If they were just talking about Reddit, I’d assume something dodgy was going on connected with the IPO. But Quora is supposedly back from the dead too… Am I missing something glaringly obvious here?
Election is coming up, all Russian bots
It probably has a lot to do with their IPO as well. They want to look like they are doing well ahead of that.
Judging by the trending posts, its mostly us liberal bots :).
It’s all kinds of bots; Russian, Chinese, Liberal, Conservative, but most of all its Reddits own bots meant to inflate traffic stats ahead of the IPO.
So what you’re saying is we should short the stock to make it big
Could even open a lawsuit and force reddit to investigate how much of their traffic is bots, immediately after the IPO
This is not financial advice… typically these things balloon fast, and maybe stay up a week or two before anyone buying is done buying and the price collapses to the point informed investors want in. You can also have people doing price support early (“a squid on the bid”) to avoid a depressing price collapse in the opening phase, but that’s something you have to feel from experience.
That tired but always working deflection. Let me get a little creative. I’m pretty sure it’s underground blind mole rats this time.
theys r comin 4r us, I’m telling ya, mark my wurds. ya’ll bein minefukd while yous wer sleepin
How’s my russian? did I do it right?
Dude, you guys got owned bad last time around. You can pretend it didn’t happen but there’s extensive documentation of how you got caught with your pants down and got fucked hard in the ass.
Now it’s 8 years later and you’re still walking around with your pants around your ankles.
Mfers still believe in Russiagate despite everything… It’s time to accept they’re not Russian trolls, your country is just full of fascists.
Did something come out that disproves the existence of russian bots in social media?
- Wall Street Journal: Mueller Doesn’t Find Trump Campaign Conspired With Russia
- Jacobin: Democrats and Mainstream Media Were the Real Kremlin Assets
- IT Pro: Cambridge Analytica models were exaggerated and ineffective, [UK Information Commissioner’s Office] claims
- Washington Post: Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters
- Jacobin: It Turns Out Hillary Clinton, Not Russian Bots, Lost the 2016 Election
- Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork
- MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
- Jeff Gerth/Columbia Journalism Review on Russiagate: Editor’s Note | Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four
- Matt Taibbi: WMD, Part II: CIA “Cooked The Intelligence” To Hide That Russia Favored Clinton, Not Trump In 2016
- Chris Hedges: Why Russiagate Won’t Go Away
Liberals will cry for impossibly indisputable evidence then go silent when you actually manage to provide it.
From the Washington Post piece:
But the study doesn’t go so far as to say that Russia had no influence on people who voted for President Donald Trump.
- It doesn’t examine other social media, like the much-larger Facebook.
- Nor does it address Russian hack-and-leak operations. Another major study in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson suggested those probably played a significant role in the 2016 race’s outcome.
- Lastly, it doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.
And
“Despite these consistent findings, it would be a mistake to conclude that simply because the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter was not meaningfully related to individual-level attitudes that other aspects of the campaign did not have any impact on the election, or on faith in American electoral integrity,” the report states.
The overwhelmingly more significant threat is that US corporate social media are integrated with the propaganda machinery of the US government and the capitalist class. The purpose of things like Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Hamilton 68 and the Disinformation Governance Board is not to protect us from foreign influence but for the “intelligence community” to inject its own influence.
- Facebook Partners With Hawkish Atlantic Council, a NATO Lobby Group, to “Protect Democracy”
- Jessica Ashooh: The taming of Reddit and the National Security State Plant tabbed to do it
- A Reddit AMA Claiming To Be A Uyghur Quickly Exposes A CIA Asset Slandering China
- r/neoliberal was created by a neoliberal think tank » BPR Interviews: The Neoliberal Project
.
They have their eye on the fediverse now as well: Atlantic Council » Collective Security in a Federated World
This is all an extension of how traditional corporate media works, which has been understood for decades:
- Michael Parenti, 1986: Inventing Reality: The Politics Of The Mass Media
- Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky, 1988: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.
A five minute primer: Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine
This. Everything wrong in US is some bot army peddling propaganda at labor camps. Might even add the Atlantians to the list of foreign influencers before claiming US has more than a significant amount of fascists, racists, xenophobic assholes that already elected criminal as a president, and others war criminals without a shred of repercussions.
but whatever makes you sleep better at night.
Uh, actually yeah it did. Turns out they were just normal pro-russia conservatives. I thought the Cucker interview would have made that connection pretty obvious. They weren’t paid to post that kind of propaganda, they were doing it willingly.
These things are not mutually exclusive. The fact that Russian propaganda bots swayed a large percentage of American republican fascists in no way debunks the bots. It just means that it was an effective propaganda campaign.
I’m sorry I was hoping what I was asking would be more clear:
Did something specific, that you can link to disprove the existence of Russian bots in social media?
Sure but first you have to get me a link to an instance of evidence ever swaying someone’s opinion on the internet and not just turning into a debate about the validity of the evidence.
Why can’t it be both? Tussian social media engineers wouldnt have to try that hard. America’s full of a bunch of fascist capitalist warmongers with a majority of liberal sheep for citizens, ready to believe whatever truth they want to be more true than reality.
Perhaps not so much as of late though. Perhaps Putin killed off all his social media engineers sending them to fight in Ukraine? I’m waiting for the reports fo come in from field reporters finding Russian boy scout corpses on the battle field. That’s when you know he doesn’t have the resources to spend trying to influence American elections. He’s got bigger problems, like mandating Russian breeding schedules.
If I remember correctly the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence quietly released a bipartisan report some years back conforming the existence of Russian trolls in the 2016 election. I haven’t seen any evidence or reports released that they have ceased their attempts at manipulating social media since then.
I do agree though, a lot of the posts are just real people who know that hate gets more engagement and crazy people.
They did, but they determined the huge russian disinformation campaign was the work of like 5 accounts and 200k in ad-spend on facebook. In other words a wet fart.
And Israeli bots (probably IDF and Pro-Israelis too)
Seriously I just discovered this. Go search any random Gaza/Palestine/Israel post you will see -50 for someone saying “Israel has killed children and should stop killing children” and like +300 for “this article is so biased it’s taking about Israeli attacks but no mention of how Hamas is the real cause of this death”.
I’m not even going to bother to link because I want people to see for themselves rather than it looking like I’m selecting the worst if it.
yeah but that’s sadly how a lot of real people think on Reddit anyway.
They are probably paying clickfarms.
Reddit probably isn’t, as that would be cooking their metrics and Huffman would get fucked by the long arm of the SEC. They might still be, Huffman loves Elon and Elon got away with tons of shit.
Advertisers are probably paying more content farms to astroturf it though.
Plus without the API, do you really think people just stopped scraping Reddit? They just run a headless Chrome instance now and I bet Reddit doesn’t look the gift horse of traffic in the mouth.
The SEC got its funding slashed by Trump - are they like the IRS now where they don’t have the resources to truly do the job anymore?
Advertisers are probably paying more content farms to astroturf it though.
Yup, in fact we just banned ~13 accounts tonight from a subreddit I’m still involved with. That’s just the ones we identified, and it’s only a medium sized subreddit
A user noticed that the responses to a post sounded a little off and reported it. Turns out there was a network of bots using generative AI to mix real academic advice (ex. “Go talk to the advising office”) with occasional subtle advertisements (ex. “I recommend using grammarly and (advertised service)”.
Once we caught on, we looked through the history of those accounts and gathered as many as we could identify and banned them all.
I don’t think this is Reddit’s doing, and they’re usually good about banning spam bots site wide once a mod report is made. Still, they benefit from increased activity and they have an incentive to do less of that. It was also much harder to notice the problem because of the AI generation. If a user didn’t explicitly report it, I probably wouldn’t have noticed
I highly suggest you ban what the were advertising and not just the account.
If advertiser’s realize the shady bot farms they deal with are causing any comment that mentions their product to be automatically deleted, they will stop.
This is going to be the Idiocratizing of the internet. AI is going to be training in itself with these unidentified posts and get dumber and dumber.
Let’s hope no one lets it have access to anything important…
It feels a little like how steel from before above ground nuclear testing, called low-background (or pre-war) steel because it isn’t contaminated is prized for building some sensors.
Pre AI information need to be preserved, otherwise we might not really know if the info we’re seeking is fact based in any way.
This is going to be the Idiocratizing of the internet.
I know, because I was there!
I was too. The internet was never for normies or businesses and between the two of them they’ve managed to turn it into a complete dumpster fire.
93/94 was when I first got AOL on a 14.4k modem. I’m one of those shitty users!
We used to use gopher and college FTP sites to download warez as a freshman in HS, and then moved on to Hotline trackers.
Except I can totally see them committing securities fraud in order to pump up the numbers. It seems very much like something they would do.
I think that’s what this part of the comment was about:
They might still be, Huffman loves Elon and Elon got away with tons of shit.
deleted by creator
Did you guys read the article? It’s all about how since google and Reddit penned a deal to use Reddit to train google AI models, google is now massively pushing Reddit links in search results.
And their answer, ironically, is to avoid “Gen-AI garbage.”
But you should really read the article. It pissed me the fuck off. Because that sounds…massively illegal.
You scratch my back, I scratch yours
I wonder if Reddit user activity has noticeably increased. Probably not.
Like, this will help Reddit in the short term, and honestly is a good idea from a search perspective (how many queries have I manually appended “Reddit” to?), but it doesn’t necessarily help with the fundamentals of the platform.
Fuck me, I’m not even using Google directly, I’m currently on MetaGer which is a meta search engine, and even there, I got annoyed today already that half the top links were shitty Reddit links.
I hate this shit so much. I work as a Software Engineer, so using web search was half our work day a few years back.
Personally, I’m thankfully already at a point where I can figure out most things by fucking around. But we have an intern who’s new to the job and she regularly tells me that she struggles to find anything useful on the rather mainstream technologies that we’re using.To some degree, LLMs are still a workaround for that, but they won’t be able to update to newer information without pulling in LLM spam, so either we’re stuck with the current technologies for the foreseeable future or we won’t have a way of finding anything in a few years.
And the worst part is that I can’t think of a real solution. Maybe we could use a search engine, which only queries official documentation directly. That could be an improvement, as often not even that shows up in the normal search results. But really, what our intern needs is tutorials and those are virtually indistinguishable from LLM spam…
Official documentation can, sadly, only contain so much information. Lots of tools are community driven and there are some niche uses of libraries that official docs don’t know about, or including them would just take up space.
Yeah, for sure. I’m mostly saying that she sometimes struggled to even just find an appropriate Hello World example, to the point where she would ask me for help after a while.
Then I, having already gotten used to the terrible search engine results, opened the official documentation directly and had it after a handful of clicks.Obviously, she understood pretty quickly, but the official documentation doesn’t always have a built-in search and can be difficult to navigate, so that’s why I’m saying even just a search engine for that could be good…
Simplest explanation is that the general public doesn’t give a shit and while Facebook is on the downturn (not sure if numbers can back that up) people need to go somewhere else. Maybe that is reddit right now, they got the marketing and content to get people on it.
I’d like to hear that crapbook is going downhill, but its share price says otherwise
Its share price doesn’t matter in this context, since Meta also owns Instagram, which is absolutely not going downhill at the moment.
Facebook however is losing active users, especially in the younger age ranges and even more pronounced in Europe and the US.
They also own WhatsApp which has a massive user base outside of the US.
But it’s not really a cash cow. At least I don’t know of any widespread attempts at monetization (yet).
WhatsApp is monetized by selling your private data, same as.FB
Enron’s share price was very high right up until the end, too. Share price is not necessarily a good indicator of underlying fundamentals
Stock price isn’t a representation of the current value of a company, it’s the projected value of a company down the line.
The article seems to suggest a change on the Google search algo and how Reddit pumps the SEO is to blame as it’s showing up in search rankings above other more relevant results.
I’m assuming “traffic” here is individual page visits, which would shoot up if people are just pulling up one page from a “how do I do X” type of search. I doubt this boost is coming from people sticking around, but I’m sure that’s not how Reddit will spin it.
I do believe reddit pops up in my search results more frequently these days than it did a year ago, without any explicit prompting with ‘reddit’ keyword… (just based on my impression, though)
I honesty can’t search a damn thing and not have Reddit be the first result. I basically been using AI over search to fix things… probably as intended.
That or google bought a lot of shares ahead if IPO.
A lot of AI LLMs have been trained on reddit…
Not saying its bad info sometimes. There’s a reason most of us used reddit. It just seems like its the new SEO optimized background noise now. It’s not what I’m looking for, and I rather avoid the site now.
There are search addons able to filter out specific sites, if you’d like it.
So Reddit is turning into Quora.
In that it will soon to shit? Yes.
Painfully accurate.
This would be my guess- Reddit is more reliable for random queries than much of the internet, as AI propagates.
I see more and more suggested “my search Reddit” on Google even as I visit Redfit way less now
Ai generated content
Bots all the way down
IPO padding for the CEOs golden parachute.
I wonder if there was some kind of technological revolution that made it exponentially easier to generate text that happened recently.
Good Post Theory
Wasn’t it that (they want to) offer a way to get money for your karma points?
Dead internet theory.
bots?
I think I’ve comment this before but over the pandemic years I did a little experiment. Every day I bookmarked the obvious content reposting bot accounts on the first few pages of r/all. After a while I checked back on the accounts. The majority of them become cryptocurrency spam bots. A very small percentage spam random things. There was an extremely high success rate of picking out the bot accounts. Pretty much all them were except for maybe a handful.
spez is basically exit scamming with reddit. Whoever is buying the dataset is getting robbed blind. That’s if reddit inc isn’t being upfront behind closed doors. Maybe they are. After all reddit does have well over a decade of mostly organic activity. The recent data has to be absolute trash though.
It isn’t like you can’t otherwise get the older data if you really want though, pretty sure it’s on torrents. The newer stuff is all they have to sell.
Google wants the data to be exclusively licensed, so they can pursue any competing LLMs and sue them to death - I mean, develop a ‘moat’
It’s not really about the actual data access
I don’t buy that, given
-
All the effort Reddit has put into locking down data access
-
Google itself was behind the lawsuit establishing fair use for scraped datasets, and it’s looking likely that will be upheld
Would be happy to hear it if there’s reasons I’m not aware of that this is the intention though
-
It’s sort of become a bit of a meme to end every google question with ‘reddit’ to trick it into showing you an actual human response. I’m sure that’s been good for traffic
I’ve had to start limiting the date to pre-2023 to keep ai bs out of the results
I’ve heard some AI experts on Hard Fork suggest 80% of the Internet will be AI bot trash in 2 years.
Honestly wouldn’t surprise me. There’s already so much garbage when you google pretty much anything
That’s an excellent tip! I draw occasionally and finding references for animals is so much worse than it used to be.
Just add
before:2023to your search query BTW.Thank you!
Add what? Didn’t show up on mobile
add “before:2023” to your search query
Yes. Google is strongly favoring both in search results in their feeble, and failing, attempt to combat AI.
As someone who still semi-frequents reddit, it’s mostly bots, more and more of which are clearly using some form of ChatGPT or another LLM. It’s actually kinda absurd, I’ve seen many a comment chains where it’s just different bots replying to each other, both pretending to be real people.
I must say I’ve seen in increase of conversations on Reddit that seem like everyone involved has severe lead poisoning.
Nah, it’s always been like that.
If bots actually do start frequenting Reddit, and they get hard to detect, the AI content generation will start poisoning itself. Isn’t that cool?
Before I migrated the bots were doing quite well by taking old posts and rewording them into new ones. I only started tracking them when I noticed one posting about a months old event as if it had just happened.
For me, the cool part is that the vast majority of people can’t tell anything has changed.
Also, we can be rather poisonous ourselves.
