Will the bots be what ends it?
Eventually it’ll be all bots jerking themselves off
AI really is taking our jobs, huh?
https://lemmynsfw.com/comment/8244505
It’s already dead. r/wholesomememes decided to allow only original content (no bots or reposts), and, after two days the only post was one begging human users to post anything original.
There are no users left. It’s bots all the way through, like maggots in a rotting corpse.
Half the users may as well be bots anyway, it’s just dorks yelling the same catch phrases at each other in the comments.
Have a look at r/wholesomememes; they decided to allow only original content (no bots or reposts), and, after two days the only post was one begging human users to post anything original.
Much more than half the users are bots.
Subs like that are bot farms for sure, but it’s been common knowledge for a decade that the default subs are awful. The ratio in smaller subs is probably a lot better.
Besides, I think things did get better there after a while?
I just had a look… there were four posts yesterday.
Seven the day before.
For a sub with over 17 million subscribers.It doesn’t look much better, I’d say.
So many on Reddit bitch and moan about reddit. Just delete your account and use alternatives if you hate it so much.
deleted by creator
I was one of those. Before Lemmy, nothing was truly an alternative for Reddit. There were alternative Twitter-like sites up the ass and Facebook; but nothing similar to Reddit’s layout/presentation.
bans controversial subreddits
They are ruining valuable conversation by banning GasTheKikes and Jailbait. My free speech!!! /s
I enjoy using Reddit.
Damn you for that
/s
Username checks out /t
It was dead to me over here until you posted about it. Want a reddit hate circle jerk updoot buddy?
Restricting search results to reddit is still a nice way to filter out corporate junk and just get honest end user opinion on things. As much as I hate the management of the platform now, you have to remember that Reddit didn’t always used to be shit. Aaron Swartz was a co-founder.
Except companies have learned the meta, and now a bunch of search queries for Reddit are filled with ads on Reddit. (not to mention you have to use google to get their results now.)
Eh, I still get Reddit results through DDG. They may not be fresh, but they seem to still be in the index, and honestly, that’s fine because I only really care about the older content.
It is rapidly becoming an unviable way to find info these days. I have to specifically ignore anything from the past couple years.
Aaron Swartz was a co-founder.
Swartz has been six feet under for longer than some Lemmyites have been alive.
at this point I get like 75% fuck spez/etc post edits instead
You still have to filter through bots posing as real people replies on some posts high in google results
My account has been banned for like 2 years but I can still watch porn so idc.
I miss the IMDB discussions under each film…
Was great to finish a film and have a question or and ideas and be able to talk about it.
It’s not exactly a replacement, but TV tropes provides a lot of satisfaction on this front.
Abandon all hope ye who enter there!
Totally. I was so pissed when they stopped it. And now it’s just a gargantuan prime-advertiser.
We have discussion posts from time to time on [email protected]
Why is lemmy obsessed with talking about its ex
Agreed. Lemmy has its own issues .
Yeah, at the core, people cause problems when the group gets too big to be a tight knit one. There are also a not insignificant amount of people, who get together, with antisocial behavior in mind. When you have thousands of people, posting on some community forum, it will be impossible for it not have some serious underlying issues. Not to even think of the scale of places like reddit, where that forum could have millions of users.
Back in the day, when IRC ruled the social scene of the internet, it was hard to control a channel that had 100+ people on it, forget about crowds orders of magnitude larger.
She did me dirty bro she deserves it
Goes to Google and types in a search
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Reddit
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Reddit
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Forum post that links back to Reddit
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YouTube that’s just a bunch of screenshots of Reddit over an automated voice
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Reddit again
Why won’t my ex leave me the fuck alone?
Yeah, I’ve long since stopped using Google. Theres not any search engines I’ve found that mimic Google in its height, but many of them are better than what Google is now. Even bing.
Goes to Google and types in a search
Reddit Reddit Forum post that links back to Reddit YouTube that’s just a bunch of screenshots of Reddit over an automated voice Reddit againWhy won’t my ex leave me the fuck alone?
Oh boy… Just wait until they go full into Gemini. They’re starting to use Gemini and AI in general for search capabilities.
Reddit actually solved that problem for me by blocking themselves from appearing in Bing search results.
Im on searxng so i still see reddit but i dont comment or post.
Ahh that explains why Ecosia has remained so pleasant to use. Bing can’t scrape it anymore 😅
Christ, don’t make me switch to Bing.
Just switch to Duck Duck Go. It’s Bing with less spying on you.
Either DuckDuckGo or Startpage both are quite decent and serve the same purpose.
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That’s just the way it is.
When Reddit was new, it mentioned Digg a lot.
When Digg was new, it mentioned /. a lot.
When /. was new (yes, I was there, too), it mentioned Usenet a lot.At some points in time, the likes of The WELL, the Facepunch forums and Metafilter got their own mentions, prompting me to check them out.
No Fark? No Plastic?
Whenever I stumble on reddit I make sure to post disinformation or some kind of dumb shit to throw a wrench into the LLM training data they sell to google.
this is an ancient and noble practice known as shitposting, no need to call it something else :)
I have literally over a hundred permabanned accounts on that site.
That’s impressive, I think I’ve got half a dozen.
I timed it once, took me just over a minute to make a new account.
I found they caught on quick to alt accounts though.
Yeah, usually made a couple, lost those as well, gave them a while, and I’d be able to make one I could keep again. Not sure if they had anyone manually looking at it.
Haven’t had a main account for years. Never maintained multiple alts either. Just constantly replacing.
I still engaged a lot in earnest, but I sometimes leaned heavily on sarcasm and became incredibly flippant about the site and all the people on it. Really stopped valuing keeping my account.
I noticed that every time I commented on anything in r/pcgaming, I think it was, I was banned quickly. I think some subreddits do their own “security” seemed pretty fast and consistent, maybe automatic. Talking about a few hours or so.
I just got another one today for “harassment” of zionism in r/worldnews. Reddit cannot hold a free discussion and they know it. They can’t even let you speak to expose their bullshit, and permaban you when you do.
I can you show you the comment which got me banned. I was literally asking questions which they know the answer for but censor intentionally because they are bought and controlled by awful groups directly linked to the IDF themselves. They have a division who train and employe teens as stupid Hasbara trolls who don’t know history and unable to hold a discussion.
My first one was in response to some rich cunt who went on air to say more or less that poverty was a good thing because then people had something to strive to avoid, so I said something along the lines of “This guy should be shot, I’m not even exaggerating.”
Make sure to have some LLM generate the comment for you, as LLMs learning synthetic data may fuck them up over time: AI models fed AI-generated data quickly spew nonsense
I hate to ruin this for you, but if you post nonsense, it will get downvoted by humans and excluded from any data set (or included as examples of what to avoid). If it’s not nonsensical enough to be downvoted, it still won’t do well vote wise, and will not realistically poison any data. And if it’s upvoted… it just might be good data. That is why Reddit’s data is valuable to Google. It basically has a built in system for identifying ‘bad’ data.
No, you’re missing the point. You make up some credible misinformation to poison AI training with, but you don’t stop there: you get an LLM to rewrite it for you. Retry until you get a text that sounds credible, doesn’t particularly look written by AI, and people will upvote, and post that.
With this, even if the text looks good, you’re not only poisoning future models with the misinformation you started with; by feeding them a text generated by an LLM (even if you can’t tell the difference at first glance) you’re introducing feedback into the model that will also poison it, not with misinformation, but by reinforcing its biases and errors and reducing the variety of its training data.
I think I got the point just fine… you’re wasting a ton of electricity and potentially your own money on making text that is not bad training data. Which is exactly what I said would happen.
LLMs are made of billions of lines of text, the last we know is for GPT3 with sources ranging from 570 GB to 45 TB of text. A short reddit comment is quite literally a drop in a swimming pool. It’s word prediction ability isnt going to change for the worse if you just post a readable comment. It will simply reinforce it.
And sure you can lie in it, but LLM are trained on fiction as well and have to deal with that as well. There are supplementary techniques they apply to make the AI less prone to hallucinations that dont involve the training data, such as RLHF (Reinforcement learning from humans). But honestly speaking the truth is a dumb thing they try to use the AI for anyways. Its primary function has always been to predict words, not truth.
You would have to do this at such a scale and so succesfully voting wise that by that time you are significantly represented in the data to poison it you are either dead, banned, bankrupt, excluded from the data, or Google will have moved on from Reddit.
If you hate or dislike LLMs and want to stop them, let your voice be known. Talk to people about it. Convincing one person succesfully will be worth more than a thousand reddit comments. Poisoning the data directly is a thing, but it’s essentially impossible to inflict alone. It’s more a consequence of bad data gathering, bad storage practice, and bad training. None of those are in your control through a reddit comment.
“ruins the Internet”? This coming from 4chan? That’s rich
4chan is kinda the sump of the Internet. All the crud sinks there.
Shit usually floats.
4chan, in part, ruined real life. So much of the initial meme buzz around Trump came directly from 4chan - god emperor, etc. /b/ and /pol/ had large coordinated campaigns to boost Trump for lulz and to fuck with people. These made the news occasionally and were sometimes quite wide-reaching. Edit: not to forget Qanon, pizzagate, etc.
Additionally, 4chan is responsible for a massive swathe of meme culture more broadly. Most people don’t dredge its depths or even know “the hacker named 4chan” exists, but it has been a massively influential force.
imo redditors and 4channers think too highly of themselves if they believe they have real influence on elections. Most people aren’t online (except for Facebook), and politics are much more readily explained by material causes such as the Dems fcking up the post 2008 economic recovery and going for austerity instead of investment. The biggest proximate cause (non-material/economic) is just that hilldawg ran a bad campaign that didn’t focus enough on swing states (but she won the popular vote, congratulations).
There have been dark corners of the internet for several decades now. 4chan is just one. Trump didn’t achieve popularity because of it. There aren’t enough users, and there certainly aren’t enough politically and economically influential users, for that to be true.
QAnon started on 4chan lol
4chan doesn’t nearly have the kind of traffic to ever have ruined the internet.
It used to. Used to be the #1 most visited website worldwide for many years.
I miss moot. Back when 4channers didn’t take themselves seriously.
Right now, mainstream internet needs 4chan to deflect their own issues onto even though they all have the exact same people using it.
“Ruins the internet”
I happen to remember the forum culture of the mid-late 2000s. It wasn’t that great.
It was pretty great, actually. So much creativity, everyone has a normal voice, no YouTube celebrities
So much creativity, everyone has a normal voice,
…
You might be wearing nostalgia goggles.
It started out great. It went to shit.
It was better though. Wouldn’t call it good. But definitely better.
Gotta disagree with that. I remember the rampant elitism and tribalism, the shock-culture, isolation of communities, casual bigotry that would make modern 4chan blush, arbitrary forum rules irregularly enforced, etc etc etc.
For all the modern internet’s problems, its communities are much more connected, it’s much more accessible and less elitist, that shock-culture died out, the casual bigotry became contentious instead of accepted, and corporate running the show on most of these sites means that appeals and reversals are much easier than when you would rub some mod the wrong way and get permabanned from a forum you were a long-time member of. Never happened to me, but I saw it numerous times.
Yes, but if you didn’t like one forum you just move on to the next. Today there are very few active forums left.
Wish I could experience it
It had unique pieces, and a lot that I genuinely miss. But… there was also a LOT of bullshit that wouldn’t pass muster nowadays.
I do recall that people were extraordinarily toxic online. Reddit for a few years was a breath of fresh air but then got too big.
It’s already dead. r/wholesomememes decided to allow only original content (no bots or reposts), and, after two days the only post was one begging human users to post anything original.
There are no users left. It’s bots all the way through, like maggots in a rotting corpse.
17m members and only 2 posts in the last 24 hours as of right now lol
It’s tragic, really. Reddit used to be great. Enshittification sucks.
holy fuck, i didnt know it was quite that bad
It’s already dead. r/wholesomememes decided to allow only original content (no bots or reposts), and, after two days the only post was one begging human users to post anything original.
Asking people to post on their sub is fuckin hilarious to me. Like that’s some major, pressing issue in anyone’s life.
“Sorry, I can’t hang out today. Wholesome Memes subreddit needs me to post there! I’m doing it for the shareholders! Without them, reddit would never survive!”
Like… Is this how he expected that to go…???
If you read it, the mod certainly didn’t beg. They just mentioned that they’re still blocking bots and to not be discouraged from posting original content.
Also I find it highly doubtful that the mods of that subreddit are concerned about shareholders. Why would a mod care about money when they’re not even getting paid? They most likely just care about keeping the community alive.
Not to take away the point. Which I think is something most Lemmy users have realized ages ago, reddit is so full of repost bots that it makes gallowboob look like a saint. So much in fact that after two days, not a single original post has occurred in a subreddit with a reported 17 million followers.
Why would a mod care about money when they’re not even getting paid?
Better question, why the hell are they volunteering for free to moderate a paid multimillion dollar publicly traded company? The mods on Reddit have a God complex. They literally think that if they don’t do what they do then the entire website would fall apart. Like a nurse in a hospital. It’s insane
Many left with the API closing, and the site did fall apart, soooo…
Except… it looks like people did start posting. So the users were crowded out by bots before and they’re posting now. That just shows that Reddit isn’t dead, but it does have too many bots.
I mean, I’m sure many people here wish there was more non-bot content. It’s annoying to see something on Reddit and come back here and see the same thing.
Saw a stat the other day, and I can’t speak to accuracy. But the claim was that like 58% I think of all content online is bots.
I’ve made an active effort to bookmark any active forums I come across. Even Lemmy doesn’t quite fill the niche that actual forums provide, though it is still useful.
I still use reddit for looking up information even after deleting my account. Yesterday i decided i wanted to compile the zen kernel for fedora. And reddit had the best guide for doing so. And what settings were worth a damn.
Lemmy still has a lot of problems reddit does, just smaller and weirder. It’s probably not possible to create a “perfect” social media platform, but there still seems like room for a new type of social network that’s federated but isn’t a clone of something else.
What’s your favorite forum?
Civfanatics. I actually joined up long before I ever signed up for Reddit. It’s probably the one site besides Youtube that I’ve consistently used since middle school.
It’s about the Civilization games?
Yes.
The hardcore forums survived.
Are you kidding? They were some of the first to go.
What makes you think so? I read hardcore as ‘small and tight-knit’, exactly the kind of forum that could survive easily on user donations and due to the more personal relationship there’s more loss in leaving it. I know some forums that fit that description that are still around now.
None of the small tight knit ones I used have survived outside of VI Control. But even the remaining ones are barely turned up by search engines.
I’m sorry to hear that, that’s a shame. My experiences are more with gaming communities from the early 2000s, so perhaps my view isn’t universally applicable to other hobbies, professions, and such.
Nah, I’m happy to hear there are still some thriving out there. Gives me hope for the future. I’ve just noticed that I’m corralled towards Reddit any time I seek out the sorts of discussions that used to happen on forums.
Yeah I can definitely say for a while that was the case for me as well. It’s honestly why I like Lemmy, since by the nature of federation it can both be self-contained and owned by the people actually using it, but still kept around even if the specific instance doesn’t last forever.
So so so many of my old favorite forms are dead. I’m not sure I agree with you
I’m sorry to hear that. For me I’ve seen far more (relatively) big forums either turn into a discord, a subreddit, or just die out altogether due to being unsustainable for it’s cost. Just seems more logical to me that the less personal places have more trouble sustaining themselves, but we can disagree on that.
