- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Reddit, AI spam bots explore new ways to show ads in your feed
#For sale: Ads that look like legit Reddit user posts
“We highly recommend only mentioning the brand name of your product since mentioning links in posts makes the post more likely to be reported as spam and hidden. We find that humans don’t usually type out full URLs in natural conversation and plus, most Internet users are happy to do a quick Google Search,” ReplyGuy’s website reads.
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I’m looking forward to their “Dynamic Product Ads” system to coming back to bite them in the ass when ads for Nestle products appear next to posts talking about whatever horrific thing Nestle is doing this week (and similar things).
The funny thing is, the ai-generated engagement is specifically formatted to still be desirable in that situation, because plenty of advertising is already purely to create goodwill.
Imagine that when people start talking about Nestle being horrible to its workers, a “dynamic product ad” chimes in to retort that Nestle is actually great and cares about its workers.
Exactly like election disinformation? Yup, and plenty of companies can’t wait to have their own disinformation bot net, sanctioned under the guise of “advertising.”
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I wish I could get all the mods from the subreddits that rolled over in June/July in a room and slap each and every one upside the head.
why?
Because they thought if they just folded to the site admins that everything would be okay in the end. “Oh, we built a community! We don’t want to lose it, so we’re opening back up so daddy Spez doesn’t take away our power!”
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As much as I dislike iBleeedBullshit and AssholeTheTurtle, I can respect the fact that they pissed off Spez enough to nuke their accounts from orbit.
Mad props to anyone that managed to be a thorn in the site admins’ sides, even briefly.
Most facepalm reaction tbh. If only they had some spine they would have switched immediately to lemmy, but most were just doing it to go along and never had any intentions of doing anything significant.
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Even as someone that’s still active here, this would never happen. Neither lemmy or Kbin were ready to replace reddit in either features, stability or support, not then and not even today. It’s unfortunate but reddit is not going to go down when there is no actual competition available.
lemmy is to reddit right now is what reddit was to digg when reddit first started. Eventually reddit will go a step too far.
Except instead of having an evangelizing atheist neckbeard problem, we have tankie problem. A lot of people that see unfiltered discourse on instances outside LW will think it’s Voat 2.0.
yea because not accepting US propaganda and trying to uplift marginalized people and help workers not be trodded upon, is about the same as open fascism, bigotry and constant hate speech /s
Reddit was always better than Digg too. I prefer the smaller community.
When reddit fuck up again, the alternatives are already pretty mature, at least compared to last year. Back then the only app we have was jerboa (and it was pretty shitty back then too, unlike now). Now we have gazillion of lemmy apps that can suit everyone taste.
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I wasn’t a mod, but I did participate in the blackout as a user and I did not immediately switch to Lemmy when it was over. It took about two weeks to get over the whole ‘FOMO if I leave Reddit’ and ‘I’ve spent over a decade here’ sunk cost issues.
So I don’t blame anyone for not immediately switching to Lemmy, but if you haven’t jumped ship from Reddit by now, especially if you’re doing thankless mod work for people who don’t appreciate you, I have little respect for you at this point.
And let me take this opportunity as someone who mods several lemmy.world communities to say that I do not feel that the .world admin are unappreciative at all. In fact, exactly the opposite. And they’re working for free just like I am, so it is a whole different scenario anyway.
I tried to get other people off the site before I left, but the mods decided to be douchebags about user retention.
If anyone looks up my profile there, it says something like ‘Fuck Reddit! Reddit sucks! Go to Lemmy!’ but that’s the best I can do at this point.
I’m pretty sure it’s why I didn’t get an IPO buy-in offer despite having super high post and comment karma too.
They kept sending their IPO shit to me with no way to opt out. I reported them to the FTC for not having an unsubscribe on their email.
As someone who moved a million-users community to lemmy successfully, if those mods had already started moving their communities to lemmy during the blackout, many many more users would have moved already. But they never planned for that, so it was just a weak bluff that reddit called.
But that would have been to assume the blackout would fail, and I think a lot of people didn’t think it would. I was dubious, but I think I was in the minority there.
Not really, I started moving /r/piracy when I saw spez doubling down. By that point the writing was on the wall.
It was obvious that Reddit wasn’t changing course at all. Especially with how they handled communication with Christian Selig and other 3rd party devs.
I came here during the blackout and deleted all my content on my account. The last day Apollo worked was the last day I used Reddit and I was a Reddittor since 3/10/2011
If there was better mod organization we could have better translations for the non tech and piracy related communities but I’m overall happy how we ended up.
We highly recommend only mentioning the brand name of your product since mentioning links in posts makes the post more likely to be reported as spam and hidden.
Like Barbie™, now available on Blu-ray and select streaming service!
Thank you, Oscar-winning actress Margot Robbie.
Thanks actress Margot Robbie!
fire is hot, water is wet. More news at 10
Lemmy Flood Gates right now.
The control room has alarms going off and on the main screen it just says “LET ‘R RIP” in blinking red letters.
@tearsintherain I see repost bots on the front page all the time now
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I don’t think about reddit unless I see these posts. Good for me!
You couldn’t make this stuff up
Why are people still on there?!
I went back yesterday just because Lemmy is way less active, and also I still don’t actually know how it works a year later.
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Because up to now it’s still a site where you can go talk to actual people. This value was preserved not intentionally it seems.
Lets see how that holds up if half the people are AI bots now.
Just like Twitter where most people are entirely ignorant to what’s happening and they continue to use it because everyone else is. It’d be nice if they died like Digg back when that site went to shit just like reddit and Twitter have.
most people are entirely ignorant to what’s happening and they continue
i’m learning as i age that this is the reason enshittification happens anywhere and to anything; i wish i could learn how to accept it.
Well, Twitter is actually based now. Before Elon bought it there were a bunch of feds working behind the scenes to censor and move the needle. When Elon cleaned house he removed a lot of that. Elon said he “bought a crime scene” basically.
Keep telling yourself that.
Just as one example: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/09/x-twitter-bots-republican-primary-debate-tweets-increase
Use of Twitter in the US alone has slumped by more than a fifth since Elon Musk bought the site. 23% less usage is a big drop in general, let along from a single country.
So now it is similar to the dead internet where a fair amount of engagement is fake. I logged on a few weeks back and I had dozens of comments and messages from Stacys, Jessicas, Amandas, Jessicas, and Laura’s. Funny how I attract only women with those names.
Just because elon isn’t their guy doesn’t mean he’s for the people.
Echo chambers were literally the biggest issue with that site. Now it chatGPTs itself?
All communities have echo chambers, including those of Lemmy.
Agreed. Reddit now has ai generated echo chambers.
The depressing thing about all this is that this stuff actually works. Most people will happily consume whatever shit is served to them.
When you’re constantly inflicted with advertising it’s the fish not seeing the water story. Fuck advertising propaganda and malware networks. Fuck advertising without consent in public spaces. And most of all fuck reddit for betraying their mods and users and treating them like pieces of shit because they can get away with it.
I left in a huff when they jumped the shark and dropped 3party app support. I was a pretty heavy user / contributor and fully thought I might crawl back at some point. Turns out I’m doing fine without going back and the alternatives, while massively smaller, are so much less crappy feeling. I think a lot of people would feel the same way if we could just get them to try the green eggs and ham. I think it’s great that Kagi is starting to index Lemmy, but the one gateway to get people over here that might actually work would be if Google searches started turning up Lemmy content. I think that would grab some attention.
I’m unfortunately on Reddit regularly, but that’s only because it still has decent tech support search results. Haven’t logged in since the APIpocalypse
I still miss many of the nice communities though, Lemmy is fine, but it has less users in total than many of my niche communities. I still visit Reddit sometimes to find something out about my interests, although that might slow down if bots really take over Reddit
I literally only go back for one niche sub and only using that sweet, sweet adblock.
Id do the same, but Im in a verry stupid situation, I dont have a reddit account and dont want to be advertising-group stalked due to being a sensitive subject.
plus it was already half taken over by ads because the sex industry is bad, some of the subs are just filled with “this is a thing you can buy, look how sexy!”. I dont want what your selling, the way your selling it.
on lemmy, the subreddit is dead, minus some guy trying to revive it. Like many others, its owner posted 5 posts, and… nobody kept the pace up. 🤕
Same here, but I still use 3rd party mobile app, because both the site (unless you use old.reddit) and the official mobile app are garbage.
I still use my porn account, though it seems that I go to it less and less
Agreed. I just bought a used Sony a7iii and the sonyalpha sub is a great place for knowledge.
Granted eventually that stuff will filter off reddit… but in the mean time I’m only there on desktop with pihole and unlock origin.
Once old.reddit dies I’ll never go back.
Sent from my boost for Lemmy app.
Once old.reddit dies I’ll never go back
I’m the same way, but that’s because I find the text formatting, comment layout, and page framing to be almost completely unreadable without it.
My ten year old monitor is at a nice 1980x1020 and when I view a post on base reddit, it crams the post into the middle of the screen, displays one or two comments below it, and then displays… other posts? Or something? It’s mind-boggling, difficult to sort out what’s what, and I can’t figure out who’s needs are being met with a layout like that.
When I click on a post, I want to see the whole post, laid out across the majority of my screen real estate, and I want all of the comments visible beneath the post, with multiple comment sorting options.
I just realized what I’m basically asking for is a forum layout.
You know, that thing that worked for decades.
I’m putting up with Lemmy even though I have a few minor gripes (mostly related to sorting and search) because the community is part of what’s important to me, but the main reason I stick around anywhere is the ability to read content I’m interested in. When the on page formatting of that content sucks, I quit reading it.
I quit subscribing to newspaper websites (and ultimately quit visiting them for news entirely) when the on page advertising squeezed out the actual journalism. I could adblock, but the formatting is still a disaster and barely resembles a news article if you print it out and hold it up to a newspaper, so screw that noise.
I’m sometimes willing to be okay with being “the product” when it’s my choice and I know what I’m trading for it and judge the value of what I’m getting in return to be acceptable.
When I do that, though, and major changes I don’t like get made to what I’m “getting out of it” with no way for me to go back to what I did like, it’s a rug pull and a breach of trust.
For all of the market analysis everyone is supposedly doing, you’d think at least ONE major player would figure out that noone likes it when their routine grinds to a screeching halt because someone decided to move the user interface around and now nobody can find anything.
lol is this a discrete Kagi Ad?
Oh man, you just cannot tell anymore…
I still visit smaller subreddits when looking up technical fixes (like unraid) but I no longer post and got rid of all my old posts.
Hopefully as Lemmy grows, I can leave that shithole for good.
I was very similar, heavy Reddit user that quit over thr 3PA shitshow last year. Not sure if you’ve noticed the same effect, but my attention span has gone way up.
Same! Also a Kagi subscriber. Hello! I thought Reddit might cave on the 3rd party thing for a while. Then they were doubling down and treated the developers of those apps like shit. I was a happy Apollo user, and I trusted what he said about how Reddit acted. I moved to Lemmy. It was confusing at the start but now I feel as at home here as I did in Reddit. If not more actually, since our user base is smaller, I feel like community is closer and has a little more tech know-how too. I do miss some fun Reddit things but I think Lemmy and the fediverse has a ton of potential and I want to be part of it ☺️
I was considering Kagi but the the CEO is a maniac
Really? Do you use this criteria for everything in your life? Show me a ceo that isn’t a maniac and I’ll show you someone that hasnt had a proper psychological screening. Lemmy has blown up the lore on this guy anyway. Not much evidence he’s any more of an asshole than most ceos.
I don’t actually think that’s the case - my reading of that whole kerfuffle was that the blogger had overreacted.
Agreed, but they both did in my opinion. I’ll stick with StartPage and DDG, myself.
Just gonna suggest searxng as an alternative to kagi if you want something open-source, free, and still customizable.
Most searxng instances also index lemmy.
I think there was a post a while back where someone found Lemmy posts on search results. I think it’s still being drowned out by bigger platforms but it’s good to see it happening!
They do show up in DDG occasionally but I was troubleshooting a jerboa problem. The results are there, they’re just buried deep.
Homie, most people in my office don’t read fucking books. Half the people in my life before I was an adult have grown to never touch a book or educational material in their adult lives. We’re fucked. By and large people just want to not care about anything it seems. I still get scoffed at when mentioning google and they’re under an antitrust lawsuit right now. We are not going to last unless education comes to the forefront.
Woops, thx. I enjoy the comments people make on AT as much as the news stories.
The only remaining use for reddit for me is basically being a Stack Overflow for non-technology stuff (want to find the best bidet, there’s probably a review post on reddit that someone put together).
Now that comments might be well-hidden marketing attempts, there’s legit no trusting that information anymore.
Way to go, Reddit. In a few months, I’ll no longer have any reason to look at a post from 2024 or later.
Same, plus porn. I haven’t run across active communities on lemmy that cater to what I’m looking for, but reddit still going strong in that regard.
Other than that, I haven’t visited in months.
When reddit bans porn, it will truly be over
I gave up even on that a long time ago. Every subreddit was overrun by softcore pics from women with onlyfans.
I use the (hidden?) rss feed that every sub has, to get a chronological order of posts. Then when I find a user I like, I’ll add their (again, hidden?) user rss feed to a category of users I follow. It was a huge pain in the ass to start but now I have a pretty steady flow of users whose content I like. All this is wrapped together via FreshRSS, which I self-host. This has the unexpected side-effect of capturing images/links that may be taken down by picky/overbearing mods, but because I still have the source link (not just the reddit post link), I can usually still access it.
When they silently axe that feature, it’s the end for me.
Definitely not every…
Every one I was subscribed to. Or at least that’s what showed up on my front page feed, because they were the newer posts and in greater numbers.
The style in which that post by Ophelia_SK is written seems exactly like chatGPT. I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly makes me feel so strongly, but it’s something to do with how sentences and paragraphs are constructed. They always have the same cadence with the commas and how thoughts are laid out. It’s got that generically positive tone as well.
Kinda cool though, I feel like I’m becoming able to spot these. It’s like being able to spot a photoshop by the pixels. I’ve seen quite a few shops in my time.
I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly makes me feel so strongly, but it’s something to do with how sentences and paragraphs are constructed.
It has the classic 3 section style. Intro, response, conclusion.
It starts by acknowledging the situation. Then it moves on to the suggestion/response. Then finally it gives a short conclusion.
the “This is photoshopped, i can tell by the pixels” has now become “This is LLM, I can tell by the sections”
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how thoughts are laid out
Perhaps you’re noticing the lack of deixis?
Without going too technical, deixis is to refer to something in relation to the current situation. For example, when you say “Kinda cool though, I feel like I’m becoming able to spot these.”, that “these” is discourse deixis - you’re referring to something else (bots) within your discourse based on its relative position to when you wrote that “these”.
We humans do this all the bloody time. LLMs though almost never do it - and Ophelia_SK doesn’t, that’s why for example it repeats “debt” and “job” like a broken record.
EDIT: there’s also the extremely linear argumentation structure. Human text is way messier.
Plus it explains like the reader is kinda dumb
Oooh, I think you’re onto something here. That’s definitely part of it.
Let’s try something. I’ve reworked Ophelia’s text to include some deixis, and omit a few contextually inferrable bits of info:
reworked text
It’s understandable that you’re feeling anxious and overwhelmed with this, just know that you aren’t alone facing it. Many people have experienced similar struggles and found ways to overcome them.
Firstly, it’s important to address your debt situation. I recommend relief options that may help against some of the financial burden. One to consider is visiting the website [insert link], they offer an American debt relief program. It’s worth looking into, to see if you qualify.
In terms of finding a job, it’s great that you’re considering part-time options that won’t negatively impact your mental health, as it’s important to prioritize your well-being. You may want to explore opportunities that align with your interests and skills, and consider reaching out to local resources like job centres or career counselling services for guidance and support.
Remember, it’s okay to take things at your own pace and focus on your mental health. Seeking support form loved ones, therapists, or support groups can be also beneficial during this challenging time.
If my hunch is correct, this should still sound a bit ChatGPT-y for you (as I didn’t mess with the “polite but distant, nominally supportive” tone, nor with the linear text structure), but less than the original.
The full url written out is a good clue, but beyond that, AI sounds off-puttingly positive because it’s always trying to be as inoffensive and appealing to everyone as possible.
AI sounds off-puttingly positive because it’s always trying to be as inoffensive and appealing to everyone as possible.
And also because people trying to cheer you up adopt a casual tone that is completely absent here, so it sounds as fake as corporate “apologies”.
That’s what I hate about it the most. Why can’t it tell me I’m a fucking idiot sometimes?
It would be much harder to tell it apart from real people that way!
Every commercial model has a positivity bias baked in, it makes it hard to use any of them as a cowriter because your villains all end up really nice and accommodating. Finetuning can break this but sometimes it creeps back in. Very annoying.
It reads like the script for a customer service rep.
MFW proper spelling and comma usage means it’s an AI post.
But really though. <- and that is a sentence that AI would never use because it references too complex of an idea and is too casual.
Humans are much more dynamic than these LLMs, especially because companies need their LLMs to be as uncontroversial as possible.
It’s like a corporate memo as an AI
You see all over the place in Amazon reviews too. You basically can’t trust the reviews anymore.
Tbh I honestly write replies in a style similar to Ophelia_SK (ChatGPT?) except for the www. part, when I am giving paragraphs of genuine advice. Am I bot?
Edit: Looking at it again, it’s too long and flowery even for my long form replies.
Oh no, forming your ideas into comprehensible essay format with intersentence connectivity and flow, maybe even splitting into paragraphs, isn’t even close to LLM speech.
I do form long, connected, split texts and comments, too, but there is a great difference between mine and an LLMs tone, cadence, mood or whatever you wanna call these things.
For example, humans usually cut corners when forming sentences and paragraphs, even if when forming long ones. We do this via lazy grammar use, unrestricted thesaurus selection, uneven sentence or paragraph lengths, lots of phrase abbreviations e.g. “tbh”, lax use of punctuations e.g. “(ChatGPT?)”, which also is a substitution for a whole question sentence.
Also, the bland, upbeat and respecting tone the bots mimic from long-thought essays is never kept up in spontaneous writing/typing. Dead giveaway of a script-speech than genuine, on-point and assuming human interaction.
Us LLMs can’t do these with rather simple reverse-jenga syntax and semantics forming, with simple formal pragmatics sprinkled, yet. The wild west, very expansive, extended pragmatics of a language is where the real shit is at.
whatever you wanna call these things
This is a phrase an AI (as they are now) would never use. To these LLMs, something is either a fact or it thinks it’s a fact. They leave no room for interpretation. These AIs will never say, “I’m not sure, maybe. It’s up to you.” Because that’s not a fact. It’s not a data point to be ingested.
Oh, feel ya.
You are dead on. That post absolutely fucking reeks of AI. I want to say if you can’t smell it a mile off you’re an absolute cretin, but there are probably millions of people who’ve never really spent much time with LLMs and would be easily fooled by this garbage
The style in which that post by Ophelia_SK is written seems exactly like chatGPT. I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly makes me feel so strongly
It’s because of the soulless soulless emoji at the end. LLM developers have been adding them to the ends of all GPT conversations because they statistically trick people interacting with them to think they are having emotional connections with the chat bots 🤖
The AI doesn’t have an emoji in its text, that’s a real user that used one (as far as I can tell from their post history).
The account is now suspended. Interesting.
Ophelia_SK is, yeah. You’ll see that a lot when there’s a screenshot of an obvious bot shill, since what they’re doing is against reddit’s rules.
Yes! I talked a bit to ChatGPT about my mental health to see if it would help (sometimes I just want to scream into a void that I’m stressed, and having the void talk back sounded amazing. But it never helps).
It always responds exactly like this, with exactly the same expressions. I’m kind of sad for the other user now.
Yay we’re developing the uncanny valley for AI generated content
And so the Turing test lives on! /s
