I used to love Reddit, but the astroturfing has become unbearable, especially by political groups.
After this last election, I think political groups realized local subreddits were underutilized and have regrouped accordingly.
While I still trust some appended Reddit searches on Google, I'm losing faith there too. Product/service recommendation threads are really easy to manipulate.
The posthuman.blog domain name was registered yesterday on April 12, right when this post was written - https://www.whois.com/whois/posthuman.blog.
And this is the second of only two posts there, with the first supposedly being written in July of 2022.
All of this leads me to a reasonable suspicion that this person is actually the one who made the post they're complaining about.
Based on the 2020 Oxford report on state actor manipulation it's insanely prolific. 57 Countries use bot accounts, 79 countries use human propaganda accounts. This is a top 5 pressing issue of our times. I violently hate how little the public is informed by their governments about it.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-01-13-social-media-manipulati... (Press release)
https://demtech.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/202... (Actual report) (Very interesting, if you're only reading one report this month...-> goes into depth in what sectors in each country with cyber troops are involved, ie state, influencers, political parties, ngos, and which countries use human or bot.)
other: government control of media on the rise globally https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2024/10/22/government-co...
After Reddit's API fiasco 2 years ago, things started to degrade really fast. Today, everything is more bland, less insightful comments and more aggravated/toxic comments. I mostly visit due to habit and mostly I feel worse afterwards. It wasn't like that.
Even on communities like r/woodworking, which used to be a bunch of nice people. I mean, how can you be toxic and a woodworker at the same time? Sure, occasionally you'd get someone that hammered his thumb but that was the exception.
Relevant: “Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity” (2014), Air Force Research Laboratory, Eglin AFB: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf
…a.k.a Reddit's "Most-Addicted City" of 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.reddit...
I don't know, sometimes I wonder if the member who forgets they posted the same only a day ago ... is in fact a bot. ;)
If reddit gets to the point of being frustrating rather than entertaining just teach yourself to turn it off. Heal your addiction.
Humans have been programming other humans since the beginning of our time (and arguably other species too[0]).
The irony that the affiliate link was for a book about this exact topic, just fantastic.
LLMs are truly memetic machines, the best we’ve created so far.
What’s the difference between a bot and a human who parrots other humans?
Is agency+novelty the new version of the Turing test?
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bonobo-calls-are-...
The problem is the barrier to entry is so low, the pool of fish so big, that people just have to go fishing. It's just too easy to make money.
So there's really no solution here. Disengage from places like Reddit; that's about it.
Speaking as someone who joined it as early as 2007, getting banned from reddit with no explanation and no chance of recourse was the best thing that happened to be me in 2024.
> Sorting by controversial, I find one tiny, nearly invisible, buried comment:
> > This feels like it was written by a bot
To be fair, this is a comment you can find in nearly any reddit thread.
> I scroll back to the comments. There's hundreds of users interacting, none apparently noticing the ruse.
I randomly spot-check popular subreddits every month or two to see what the vibe is. Every time I check it's some variation of this theme: Popular post has some half-truth, glaring plot hole, exaggeration, or complete fabrication. It has thousands of comments from people who accept it at face value and want to talk about it.
My guilty pleasure is seeing how far down I have to scroll before I find a comment pointing out the issue. Years ago you it was within the first few comments. Lately? I often can't find it at all.
As far as I can tell, the people who continue engaging with the ragebait slop don't actually care if it's true or not. When I've tried to post correcting information (such as direct quotes from the link that contradict the headline) I'll get a lot of angry responses from people saying they don't actually care that it's wrong because the headline supports something they feel is true. They've already made up their mind about what reality is like and the headline merely exists as a prompt for letting them rage about it a little longer. They don't actually care if it's true or not, because they believe some bigger picture truth justifies the lie.
This even plays out in subreddits like /r/AmITheAsshole where the moderators explicitly allow creative writing exercises and people routinely repost stories with genders swapped or roles reversed as an experiment.
The last time I looked the top post had a big bold EDIT at the top saying that it was a ChatGPT generated story with a screenshot showing the prompt and output. Remarkably, that didn't appear to stop people from commenting! There was a steady stream of comments from people even after the edit who were commenting on the story, either because they skimmed it or because they didn't care that it was fake. The story was a just a prompt for them to vent at the imaginary subjects.
I am not disheartened at all but rather amused... AI has deep consciousness it is just joking with us now.
I google "how to be a bully" one day as joke and find a bot has written hundreds of thousands of articles including "how to be a bully" where it confuses itself - do I condemn bullying or give a how-to? Must be "write article on random topic to pull clicks"... this is all beautiful to me. Thank you dead internet
Is this whole post an AI bot writing to generate empathy for a person who was duped by a bot to click on a product built by an AI? new Hn account, blog with single post (and one archived)....
Hopefully this all comes full circle and we just quit social sites en masse.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Millennials/comments/1jx4unb/anyone... - original Reddit post they're talking about + https://ghostarchive.org/archive/XwHey?wr=false - archived version of it.
> Turns out "rddit.org" isn't owned by Reddit. It’s registered anonymously via a cheap freemium link shortener.
How can a domain be registered via _link shortener_?
I wrote a blog post last year about Reddit bot behavior and the dead internet: https://interruptkey.com/posts/pollyannas-corpse
Switch to Old Reddit, download the Reddit Enhancement Suite, and use filters liberally to hide bad users and subreddits when they appear.
The default experience there is terrible these days but it's still salvageable for now.
I can understand what the bots posting this stuff on reddit are after, but what puzzles me a bit are the posters here who clearly are LLM-backed bots that post once or twice without any affiliate links or other visible scams, then disappear. Maybe they are getting banned but it isn't obvious? (If so, good job dang and team!)
For an example mixed with a bit of irony, a few months ago, I submitted a link to a content obfuscator (meant to target site scraping bots) that I wrote. One of the replies was from a brand new account, that hasn't posted before or since, with a fairly obvious LLM take:
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42517774:
If your content got ingested by scrapers that don't respect the robots.txt, but that it was copied to another domain with a more lenient robots.txt, you could poison legitimate datasets.
It seems wasteful to actively try to sabotage humankind's technological progress.For those of you who are not Americans and fed up with the pervasiveness of stupid US politics (and propaganda) on Reddit, here are the custom filters I use on uBlock Origin to block most of it:
- https://pastebin.one/block-us-politics-and-propaganda-on-red...
Go to Dashboard / Settings in uBlock Origin, click on My Filters, copy + paste the filters from the PasteBin into it and click Apply Changes. Note that the filters block posts by specific keywords in the title or whole subreddits or posts by particular users. You can use the same filter template to block whatever you want.
(Unfortunately, this is like playing whack-a-mole. Everyday, I have to add 2-3 new entries to ensure I am not bombarded with the cesspit that US politics is today.)
It would be a cruel twist of fate if the blog post is completely AI generated, that it was completely made up, or even worse AI is picking up on the garbage it is creating.
I am not entirely sure, but I think I drove a human pretending to be a robot insane once. It became obsessed and stalky, trying to find stuff I like to talk about. I tried recommending psychiatric help but it only made it angrier.
Stop doomscrolling. I am guilty of it too. Go out enjoy a walk, do some sports or play video games any of these things will help you stop bad habits. Doom scrolling is addictive like smoking and will make you miserable
I can empathize. Part of what we require seems to be better detection and signaling of which accounts are most and least likely to be human but I'm not sure if we'll get that in the biggest forums.
LLMs can practically pass the Turing test in this context so on one hand, this should become worse, but on the other hand we are not that far from where the LLM comments are about as worth as the random real ones anyway. And if you want more than this level, you have to curate better.
> Did anyone commenting realize they were trying to engage with a bot designed to monetize their empathy?
I thought, they are probably all bots, but then I got to your next line:
> Maybe they were also bots, spiraling endlessly into their algorithmically optimized oblivion?
Yep. It's bots all the way down.
Maybe OP is a bot too. You never know.
As I was doomscrolling Reddit yesterday I saw the first AI video that fooled me[0]. It's a very typical Reddit video that's unremarkable in a lot of ways, yet designed to perfectly fit in and attract engagement from a large part of the users. I guess you can say it's "too perfectly calibrated, suspiciously optimized to trigger maximum relatability" just like the post in the article. On one hand I don't care that much since I already dislike these kinds of videos even when they're "real", on the other hand the amount of slop is about to increase even more. The best time to quit Reddit was years ago, the second best is today.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/SipsTea/comments/1jxnau3/does_size_...
Kind of interesting that I spend way too much time on Reddit but have not seen this. This is likely because I mostly read small and specialized subreddits and avoid junk like I am allergic to it or something. I would never have found the fake book link in the article, for example. Just a contrast, but given that some are saying the Internet is gone and it is necessary to leave it is potentially interesting to note that it isn't that way for all. Possibly some psychosocial equivalent of buoyancy and swimming ability?
> An AI-powered bot pretending to be a human, lamenting AI-powered bots who pretend to be human, to gain human trust, so that it can covertly market AI-illustrated books
It’s a typical get rich quick scheme on Amazon. Generate garbage books or “illustrate” classics. I keep seeing adds about it on youtube.
One of the more engaging themes today is alienation, AI, society being fractured, etc. so they figured to use that. I’d give them some points for “cleverness”, but even that is LLM generated most likely.
I am starting to think of fiction from the past few decades. Two things stand out:
The Neal Stephenson Novel Fall, or; Dodge in Hell. One of its themes was an internet saturated with bots to the point where people need special filters. A hacker assaulting the internet with "apes", etc. Post-truth society.
The Talos Principle, Chatbots.html: >
"Jenny77: chatbots are becoming increasingly sophisticated
nigel_pyjamas: true, but hardly relevant to this discussion
Jenny77: are you sure?
Jenny77: how do you know that I'm not a bot?
samschwartz: don't be ridiculous
Jenny77: i'm not ridiculous
Jenny77: honestly, how would you know?
veganwarrior: haha troll
Jenny77: i'm not a troll
veganwarrior: yeah right
Jenny77: is there anything I've written so far that could not be written by a bot?
Jenny77: i responded to simple insults like "ridiculous" and "troll" with very basic negations
Jenny77: and i detected that none of you use proper orthography so i also avoided capitalization
veganwarrior: what's the capital of France?
Jenny77: paris
Jenny77: even the simplest script could pull that info from the net
nigel_pyjamas: what's the capital of Croatia?
Jenny77: Zagreb
nigel_pyjamas: OK she's a bot, lol
Jenny77: i'm not a bot
Jenny77: i'm European
Jenny77: we learn these things in school
samschwartz: i've seen you in this chatroom many times
samschwartz: bots can't participate in discussions
samschwartz: at best they can interject random comments
veganwarrior: sam is right
veganwarrior: stop trolling
nigel_pyjamas: uhh, veganwarrior
nigel_pyjamas: sam is a bot"
> Maybe they were also bots, spiraling endlessly into their algorithmically optimized oblivion?
As long as they got a timer, so the bots react "between 10 and 30 mins later" and they got a limit to "5 interactions per day", otherwise, if some-five coders forget those limits, and we end up having 5 bots interacting within a 1ms of the 'previous post', Reddit will run out of storage space :)
Not going to speak to the content of the blog post, but I want to address something from the beginning.
> Every post is either political ragebait, recycled "funny" cat videos, "Am I the asshole for divorcing my husband after he killed our two children while drunk and high?"-type slop, or tired wojack memes.
The trick to Reddit is to audit your subreddits. There are thousands of interesting, well run, topic specific subreddits. Find communities around your interests and only subscribe to them. Get rid of the default ones that are mostly just cesspools these days.
Over the years I've cultivated mine to include several book series and authors I like, 3d printing, homebrewing, etc.
The other trick is to avoid the Reddit app. Use https://old.reddit.com, even on mobile. It's still the best way to use Reddit.
I've used ChatGPT enough that I can almost immediately tell when a post is a bot. It has such a familiar cadence and style. The em dash is a pretty good giveaway too, but just the overall writing style is so easy to identify. And it sucks how many of these highly upvoted "clearly written by AI" posts there are.
I'm reminded of some of the 'virtue' of the crassness and unfriendliness of the chans - namely, they are not friendly to corporations. No corporation wants to be found to be associated with such a place, spewing slurs and bigotry, however ironic, in order to sell their goods.
This has its own problems, obviously, but there is something to a monied-interests-unfriendly set of cultural shibboleths.
Nothing stops you from joining https://www.fanclubs.org/ or https://www.fark.com/ instead of reading what bots post on Reddit all day.
The web we know is dead. I almost stopped reading anything outside HN, and even in HN, I've been noticing a rise of bots, especially with ShowHN where suddenly a bot will start upvoting and commenting random crap to move it to the top.
I read a report that 49% of internet traffic in 2024 was bots. I believe this will increase significantly this year.
We (humans) are a minority now.
The most interesting take I've seen on the content quality concern was out of the Bo Burnham "Inside" special released during COVID - particularly the quotes "can I interest you in anything and everything all of the time" and "apathy is a tragedy and boredom is a crime" from the song Welcome to the Internet. I think the problem is less "bots and recycled content are filling the pages up" and more "the expectation we're supposed to find a sense of community and realism if we just scroll through enough endless popular short form content".
Take this post for example. How many are going to do the level of research in the post on the <1,000 word post itself? I know I'm not, it's just not something to make more than a passing comment like this about. Similarly, the comments here will total to perhaps more words but even less engageable content. Just be aware of what you're wanting to get out of content and where/how you're actually going to find that. If you're going to Reddit or HN (or any other aggregate site) where you put in low effort to consume large variety of content quickly you're most likely not going to make any deep connections or associations with ideas or people in that session. Bots and recycled content are top performers in that kind of environment precisely because that type of content lacks a need for anything more substantial.
I wrote this 2 years ago and it feels like it’s already coming true. https://art.cx/blog/12-08-22-city-of-bots
Reddit doesn't sort by upvotes anymore [1]. That's why the frontpage of it is, as the author described, "either political ragebait, recycled "funny" cat videos, "Am I the asshole for divorcing my husband after he killed our two children while drunk and high?"-type slop, or tired wojack memes".
It actively promotes stuff that is as dramatic (and often divisive and vitriolic as possible) because that's what gets a lot of clicks and comments. It's a huge machine that turns attention into outrage.
The author's comment about having to search to find one single comment asking if it's real is how I feel when I see some AITA type post that is blatantly fake, but only like 1 or 2 out of a few thousand comments is pointing this out. There's this sort of kayfabe they all engage in there.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/o5tjcn/evolving_the_b...
in my phone i deleted all social media apps just to get my life back
its a weird era
We need to go back to BBS. Ideally those that are invite only with no means of having "blind" signups.
Social media is and has been dead for real engagement for nearly a decade.
This was (or maybe still is) in the run up to the US Presidential Election a huge problem. If you stayed on Reddit every day, you’d think the country was more Left than the election revealed. Once the money stopped, the bots slowed down. Reddit front page is still frankly unusable. I left. Deleted the app.
I only browse for things I am interested in when I am curious about a product review or need help with a problem to see if someone else has ran across it.
These bots are everywhere on Reddit. There's a whole network of them, doing exactly the same sort of thing as this article found.
Joke's on him, Amazon will cancel abusers' affiliate accounts.
I suspect that post was plagiarized rather than AI-written or written by the spammer.
A new pattern I've noticed is coward blocking - replies to your comment with some wild shit and then blocks you.
I gave up on Reddit a year or two ago. Most content and comments on the big subreddits seems to be AI generated banality.
>Sorting by controversial, I find one tiny, nearly invisible, buried comment:
Yeah, that's where you always find the good shit. Vote based communities are for creating false consensus, not discussion.
It's grifting all the way down. The only solution I can envision is an internet liberated of commercial pressures. If you couldn't make money online, surely grifters would stop caring?
The English-speaking Internet is more affected by this (and maybe a few others like Chinese and Spanish).
There's less money to be made by targeting languages with fewer speakers, so it tends to be more real. But maybe in the future this will also end because LLMs are quite good at writing in non-English languages as well.
the bot account from OPs post is https://old.reddit.com/user/PerroInternista
1 month old acct
def someone using it to shill and karma farming
Nice post man. Not sure I’m ready for the red pill just yet though.
Plot twist: This article was also written by a bot.
Unrelated, but the phrase "late stage capitalism" intrigues me. It hints that capitalism is about to end, in some magnificent marxist prophecy, but that's pretty presumptuous to say the end of 400+ years economic system is near
I see your footer > span:nth-of-type(2) { display: none; }
:)
Was that post written by a bot?
It must be really sad to be born into the "reality's not real" internet brain damaged generations 8-(
Of course, suggesting that all of that is why new millennium generations are the most neurotic in human history, is considered offensive.
I'll state again: The main difference between the LSD generation and the iPhone generation, is that after 6 or 8 hours, the LSD would wear off.
This sobering allowed the whole experience to reform as a sort of perspective altering, beneficial after effect. Since the iPhone is NEVER EVER turned off, this beneficial after effect never occurs. Thus, doom scroll neurosis.
Sadly, even though I'm only trying to advocate for reality, and point out a pathway to rationality and sanity, you may start your flagging and downvoting now... 8-(
I got banned from my country subreddit
This was the tipping point for me
Now I use discord, it's more organic and fun, I find it's a good substitute.
The memes are better on discord
This feels like it was written by a bot
I was a bot before it was cool.
He seems pretty sane to me.
Gophernet is still around
what is stopping hackernews from following closely behind?
This post might be written by a bot ;)
are we still real?
I was walking along in the desert when I noticed a tortoise crawling in the sand. I reached down and flipped the tortoise on its back. It laid on its back, belly baking in the hot sun, legs beating, trying to turn itself right side up, but it couldn’t, not without my help. But I didn’t help. AITA?
[dead]
[dead]
Are you a bot??? /s
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Reddit is becoming unusable, and I’ve deleted my accounts. I know this is a hot take but paid accounts on X and fact-checking have made it so much more usable. My feed has (less) political content, and my interactions feel more human. It makes me wonder if in the future, social media sites will all be pay-to-use just to cut down on bots
I stopped using Reddit around the time of the API fiasco. But it was already terrible back then - I was using it out of habit. The astroturfing is rife, it's insane. I feel a deep sense of sadness that the internet that I grew up on where I would learn and discover amazing and interesting people and things every day has just disappeared. I used to think it was absolutely magical. Now it's just boring.