or social media for that matter) told me X is a valid treatment for X disease without like real evidence, I'm gonna laugh in their face (well not their face, since its a forum, but you get the idea).

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Man, sometimes when I finish grabbing something I needed from Reddit, I hit the frontpage (always logged out) just out of morbid curiosity.
Every single time that r/AmIOverreacting sub is there with the most obvious "no, you're not" situation ever.

I never once seen that sub show up before the exodus. AI or not, I refuse to believe any frontpage posts from that sub are anything other than made up bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

Typical AITA post:

"I want to do what I want with my own life. AITA?"

Everybody Sucks Here

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago

If it's well-written enough to be entertaining, it doesn't even matter whether it's real or not. Something like it almost certainly happened to someone at some point.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

I'm thinking of pulling the plug on Reddit (at least for a while). My tipping point has become how the "drone" story is becoming popular. At first it was intriguing and mysterious (the airport shutdowns and reports of large vehicles at low levels was fascinating), but I'm getting the vibe it's a misinformation campaign to distract the US from how we are about to be changed.

I was actually permabanned in the "News" sub for an innocuous comment. All it was is that I noted the federal authorities are likely correct for saying most of the reports of "UFOs" are likely airplanes and manmade drones, and to play devil's advocate I mentioned there were likely legitimate reports of UAPs, but since the majority were probably mistaken planes the Federal agencies' reactions were technically truthful.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 3 days ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 days ago (1 children)

there isnt so much incentive. No advertisement. Upvote counters behave weirdly in the fediverse (from what i can see).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

No advertisement

You don't think that commercial products can't get good (or bad) coverage in a place like this? In any discussion of hardware, software (including, for example, video games), cars, books, movies, television, etc., there's plenty of profit motive behind getting people interested in things.

There are already popular and unpopular things here. Some of those things are pretty far removed from a direct profit motive (Linux, Star Trek memes, beans). But some are directly related to commercial products being sold now (current video games and the hardware to run them, specific types of devices from routers to CPUs to televisions to bicycles or even cars and trucks, movies, books, etc.).

Not to mention the political motivations to influence on politics, economics, foreign affairs, etc. There's lots of money behind trying to convince people of things.

As soon as a thread pops up in a search engine it's fair game for the bots to find it, and for that platform to be targeted by humans who unleash bots onto that platform. Lemmy/Mastodon aren't too obscure to notice.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 days ago (1 children)

There are no virtual points to earn on Lemmy. So hopefully it will resist the enshitification for while.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago (3 children)

I still dont see why people care about reddit karma. Its just a number?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 days ago

Account age and karma makes an account look more legit and it's thus more useful for spreading misinformation and/or guerilla marketing.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Same reason why people play cookie clicker, watch the useless number go up.

Also, some subs are downright hostile to people with low karma.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Gotta love those dopamine fixes, huh?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Some subreddits require a minimum karma score for posting. And it gets less likely to get shadow banned the more karma you have.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 days ago (1 children)

This is the whole reason that I discovered and came to Lemmy. Reddit is literally 90% bots, from the posts, to the filtering, to the censoring, to outright banning. It's a mess.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Or getting this shit after you comment somewhere:

"Excuse me but could you please send a direct message to our admins to verify your account before placing a comment? Everyone has to do it."

I replied "go fuck yourself" and they banned me instantly and I never even submitted anything lmao.

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[–] [email protected] 88 points 4 days ago (13 children)

Oh boy, identity mechanics to curb out the last vestiges of privacy.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 4 days ago (1 children)

They're pretty much declaring a war on VPNs also

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Yep. More than half the time I can't access Reddit through Proton VPN.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 days ago

Also doesn’t fix the problem at all, I can still just use AI to post to my main account

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I wonder where people in the future will get their information from. What trustworthy sources of information are there? If the internet is overrun with bots, then you can't really trust anything you read there, as it could all be propaganda. What else to do, though, to get your news?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

That's the killer app right there: the complete inability for the common person to distinguish between true and false. That's what they're going for.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

let me scan your eyeballs. it’s the only way

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

Does Lemmy have any features that resist this kind of astroturfing?

No one would consider bots talking to one another a real conversation, but is there anything regular users can do?

[–] [email protected] 44 points 4 days ago (4 children)
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[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 days ago (1 children)

In the age of A/B testing and automated engagement, I have to wonder who is really getting played? The people reading the synthetically generated bullshit or the people who think they're "getting engagement" on a website full of bots and other automated forms of engagement cultivation.

How much of the content creator experience is itself gamed by the website to trick creators into thinking they're more talented, popular, and well-received than a human audience would allow and should therefore keep churning out new shit for consumption?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

It's ultimately about ad money. They haven't cared it's humans or bots either. They keep paying out either way. This predates long before the LLM era. It's bizarre.

It's pretty much a case of the POSIWID. The system is meant to be genuine human engagement. What the system does is artificial at every step. Turns out its purpose is to fabricate things for bots to engage with. And this is all propped up by people who for some reason pay to keep the system running.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

This reminds me of the ad supported games that advertise other ad supported games. I think I've even seen an ad supported game run an ad for itself.

I wonder if at some point people will walk away from these platforms and the platform and its owners won't even be able to tell.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 days ago

Most people who have worked in customer service would believe every word because they have seen the absurdity of real people.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago

Tbh, I see how this can be really good for people. We can never again believe that what apples are saying online is really representative of the general population. It never has been, but now we have a really solid reason to dispel the belief that doesn't require much explanation.

That said, we'll need to combat this with more right knit communities where people can better identify themselves as human. Captcha doesn't do that, but the Goth girls on VF so long ago had it figured out. We gotta do proper "salutes".

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 days ago

Shiri’s Scissor was supposed to be a cautionary tale...

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago

But I mean, AI is the asshole, so maybe that's why they went to the front page?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 days ago (11 children)

It’s stupidly easy to make up stuff on AITA and get upvotes/comments. I made up one just for fun and was surprised at how popular it got. Well, now not so much, but back when I did.

If you know the audience and what gets them upset, you’ve got easy karma farming.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Is reddit still feeding Googles LLM or was it just a one time thing? Meaning will the newest LLM generated posts feed LLMs to generate posts?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

The truly valuable data is the stuff that was created prior to LLMs, anything after this is tainted by slop. Any verifiable human data would be worth more, which is why they are simultaneously trying to erode any and all privacy

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