It seems to me that the combination of AI + engagement stats + advertising rates is probably enabling historically massive fraud.
But if the perpetrators of the fraud are tech giants worth trillions, and the companies selling the ads are the same tech giants worth trillions, how are individuals and small companies supposed to make good decisions about their ad budgets or do anything about the fraud?
I’m not going to shed any tears for the advertising industry, but I’m not looking forward to the side effects if the AI bubble pops and vaporizes $10 trillion of tech market cap. (all the big players would still be worth a trillion dollars but people would lose their shit)
Absolutely horrid feature. Supposedly it’s to protect vulnerable people’s privacy if they post in certain communities, but if they truly wanted that to be how it’s used, they’d have limited the ability to apply the feature only to subreddits where mods have specifically coordinated with the admins to get approved as places where vulnerable people are posting. Or, and here’s a shocker, they could just rely on the tried-and-tested method of using alt accounts. Instead, bots and trolls just hide their entire post history from people.
Now, supposedly, mods can see the full, unhidden history of any user who has recently posted in their subreddits. Which is good. But the number of other good-faith users being obstructed by this change is huge. It’s overall a massive failure from Reddit.
Besides, you can still see their post history simply by searching
"u/username" site:reddit.comIt gives people a false sense of security
Yeah, but it’s an extra step many won’t take.
If someone had a dedicated stalker, that stalker would definitely take extra steps to keep going.
Yeah, won’t keep away the stalkers, but will keep away the regular people.
which defeats the whole point…
I need to remember that
only to subreddits where mods have specifically coordinated with the admins to get approved as places where vulnerable people are posting
I don’t believe subreddits like r/otherkin or r/NPD would be able to get that approval, despite being support spaces for vulnerable people who wouldn’t necessarily want to be outed.
Reddit did WHAT?
huge number of people who make controversial statements (particularly those who are pro-russia) have their profiles set to hidden so you can’t see what else they have posted
That is very much the first people I would expect making use of that feature, yes.
I use it, just because some people’s first reaction in an argument is to look you up. While if you hide it then googling you takes longer and is not ordered properly. Hell a while back I replied to someone about my opinion on something and the first thing he said is “a guy who’s into x hobby can’t seriously have valid opinions”. So yes, since then, my profile is private.
Then you’re not one of the bad actors I’m concerned about. The problem with this change is that there’s no way for other people to tell the difference. If I have suspicions about the motivations of the person (assuming they are a person) I’m interacting with, and I cannot disprove those suspicious to my own satisfaction, that leaves me with two rational options: 1) Blind faith, which in an anonymous Internet context is particularly unjustifiable, or 2) To assume bad faith and act accordingly.
This has some really unfortunate consequences.
Huh. How hard is it to make a browser extension that automatically down votes posts by any such person? Asking for people who might still be on there.
Probably easy. However, anyone using such extension would be banned for voting manipulation. YMMV on how justified the later is.
honestly people just need to stop using the site.
Yeah, but what constitutes vote manipulation is an issue that pops up here, too. I bet most instances would ban someone acting like this, too.
Congrats for the moderator of /r/Jailbait for becoming a billionaire! /s
Oh god, I had forgotten about that…
Note to self: If the Epstein files ever come out, search for Steve Huffman in them.
He might not have been rich enough yet to be in that club at the time.
They have openly hired a diddler though. Was a big story for a while. Don’t remember all the details except of course they did not allow much discussion of it.
Most of Reddit was bots interacting with bots a while ago already.
The site makes most of its money selling ads. The value of that ad space is based on user metrics.
Many users are now fake. They are actively hiding this fact.
Apropos of nothing, the company has a $34 billion market cap.
Why is anyone paying for adverts that no one will see though? Surely adverts only have value if it brings in sales.
Would be amusing to see the entire advertising market crash tbh.
You think that in 2025 companies with large media budgets are buying digital ads and just saying “well fuck it maybe we’ll make money on it”?
They track EVERYTHING. From the impression to the click tot he purchase, and there are trackers and attribution platforms by the hundreds out there to help them understand what the ROI they’re receiving on those ads are.
Companies are buying ads because people are buying products.
Even if the site is 90% bots there are enough real people using the site to make buying ads profitable.
Yeah.
To misquote a paper, “attention is all you need.” It’s like the motto of the 2020s.
I suspect part of the reason for bots is to keep people on the platform. But if people start to realise which is probably going to become more likely as the number of bots rises and quality drops, then real people would start to leave or lose interest.
Could be short term engagement at the risk of long term platform health?
I’d imagine that’s exactly what’s happening.
Whether it plays out with people leaving remains to be seen. It’s become such a busted out shell of its former self, I can’t stand it anymore, but plenty of people almost certainly feel differently.
The amount of money bot views bring in shows that yes, they are just yoloing buying ad space.
It’s extremely difficult to measure the effectiveness of online ads and most companies have an incentive to inflate their numbers since they’re sold as a certain number of views/impressions.
Advertising is a scam for both those who buy it and the intended audience.
At the end of the day views/impressions don’t matter, people actually buying the thing is what matters. If no one is buying you can have a billion views and impressions but it wouldn’t even be worth £5. So then advertising companies would struggle to find buyers if buyers quickly see it isn’t worth it.
The point being made is that the big corps advertising have an exceedingly hard time measuring whether ad buys resulted in sales, and especially which ad buys resulted in sales.
Buyers don’t see that it isn’t worth it, they can only guess.
From your lips to god’s ears
This timeline had been more “from God’s ass to our mouths.”
From your foot to god’s dick
If you then train new bots on the generated content, the models will degrade yes?
If you look a lot of new posts, they are actually highly upvoted old posts. So bots probably stay the same.
The bots know what is bot content and what is not.
Actual users don’t.The bots know what is bot content and what is not.
Probably not. It’s way easier to generate bot content than to detect it. Unless they’re coming from the same group, but I find this unlikely.
Reddit is bots talking to bots
Reddit is admin bots banning real people for messing with other bots.
And the humans that do reside there have the same opinions as the bots
You wouldn’t want to leave deciding the narrative up to the people.
bots on fedi have been probing for an algorithm to exploit. not getting far, just annoying.
Care to elaborate on what you’ve found to watch out for?
blank profiles, ‘johnny truth’@ multi instances, high follows near zero followers, spam post then delete acct, usual jump bait spam for page views, porn spam. admins(thanks) mostly stay on top of it. botters might figure out how to make a profile but all their tools are geared toward average platform idiots. def above average idiots around here. here on lemmy just look at their profile posts, you’ll know. same post over dozens of communities. report/permaban/mute/block next.
Thanks - good to know
All while they partner with Google for ai training.
Yeah, I remember when they were partnering with whoever it is that does ChatGPT when they were testing out early iterations of it. I saw those gigantic endless comment chains they were testing and I knew we were in trouble back then.
Just handing one another a series of increasingly poisoned chalices when nobody is immune to iocane powder
Never been more glad to have left that sinking ship early
Oh, don’t worry, they’ll come here soon enough.
Well, isn’t the point of Lemmy to be similar to Reddit but not exactly like Reddit? I mean, it would be great to increase Lemmy user base to over 1 million despite the fact that this will also include all bad people. But, since Lemmy does not belong to anyone, it will not be controlled by done greedy bastards.
Is growth at any cost worth it?
Sometimes yes.
Make a new instance and invite no one. Nirvana.
Bots only upvote their own bot circle or content which makes their owners $$$$.
Real human concerns will only be heard if they align with $$$$.
We are remaking the whole world for bots.
Who’s paying them and how/why?
I don’t doubt it, otherwise why else - I just don’t know how.
There are a few countries that aren’t exactly friendly with the Western world and know our democratic systems have a weakness in that you can rile people up and get them to vote against their own best interests, damaging their own country.
The internet and social media in particular are valuable tools for this strategy, so it would be insane for them not to use it to its full potential. And that means endless bots manipulating the narrative.
Of course there are and they will leap at the chance to sow division. It’s literally in the Russian world domination play book - but it’s not like they will just pay you to do it.
glances at tim pool
Oh right.
I suppose everything from: normal advertising; to government advertising [propaganda]; to any industry where PR is important [e.g. oil, healthcare], aka corporate propaganda. And the interests of governments and multinational corporations reach far, from the environment to finance to workers rights. Similarly, their advertising reaches just as far, much further than just “vote for us” or “buy from us”.
If I sound like a cynic it’s only because the world made me that way.
Mfw putting “author:username” into the Reddit search bypasses this
Which is the worst of two worlds, because now most people will still not be able to verify other account’s credibility, however people with bad intentions - who are usually more prepared - will still be able to continue their activities.
Now imagine you’re a fragile person who’s really paranoid about their internet activity. This is obviously a good change for them, so they click it. One day, someone decides to use this backdoor to bully that person by insulting them under multiple posts and comments that were meant not to be traceable. I can only imagine the consequences.
If you want to be anonymous on the internet you can’t rely on some website to protect you.I get your point but people need to really start learning the reality of the internet again.
This is an example of social darwinism. That doesn’t mean I don’t agree with this idea, it’s just that I don’t agree that it is viable to expect it from everyone.
Companies must be forced to care about peoples’ security and privacy. Actively fighting against bots infestation would be a part of that.
for now
I’ve memorized most of the comment scripts on reddit at this point. Going to the comments is like eating dog food because youre bored.
There used to be a site called Reddit, where you were your post history. Now that site is dead - the URL still works, I guess, but it links to some weird Twitter with an alien logo.
That’s the best description of reddit I’ve ever seen both past and present, and you’ve completely bypassed all of the usual sayings about reddit in the process. I applaud you! Now where’s that Lemmy gold thing…
On a side note, an actual financial implementation of Lemmy gold would probably be a really good feature to drive donations to hosts. I’d imagine the implementation as the user donates to their host and receives a configurable amount of gold to give as a reward for donating. That gold is entirely tracked by the instance their account is on, then when they gift gold to a user the receiving instance just receives notice that gold was given, similar to an upvote. Then to filter for bad actors instance admins can whitelist/blacklist instances from giving gold to their instance, and probably also make it possible to see which instances a user’s gifted gold came from as a layer of transparency to help spot bad faith instances that give free gold or too much gold or whatever.
I could also see an extension where a portion of the gold’s value is transmitted to the recipient via cryptocurrency (about the only thing cryptocurrency is actually good at, peer to peer online transactions) but that has way too much opportunity for abuse. Maybe that can be done manually by admins to help ensure a fair dispersal of gold funds? Still overcomplicating and introduces a ton of opportunity for abuse though
I’m not sure if gold would be a good fit for the Fediverse forums. As problematic as the voting system is, tying visibility to popularity is less worse than tying it to money spent.
Instead I think the current approach (donations) should be improved. I expect the same type of people who’d buy gold to finance their instances to be OK with donations, as long as they know it’ll be well used.
People able to pay money, to have their voice louder than the rest, is one of the many current plagues throughout our societies right now. I don’t think gold or awards would be good at all for the fediverse. Please dear satan, no
I would just add a regular donate function that takes crypto, Paypal, etc but adds a small fee configurable by the instance owner on top.
But to stop it from becoming like YouTube with clickbait everywhere, you would need limits on how much can be given and received.
I see it a lot with AskReddit, surveying (or possibly influencing) how people feel when something happened in the news. Those posts get bumped to the front page.
Is reddit dead yet?
Its spirit is dead, but its corpse lingers on.
Not even close. It simply has too much critical mass.
Twitter was taken over by a white south african nazi and grifter with delicate sensibilities and people are still using it like nothing has happened.
Reddit would have to enshitify even more, and believe me they are trying.
Didn’t people leave it for BlueSky? I can’t figure out how to use BlueSky… could never get Twitter to work either, maybe it’s too Gen Z for my Millenial ass?
Didn’t people leave it for BlueSky?
A small number of people yes, but most influencers remain on Twitter or use both.
I should also point out that BlueSky is backed by crypto bros and they’ve never had any intentions of improving anything the way the people who want to move moved things.
They ran on the idea of decentralization but ultimately BlueSky is, in practice, completely centralized and its not possible to decentralize it. You can run your own instance, but that would just be a separate centralized instance as opposed to any sort of meaningful federation.
I can’t figure out how to use BlueSky… could never get Twitter to work either, maybe it’s too Gen Z for my Millenial ass?
I hate to say it but… that has nothing to do with age, because there are old people on either. Its just a microblog platform like any other microblog platform.
The problem is I can’t find any worthwhile content. Feels like it’s completely random what shows up on my feed
deleted by creator
I’m not seeing any proof the Twitter is doing well as a company.
It doesn’t need to. This is about the relevance of the platform, and it remains highly relevant.
Social media companies exist to control what the public thinks the public thinks (generally). They don’t care nearly as much about profitability, and its obvious that musk more than others felt this way, especially with getting exactly what he wanted politically.
It’s why they want to ban NSFW content, with “Oh btw LGBT, ESPECIALLY T content counts as NSFW” stipulations
that and i don’t think its ever been profitable
to add to your point the biggest community on sh.itjust.works:
https://sh.itjust.works/communities
people love twitter so much they subscribe to it on other social media platforms!
No. It’s definitely not what is was, for sure. But while search engines (especially Google) are so fucking bad, adding ‘reddit’ to your search is still the best way to get answers to your actual question and not just irrelevant sponsors and paid plugs.
Ofc that’s probably a big reason why reddit has swarms of bots for grass roots advertising… it’s a vicious slippery circle of slop
Being on reddit makes me sad, because I got my account permabanned. I do miss being able to use the last actually active forum on the net.
I haven’t found a useful Reddit result that is less than two years old. Bot answers don’t provide the same value as actual human expertise. Go figure.
Sadly, but no. From good news we only have increased amounts of bad reviews online and in app stores like Play Market.
