To be fair it was bots that voted them to the front page.
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?
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
(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…
It's "reality television" on a discussion forum to karma farm and help push other kinds of misinformation.
Needs to feature both a wedding and a pregnancy and you've nailed it
insert plot from an episode of Friends
AITAH?
I asked my friend to help move a couch into my apartment but he got it stuck in the stairwell. AITAH?
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.
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).
I genuinely miss the 90s. I mean, yeah, early forms of internet and computers existed, but not everyone had a camera, and not everyone got absolutely bukkaked with disinformation. Not that I think everything is bad about the tech in of itself, but how we use it nowadays is just so exhausting.
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.
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.
ESH
Oh boy, identity mechanics to curb out the last vestiges of privacy.
They're pretty much declaring a war on VPNs also
Yep. More than half the time I can't access Reddit through Proton VPN.
Also doesn’t fix the problem at all, I can still just use AI to post to my main account
you could try to cook up some kind of trust chain, without totally abandoning privacy.
Get a government-certified agencies minting master key tied to your id. You only get one, with trust rating tied to it.
With that master key you can generate infinite amount of sub-ids that dont identify you but show your trust rating(fuzzed).
Have a cross-network reporting system that can lower that rating for abuses like botting.
idk Im just spitballing
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?
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.
let me scan your eyeballs. it’s the only way
I dunno, part of me is ok with it. It's clear to me how bad things are going to get. So having certain platforms or spaces with some level of public identity validation seems like it might be ok....
Well, it’s a great method to find people to target for political speech.
Lemmy is not safe either.
there isnt so much incentive. No advertisement. Upvote counters behave weirdly in the fediverse (from what i can see).
There are no virtual points to earn on Lemmy. So hopefully it will resist the enshitification for while.
I still dont see why people care about reddit karma. Its just a number?
Account age and karma makes an account look more legit and it's thus more useful for spreading misinformation and/or guerilla marketing.
Same reason why people play cookie clicker, watch the useless number go up.
Also, some subs are downright hostile to people with low karma.
Gotta love those dopamine fixes, huh?
Dead internet theory
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?
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.
Most people who have worked in customer service would believe every word because they have seen the absurdity of real people.
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.
It's like reality TV & soap operas in text form. You can somewhat easily spot the AI posts though, which are plentiful now. They all tend to have the same "professional" writing style and a high tendency to add mid sentence "quotes" and em dashes (—) which you need a numpad combo to actually write out manually - a casual write-up would just use the - symbols, if at all. LLMs also make a lot of logic errors that may pop up. Example from one of the currently highly upvoted posts:
He pulled out what looked like a box from a special jewelry store. My heart raced with excitement as I assumed it was a lovely bracelet or a special memento for our wedding day. But when he opened the box, I was absolutely stunned. Inside was a key to a house he supposedly bought for us. I was taken aback because I had no idea he was even looking for real estate. My first reaction was one of shock and confusion, as I thought it was a huge decision that we should have discussed together.
As I processed the moment, I realized the house wasn’t just any house—it was a fixer-upper on the outskirts of town. Now, I get that it can be a great investment, but this particular house needed a ton of work. I’m talking major renovations and repairs, and I honestly had no desire to live there.
Aside from the weird writing (Oh jolly! Expensive gifts! How exciting!), this lady somehow realized & identified this house, location and its state just by looking at some random key in that moment. Bonus frustration if you read through the comments who eat all of this shit up, assuming they aren't also bots.
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?
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
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.
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.
Shiri’s Scissor was supposed to be a cautionary tale...
But I mean, AI is the asshole, so maybe that's why they went to the front page?
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".
Why not? r/AmlTheAsshole is about entertainment, not truth. It would be an indictment of AI if it couldn't replicate a short, funny story.
News and Discussions about Reddit
Welcome to !reddit. This is a community for all news and discussions about Reddit.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules
Rule 1- No brigading.
**You may not encourage brigading any communities or subreddits in any way. **
YSKs are about self-improvement on how to do things.
Rule 2- No illegal or NSFW or gore content.
**No illegal or NSFW or gore content. **
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-Reddit posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
:::spoiler Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.