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.
It doesn't have to be bots or astroturf either, you get a bunch of ideologically-leaning mods to ban anyone they disagree with, make them control a bunch of subreddits (potentially), some subs will even ban you for posting in other subs
Reddit as a whole isn't interested in fairness, it's quite clear the direction they took as a site
I was quite surprised when a bunch of years ago a unidentified aerial phenomena was sighted around Rio de Janeiro recorded and witnessed by hundreds, the military following and shooting it down, and every dedicated subreddit deleted every submission.
I'm unsure how to understand your comment because both things exist on Reddit:
1. subreddits where sane things are removed and their posters are banned in order to astroturf a moderator's insane opinions as normal
2. subreddits where insane things are removed and their posters are banned, as they should be, but the banned posters (who can be very numerous!) try very hard to make it out like it's situation 1.
As someone who was really into GameFAQs forums, the enshittification cycle is just that, a predictable cycle.
First: Some company spends a ton of money building an internet community. Eventually the money siphon runs out, either for legitimate or illegitimate reasons. Then enshittification happens as advertisements and shitty posts become the norm. Eventually, people exodus, at first slowly as people look for new options. And then very rapidly as...
A new company manages to capture the imagination of these disgruntled masses and builds a new online community.
We are currently in the late stages of Reddit's enshittification cycle. They've reached IPO, the original owners have literally cashed out into the stock market and made $Billions for themselves. Their heart isn't in Reddit anymore. The time for replacement shopping has begun.
------------
Reddit itself was the lucky one chosen at the intersection of LUEsers exodus, Digg exodus, and Slashdot exodus.
Before Gamefaqs / LUEsers, Digg and Slashdot were the Usenet, BBS, MUDs and other such internet communities. Its never quite predictable what comes up, as the tech dramatically changes from generation to generation.
Slashdot lasted maybe 10 years (though still limps on). Digg lasted about 4 years before it started shedding users at alarming rates (and 6 years before it killed itself).
But after 20 years, Reddit still is still gaining users; It's not dying yet.
Reddit has changed so much over time. Reddit of 2006 was very different to reddit of 2008, and reddit of 2013 was very different again. By 2019, it's more or less managed to reinvent itself as an App, trading blows with Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok, almost unrecognisable.
I'm sure many people will put peak-reddit around 2019, but for me, Reddit of roughly 2011 was my favourite, and it's only been down hill from there.
I don't think Reddit can re-invent itself again, only continue to get worse. But I suspect it will still be around in 10 years.
It was quite interesting that Reddit had its own unique culture during the rage comics and narwhal era. At that time, you knew you were on Reddit and not some other site. Whereas now, it's pretty homogeneous with every other site.
I agree with you about Reddit being around in 10 years - because I don't see its users having any reason to suddenly depart, given every other large community is largely similar.
Wow 2019! Haha, yeah it went downhill way way earlier for me. The digg users joining changed the site for sure but when ever "famous" novelty accounts stopped being a big thing and the first rounds of subreddit banning it started to suck. I would have assumed for most peak reddit was around whenever there was the huge rally in DC. Perhaps there are lots more users now but the quality is awful, it used to be so easy to get multiple experts on anything to answer your questions.
> it used to be so easy to get multiple experts on anything to answer your questions.
It’s still possible to get useful answers on niche topics, but you will also get flooded with questionable sub-specific dogma, and god forbid your question is the tiniest bit obvious/unnecessary (according to the “experts” of course, never mind that it clearly wasn’t obvious to the asker)
I call that the stackoverflow effect, where once a topical community reaches a certain information density anything that does not go neatly on the very top of the current pile is mercilessly destroyed.
It's akin to the concept of "climbing a ladder to the top and then pulling the ladder up behind you", and imho it's the alarm bell that indicates that a community has died, even if the community itself does not know it yet.
Stack Overflow itself is also being more overtly destroyed by the corporation that owns it. Did you know they de-attributed Luigi Mangione's posts in blatant violation of their license agreement to his content?
I think it's just called the passing of time. Our bodies build up senescent cells. Our personalities do it as we move through being new adults in the world to old people shouting at clouds. You have something new and novel and empty and you add two pieces of knowledge/whatever and wow this is lively useful discussion. Over time you have 20,000 bits of knowledge/songs in the genre/etc and those two new bits aren't that exciting, get lost in the noise, get canceled by what came before.
chatgptbots really saved that metric. the new scams putting the old scams on life support . maybe the next big thing can keep the llm-multimarketscheme alive. Forever growth by forever bigger scams.
I'm basing my "still growing" assessment off google trends, nobody thinks to bot that. The trends for Slashdot and Digg [0] more or less match up with when they died. While reddit [1] is still growing (at least up until 3 months ago, but that's most likely noise). You really have to zoom into the right date range to not have Reddit dwarf Slashdot/Digg [2].
The new users aren't exactly high quality, but they seem to exist. Or at least advertisers think they exist.... shrug.
For some other fun trends, checkout Facebook which has been clearly declining since 2012, or Instagram which appears to have been declining since 2023... not entirely sure why.
To be fair, adding "reddit" to your search query has been one of the few ways to get away from the SEO garbage to the point where it's become a thing. So I'm not sure how effective Google trends is as a measurement.
I know Reddit has become infested with junk recently, but it just shows how bad the broader-internet has become that I'd rather search in Reddit than walk in that swamp.
The sad part to me is that there's not many online communities left that focus on helping sharing their knowledge with newcomers. I'm excluding discord doxxing generation communities here, because they are really unhelpful for newbies and the opposite of a safe learning environment for kids.
When I built my first website, xhtmlforum and selfhtml forum was amazing as it was a wiki combined with a community around it. The same for pentesting and learning how to solve CTFs. The same for electronics and how to build, etch, and debug motherboards for 6502/i386/etc. I could go on and on forever, but I loved the web for what it was: It always had an answer for anything that I could ever imagine, with other people wanting to build the same cool things, together, as a community.
And that spirit is kind of gone now. Now the statistical majority(?) wants to get famous and rich and be instagram and tiktok idols, without building something to get there. The quick buck has the priority now, and there's maybe some dozens of youtubers left that want to make knowledge on a beginner level accessible, which I have huge respect for. But video content is temporary, especially on platforms with shitty discovery methods like Youtube.
But the wikis and communities? Haha, good luck finding posts from pre 2010 with google. They've all been wiped out.
Just last week I wanted to explain to some junior dev what XHTML1.1 strict and the idea of separation of concerns was about when we still cared about accessibility. Google gave me 2 useful blog posts post-2017, 2 youtube videos of someone raging about it and favoring web components. And that was it. I was flabbergasted how much knowledge is lost.
There is no point in learning new ideas and concepts if you forgot how we got there, because we'll end up in an endless loop of repeating ourself. And I think the worst nightmare of 1984 has come true already. Google already controls the present, and the web archive might be nice but is absolutely useless as a search engine.
I wanted to start a pentest/CTF community because that's what I care most about nowadays. But turns out there's not many web forum software that's left and not enshittified yet that came after the PHP age. Now I'm writing my own markdown based forum software, with a webasm frontend for it and the idea to make all posts storable/shareable as markdown threads.
I don't want knowledge to get lost again in databases.
>> many web forum software that's left and not enshittified yet that came after the PHP age
I am a part of a community that is run on a slightly modded FluxBB. It has more comments per hour than hacker news. Maybe even 10 times more. And new threads are started almost daily. I think this particular forum is almost ten years old?
We did change platforms, but this was more then 7 years ago for sure.
And the code base isn't maintained, since moderators aren't very tech savvy.
That's to say: php forums are pretty robust, don't discount them! You can always migrate, if something better will come up. Older versions are just as good, as the enshittified ones.
It's highly specific to the country (and also to the social media where the community was once established), so I doubt it is relevant to you.
But think fandom non-english space with historical empathizes on female and lgbt members under antilgbt government.
Any social media on this particular language that wants to grow large will swiftly remove half of the discussions we can have there. Keeping separate from opinionated socially-aligned people is also a plus
Wow, a GameFAQs reference. I remember hanging on Z-Tack and some other Atari 2600 message board with silly fake ranks and weird harmless shenanigans I can't even clearly recall. Then there was Magician Type 0, DSL forums, and Outboards, and "Ace" something, and darkpage.net, all clones of the Gamefaqs message board design in variations of PHP and ASP.net. It's how I got into programming. And here we are.
I think the enshittification will continue no matter what. Amazon Prime Video used to be ad-free for paying users, until they made it "some ads" unless you paid for a higher tier.
There is no amount of money that you can pay a modern corporation that will satisfy it. It perpetually wants one more dollar from you.
Nah, this is just time passing. Us early internet users are just getting older and discovering the passage of time.
Ever find a great new restaurant? Small, quirky, but good? Things pick up, it grows, maybe moves to a new location. Everything's shiny and great. It's busy and feels fun to know about? Then over time it becomes less fun. The staff aren't working at some cool new place, but just working the same job over and over and you can tell. The newness wears off, and things start to just wear. A couple years later you reconnect with someone you haven't seen in a while and they recommend the place. You haven't been there forever. You go and it's a ghost of what it was. That wasn't enshitification, just the passing of time.
Enjoy the cool moments/places/songs/movies for what they are, don't expect them to be some sort of constant in life. 'music sucks now, movies suck now, XYZ niche thing fandom loves sucks now'. Nah. It's the same that it's ever been. But time has passed yet you want that moment of discovering XYZ to go for ever because it was so good, but it can't. Time won't allow that.
This works for things you are actively interested in, but old Reddit was cool in that random things would pop up with posts from experts related to the topic. You could get exposed to all kinds of interesting stuff outside your normal focus. And for your focus it was amazing. Not just the same 30 regular contributors in the small walled gardens we now inhabit/self curate.
I enjoy making music. I've started commenting on peoples youtube/soundcloud. And I've made a small circle of people to talk with, but it's so far removed from what Reddit used to provide before it became a 'content feed'.
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.
Reddit is incredibly echo-chamber-y for me, the voting and karma system optimizes for the wrong type of content I feel. I've tried to engage with a few niche-interest subreddits (homebrewing, electronics, musical instruments) over the years and all of them left me generally dissapointed.
My pet theory is that someone who claims reddit is a great place for niche hobbies were never part of an old-school forum with truly passionate and engaging members.
The last 2-3 years this issue just became worse and worse.
Reddit is fantastic for memes though. There are some hilarious subreddits out there. But I rarely engage, just consume.
I'd say at least 70% of reddit "hobby" spaces are people buying something with little research, then posting the picture of the thing they bought.
Any real discussion is drowned out so the average post now is "bought these, new to the hobby, what do I do with them?".
The meshtastic sub is a good example of that. People buying hobbyist hardware, without doing any research. They probably saw some youtube video, hit the amazon "buy", then when it arrived, they're stumped.
Yeah, it's just consumption consumption consumption.
Post a photo of your new gizmo: 300 upvotes. Video of you using your widget: 4 votes.
And in subreddits dedicated to actually making things, it's just hustling hustling hustling. With a small percentage of self-help posts like "how I spent 4 years in my boring-ass generic video game and nobody wanted it".
My "favourite" is on the r/vandwellers subreddit with countless people posting a basic photo of a van they just bought with zero information about themselves, their build plans, how they intend to use it. It might as well be the Craigslist vehicle sales section.
> I'd say at least 70% of reddit "hobby" spaces are people buying something with little research, then posting the picture of the thing they bought.
This is exactly what happened to all of the hobby reddits I enjoyed.
Any useful discussion was crowded out by 10 posts per week (or day) of people posting their newest purchase or asking a question that had been answered 1000 times already.
The useful Subreddits have mods who come down hard on these posts. They don’t proliferate as much if people don’t see them everywhere. It’s a lot of work for mods though.
>I'd say at least 70% of reddit "hobby" spaces are people buying something with little research, then posting the picture of the thing they bought.
A really great (awful) example of this that I saw was on the typewriters subreddit (which is already 90% people posting pictures of the same 5 or so overhyped machines):
In the 1950s, Royal used to give out gold typewriters as part of a writing contest.[0] I saw one of these come up on Goodwill’s auction site, saved screenshots for my records and followed it closely, since I knew bids would get really stupid really fast. Sure enough, winning bid was around $1500.
About two weeks after the auction ended (about the time Goodwill’s very slow shipping takes), I saw it pop up on the subreddit, exact machine, identical scratches, blemishes, and all to the one I had screenshots of. The post title? “Found this at my local thrift store for $50. How’d I do?”
That was enough to finally make my delete my account and seriously question anyone who thinks Reddit is actually good for niche hobbies.[1]
[1] Well, that and the fact that and the fact that I was probably going to lose my mind if I earnestly gave detailed advice on repairing a machine I had personally stripped and reassembled, only for someone to get upvoted to the top for posting a confident pseudo answer about some mechanism—that may or may not even exist in that machine—that they only faintly understood from a general YouTube video that they only half watched.
I used to think that the up voting mechanic was the future of the internet.
Now I think that it's a perverse incentive that requires very heavy handed moderation to not suck (AKA more free labor), and that time decaying posts can discourage quality, in-depth discussions.
Corollary: necroing forum threads isn't necessarily bad.
What's ironic is this thread is full of comments agreeing that Reddit sucks because the voting/karma system is flawed and shadow banning is toxic and deranged yet all those very features and policies exist here. In fact, HN is mentioned in the Wikipedia article for shadow banning as an early adopter of the practice. (Yes I agree it sucks but that's not the point of my comment.)
So what changed or what makes this place different? I would argue it's not the forum software but rather run differently, not placing in charge of every subreddit a cabal of unemployed fringe lunatics wielding power and waging war against their users because it's all they have.
Or maybe the forum software does suck and some just naturally migrated to a text-only low-bandwidth version of Reddit?
> So what changed or what makes this place different?
It's an interesting question. Primarily, I think it's because HN doesn't allow you to downvote instantly or even after a lengthy period of time. I think it's tied to total karma, but someone would have to provide more information there. Regardless, that single change probably makes a big difference.
Compared to Reddit, I've had some comments go into the tens of negative karma points within five minutes of posting. It wasn't because it was low quality, but because it wasn't the "correct" view to have in whatever subreddit I was engaging in. The downvoting there is practically militant.
However, as someone who usually holds a minority view on HN, I don't think the system here is perfect either. Usually an echo chamber forms because the dissidents don't last long and leave. If you reward the ones that stay the longest with downvote capabilities, it would explain my general experience quite well. But again, it's nothing compared to Reddit.
Note: I recognize this is a conversation on karma, which has a rule associated with it, but I hope we can make an exception here given it's a good faith discussion between Reddit/HN :)
There’s 4 things that are disastrous topics for any community, the horsemen of the apocalypse if you like. Politics, Religion, Identity, and Meta.
There’s several natural filters that promote healthy communities - Highly informed users, Active mods, Small community sizes, “Get stuff done” type conversations. In essence, communities where it’s easy to identify BS, and discourage navel gazing, have high signal to noise ratios. They are actively hostile to lazy posting.
A good example of this type of community is r/badeconomics, or was the last I checked, and askhistorians.
A separate note, There’s a 2024 paper that showed that that estimated that young adults spent a smaller portion their time online on high cognitive load reading. A majority of the time would be spent on “timepass” content.
I often wonder whether "limited downvotes" scheme would work: (let's say) 30 downvotes per 24h are free to use and after that each downvote decreases your karma by 1.
My personal opinion is that downvotes, upvotes and algorithms are design decisions that often stick before the best one is found.
It's a shame really, because I think it's not only really important (e.g. to combat fake news/users etc.) but most interesting.
Nonetheless, HN did good with their version where the max. downvote of a comment is -4 and where the up/downvote of a comment is not listed publicly. All functions that help with community building. However, I fret the moment when AI users and shills take over (especially since throwaway accounts are so easy to create).
HN is okay-ish, but you still can’t have long-running discussions on it, or explore some topic in depth, like it is par for the course on old-style forums. One reason is the time cutoff (can’t reply anymore after a day or so), another is that there is no mechanism for tracking which comments you’ve already read and which you haven’t.
> a cabal of unemployed fringe lunatics wielding power and waging war against their users because it's all they have.
Speaking of which, does anyone know if there are any good articles/documentaries/exposés on reddit moderators? I really just want to know what one is like.
HN is not much different (or better) in my opinion
I dislike the voting mechanism here. It incentivises me to optimize my posting to things that will maximise the votes, rather than things I think will add value to the community, even if it's controversial.
On a forum, if I say something stupid/against-the-grain, I am called out by the forum members, or we have a debate about it. On HN and on reddit, I'm downvoted into oblivion with very little in the way of any discussion that helps me learn and improve.
The only thing that makes HN better than reddit for me is the community of like-minded people, a general respect for the rules, and the fact that here we have fantastic moderators.
But I maintain that the underlying _system_ that is managing discourse here is flawed in it's design. I wonder what HN would look like if voting was abolished, and /active was the homepage, where the most actively discussed posts are the ones that filter to the top of the list.
I basically have switched to /active. IMO it's a stronger and more relevant set of articles, and tends not to be clogged with all the "Here's a thing, but with AI!" blogspam and endless number of "I ported this angular script to rust" turds that always seem to make it to the normal front page.
I think it's less "echo chamber" than under direct political influence.
It takes a lot of effort to moderate a subreddit. People will post stuff all day, in large volumes.
Who's going to be willing to do that? Sure, some will just be nice people with a ton of free time, but many will definitely be political activists (or even state actors at this point) who have something to promote.
You know how certain professions are known for attracting certain pathologies? CEOs/narcissism, car salesman/ lmachiavellianidm and surgeons/God? Reddit moderator/d-bag is not exempt from that phenomenon and for reasons unknown to me, because it’s volunteer (Ok, I can’t say 100%, but mostly it’s volunteer) seems to be some kind of mental illness XP multiplier attractant for the role. Perhaps it empowers people because they’re giving so much of their lives to their own perceived cause, that no one asked for. But there are a lot of good, great even, mods out there. Surely. But anyhow,
I’m going back to irc.
> My pet theory is that someone who claims reddit is a great place for niche hobbies were never part of an old-school forum with truly passionate and engaging members.
This. On forums you recognize members by their funny avatars and the hyper specific advice that they have (useful or otherwise). Stickied posts like "timbit2's Guide to Vintage Frobulators" or "New to Frobs? Not Sure Where to Start? READ" abound. There are usually decades of easily-searchable posts accumulated. People reply to your threads helpfully. The marketplace forums are full of well-cared-for gear.
On Reddit you get a lot of beauty shots and question posts with replies like "bro just get the new Vinculum x Chadbert420 frobber. Shit is [fire emojis]". There's usually a woefully out-of-date wiki or sticky that you can only access from one interface or another. There's no sense of community, just upvotes of pictures for clout.
Of course these are contrived straw men versions of their respective communities but in my experience they're correct more often than not. I have been dipping my toe into various Discords that seem to have a better sense of community but Discord doesn't seem to lend itself to longer-form content as forums do... I wonder whether this is something the Discord platform could be augmented to facilitate.
Discord is a chat platform, not a forum, and its contents are closed-off, not discoverable via web search. It’s a modern form of IRC chats, not of web forums. The two serve different needs and audiences.
Reddit was definitely an amazing place for Niche hobbies. Forums were great too, but the layout and having an "orangered" beat out forums. Plus you could be on so many forums at essentially the same time. Prior to reddit I had basically the same setup with RSS feeds for like my top 10-15 forums. But reddit basically copied and eclipsed that and the forums pretty much all died.
Forums were great too, but reddit made it really easy to get access to new niches quickly. Without having to join a new site, learn the forum slang and etiquette, etc.
Reddit is awful now though. IDK what the alternative is either. I'm in a few discords and Facebook groups that cover most topics but they both offer a much poorer user experience imo.
I was an active contributor to /r/espresso for a while, but in the process of the hobby I realized I disagree with some of their advice and best practices. Minor stuff really.
I would not describe the sub as toxic or anything, but it's literally impossible to get a dissenting opinion across on Reddit. Other hobby subs were the same.
Every single time I mentioned an opinion differing from the "hive-mind" consensus it was downvoted to hell, with no responses, counter arguments or anything resembling discussion. I would have liked to trade experiences but that's not possible.
While at the same time some of the other posters giving advice freely admit they don't actually have experience with what is discussed and are just repeating older posts.
There is no real value in that, and nowadays you can get mostly the same experience by just asking ChatGPT. Both have no clue and no real opinion of their own when it comes to details.
I take part in a few forums now, and it's a breath of fresh air. Much better experience and a lot more personal as well.
Everywhere you let the masses upvote and/or downvote, you're going to have the hive-mind problem. We have it here, too.
I'd propose having a separate UI for users to agree/disagree, vs. for users to flag rule breaking posts, like spam, flamebait, insults and so on. The agree/disagree count would just display a vanity number, but the rule-breaking UI would actually downweight the article or comment. You could audit occasionally and remove voting privileges from people abusing the rule-breaking UI as a "Mega-disagree."
> My pet theory is that someone who claims reddit is a great place for niche hobbies were never part of an old-school forum with truly passionate and engaging members.
In my experience, Reddit can be an okay place for niche hobbies until the reddit becomes semi-popular. Then it's a lost cause for anyone but newbies posting the same question every day and old timers who take pleasure in yelling at them.
Leading up to the election Reddit fed me stories about Kamala’s huge rally turnouts, Trump‘s tiny rally turnouts, and endless links to stories about positive signs she would win. It was a forgone conclusion to me it was going to be a blowout for her.
Same. And for about 12 to 24 hours after the election loss it was... quiet. A few people coming to terms that the illusion had disappeared, but not in any way comparable to the interactions beforehand.
The default subs are filled with left-wing conspiracy theories these days.
A consequence of years of reddit allowing its mods to shadow ban centrist voices.
It’s hard to see how reddit escapes this mess. They need more normal people and less political zealots, but the site is already so far down the echo chamber path that its overt political partisanship scares off potential new normal users from participating.
I don't see why they would. Rage drives engagement, and they just got the number one rage inducing factor back into public office for the next 4 years. This form of engagement also works better on progressives I think.
Honestly, the internet is killing us all slowly. It was better not to argue with our neighbors on the Internet or even social media. Or fellow citizens or even foreign ones CONSTANTLY
As someone with a reddit account old enough to vote, it's always been like that. If you only browsed reddit it would have been a sure bet that Bernie Sanders would be the democratic candidate, and Ron Paul was going to win before that.
Reddit's algorithm of what to show you is based in part on what you've chosen to follow and in part on what is most likely to get you to stay on the site and engage with the content. It's not designed to give you an accurate view of upcoming election outcomes, and is not at all surprising that it might show someone mostly content from one side's fans, regardless of whether they side is going to win or not.
>Reddit's algorithm of what to show you is based in part on what you've chosen to follow and in part on what is most likely to get you to stay on the site and engage with the content.
You see the same phenomena on /r/all, which isn't personalized.
I actually found out about the Silksong “announcement” from it being number one on the r/all feed followed by several other switch 2/games announcements in the top 5…
You have to remember that there was some pretty nutso tariff news right about the same time, not that strange for it to be highly represented on the front page.
Reddit’s algo is doing an astonishingly bad job if they want me to stay engaged based on the things I follow. I’ve got two seperate accounts one for general stuff, the other intended strictly for NSFW purposes and meeting people with similar interests. I spent maybe half an hour yesterday on the NSFW account blocking everything that wasn’t in my interests, but more and more unrelated (and general) subreddits kept being recommended to me. After a while of this, I gave up and deleted the app, which I can’t imagine is good for Reddit’s bottom line. I’ll probably be back at some point as it is still in my experience the best way to see that stuff and meet like-minded people, but I was kinda shocked at how difficult (impossible?) it was to just keep one account restricted to specific interests that I do kinda want to be engaged with.
There was a brief moment when pro-Trump content would occasionally surface on the algorithm, at which point the site operators hit the panic button and banned the offending subreddit.
The reason for deliberately antagonizing them, and eventually banning them, was that /r/The_Donald's moderators were directly telling their membership to upvote specific posts so they'd rocket to the front page. "Inorganic results", "vote manipulation", "gaming the algorithm", whatever you'd like to call it.
So the admins had a reason to ban it, even if no doubt they and most of Reddit's users saw Trump supporters as "the enemy".
The reason for deliberately antagonizing them, and eventually banning them, was that /r/The_Donald's moderators were directly telling their membership to upvote specific posts so they'd rocket to the front page.
There would need to be extensive evidence to convince me that the subreddit wasn't just botted. Threads would get thousands of posts extremely quickly, and there would sometimes be only a handful of comments. I don't really believe organic users were spending their free time refreshing "new" just in case a new post was made that required an immediate upvote.
It doesn't need bots to explain it. And even the Reddit admins were convinced T_D had legitimate traffic, which is why they were reticent to kill it... they just didn't like the manipulation and brigading and so on. If they could show it was bots, they would've killed it much sooner.
Normal humans tend to upvote things that are already upvoted. But normal humans don't tend to look at the incoming stream of posts.
Ordinary T_D users were refreshing the subreddit's front page. Mods stickied the posts they wanted to rocket to the top. This got them past the hurdle where very few people look at /new to give those all-important first few upvotes. Ordinary T_D users upvoted the stickied posts. The mods then unstickied them less than an hour later, because now they're "organically" at the top of T_D, and the upvotes continued to pile in, rocketing the post to /r/all
Meanwhile, all the other subreddits weren't playing this game, so their users votes were split across multiple posts on their subreddit's front page. And mods of other subs use sticked posts for administrative notices, which are worded as such and tend not to get upvoted much... but if you were to sticky a normal post, users would upvote it. But stickied posts aren't eligible for /r/all... unless you unsticky them. Oops! T_D successfully gamed that oversight.
EDIT1: Also... as the comments in the link above reminds me; it used to be that any post could be stickied, e.g. normal link posts. It wasn't necessarily clear that they were stickied posts. What changed after the T_D manipulation is that sticky posts were renamed "Administrative Notes" and had to be text posts and had to be coloured differently from normal posts. Before that change, they weren't distinguished that way. Now perhaps the subterfuge by mods makes more sense?
EDIT2: WIRED's postmortem on T_D - it was cunning mods, not bots.
T_D’s moderators were looking for a way to game the system and force T_D onto r/all every day.
The mods realized that a key lay in the “sticky” system, by which moderators could pin a post at the top of their subreddit indefinitely. The system was meant for announcements, rule changes, upcoming events, and other minutia of day-to-day Redditing. But any thread could be stickied, and stickied threads behaved the same way that any other Reddit thread did: They accrued points by vote, and more points boosted the thread closer to the top of the page. This didn’t typically matter, since a stickied thread was by definition artificially held at the top of its subreddit already. But the mods weren’t trying to make threads visible on The_Donald. They wanted to boost them onto r/all.
T_D’s moderators began to sticky threads unrelated to their rules or announcements. Instead, they promoted especially provocative user-created threads. This tactic quickly proved effective. Before long, T_D was elevating a post or two onto r/all day after day.
Another T_D mod, Alex, says the team kept in close touch not only with which threads were successful, but also how mods could encourage their users to vote on stickied threads and drive them higher in Reddit’s r/all rankings. “We trained our subscribers to upvote and comment in every thread,” Alex says. “That is how we originally gamed the algorithm.” Jessie, a third mod, says T_D’s mods made “repetitive requests” to the user base to vote and boost threads. They used memes, gifs, and jokes to push users to act. It worked.
On the one hand, yes; I don't think the admins made that specific change, but they took away the ability to sticky normal posts, in response to T_D's shenanigans, ending the effectiveness of that tactic.
On the other hand, there aren't simple technological fixes to social problems. T_D's mods remained tricksy and continued to work their userbase to upvote and focus - in ways which didn't breach the sitewide rules on manipulation - and still kept hitting /r/all
Reddit could have simply banned T_D at any time. In the years since then they've definitely started banning subreddits for no good reason, but apparently based simply on how much upper management likes the subreddit. Presumably, T_D was not banned because upper management liked it.
> Reddit's algorithm of what to show you is based in part on what you've chosen to follow and in part on what is most likely to get you to stay on the site and engage with the conten
That's not the whole truth. Subreddit Moderation is the key point that's vulnerable to abuse. I block all political subreddits. My blocklist has 120 entries. 10 of those are of inherent political nature. The rest is just like /r/pics - enshittified rage bait about Trump.
There was certainly a lot of optimism but I don't think you can really say the mood was a clear blow out. Anyone mentioning such a thing would get many replies of "doesn't matter...vote anyway!"
I think Kamala actually did have the lead in Reddit's demographics.
I would absolutely get that same feeling from reddit. But like do you not interact in the actual world? Trump would have a rally and areas 45 minutes away are backed up with traffic for 8 hours. Kamala had one and you can't even reliably figure out how to get tickets and other than motorcade closures traffic is nothing.
So much anti-Kamala and pro-Trump stuff in the communities that are supposed to be strong for her.
That Kamala did as well as she did was really shocking to me. I mean it wasn't close, but Kamala couldn't even make past the very first debate in 2020 and her list of accomplishments is basically nothing. I never met anyone in real life with an actual compelling or supportive argument for her. At best it was "she's not Trump".
Taking Biden out and having no primary is probably the worst thing Democrats could have done.
Your entire post reads like a bot post on reddit. Not sure if you're trying to prove the point and forgot the /s or actually believe the nonsense you've posted.
> having no primary is probably the worst thing Democrats could have done.
I'd argue the 15 years of identity politics that both led to Harris as VP and prevented them from being able to commit the faux paux of possibly passing her up by letting their constituents decide if they liked her was their worst decision.
There are some niche forums still, but they have to be really small. Mostly related to very specific media as general topics are affected by astroturfing. These communities often don't live as long, but they can be active, helpful and interesting.
part of the echo chamber is also instant shadow bans on many of the major subs, and especially political ones, unless you consistently comment (shadow banned) comments and eventually get whitelisted by a mod or bot who's determined you to be the "right" sort of commenter. and again an instant shadow ban again the second you trigger any "bad" keywords
That's presumably an anti-bot/astroturfing measure. As bad as that is, I'm not sure what the alternative should be. Allowing anyone to post with a 1 minute old account? Implement real name verification?
Using the 1/9/90 split [0] for creators/commenters/readers, it seems farfetched to suggest that reddit accounts (which benefits readers making an account to curate subreddit subscriptions) can't follow this pattern where many legitimate human users do not comment often.
Plenty of people don't comment often, but the impetus to sign up for an account is often to comment, which subs then either disallow or delete because they don't want new accounts commenting.
I can't speak to every local subreddit but I can tell you for sure that while it may have started as an anti-bot measure, on /r/newzealand it is absolutely used as a way to gatekeep the wrong opinions from being present on the subreddit.
Niche content for sure is the best thing Reddit is for. I only go there for info on my favorite instruments, and a few other shitposting communities for games and shows I watch.
I'm amused by how over the top it always is. A high-scoring submission on my local Reddit gets maybe +70 votes. Then, some random political-related submission —and it's only ever political-related—will have +2000 votes. They're so overt that they don't even care.
Well, if broadly popular organic posts net about 100, I would expect organic partisan posts to have a ceiling of +50. Still, more realistically, the net would be about zero because half the people would downvote them.
But, somehow, partisan posts in one direction always seem to net over 1000 or 2000, yet partisan posts in the other direction net about zero.
Even with a skewed distribution, I would only expect maybe +20 to be the ceiling.
> the net would be about zero because half the people would downvote them.
Why would you assume that? It's a fallacy to assume that political opinions are evenly distributed. People seem to agree that different sites attract people of different political persuasions. A post that gets highly upvoted on Truth Social might get highly downvoted on Reddit, and vice versa. That's not astroturfing, that's just self-selecting communities.
> partisan posts in one direction always seem to net over 1000 or 2000, yet partisan posts in the other direction net about zero.
Again, it depends on the audience. This is not a new phenomenon. 50 years ago, you would get a different response to certain political statements depending on whether you made them at a Grateful Dead Concert or at a meeting of the Fraternal Order of Police. Why should today be different?
> I would only expect maybe +20 to be the ceiling.
Why? People feel strongly about their political believes. It's polarizing and engaging in a way that a post about crockpots or guitar strings isn't.
If a submission appeals to random people browsing r/all, i.e. politics, sex or memes, then it can get way more upvotes than a niche topical submission.
For example one of the top r/aviation posts is a meme about airbuses with "slutty eyeliner" (87k points), and it far outpaces shop talk type submissions like "why does the landing gear not get retracted at the same time on this 777?" (2k points)
Posts from a regional subreddit, where world events seldom happen and traffic and roadways are the prime topics of conversation, are not making it to /r/all or the front page.
Yet political posts get +2000 out of nowhere and an influx of commentators who don't usually comment in that regional subreddit or don't even likely live there.
You're incorrect, this is the normal way that the reddit algorithm functions, it promotes highly-engaging content from niche subreddits.
The top post of all time on r/toledo is about a police officer harassing a woman. It's highly engaging but not overtly political. It has 100x the upvotes of a normal r/toledo post about traffic or what have you.
One of the top posts of all time in r/sanjose is a video of someone trying to jimmy a hotel door open using a hook contraption. Highly engaging, not overtly political.
These were the first two city subreddits I checked. It's literally just how reddit works, highly engaging content bubbles to the top and can reach a much larger audience.
Why does it ONLY happen to political posts, and why does it ONLY happen to posts that reinforce a particular viewpoint?
Either this is the design of the black box "algorithm," or it's not real engagement. There's no need to miscorrect me about something so hamfisted and overt.
> After this last election, I think political groups realized local subreddits were underutilized and have regrouped accordingly.
its not that. they realized: a) that folks were filtering out the astroturfed subreddits in /r/all, and b) that r/all's filter list has a hard limit of 100 subreddits. so, by astroturfing >100 subreddits, they can guarantee to their clients that their posts will make the front of r/all for everyone.
After the last election, one smaller local subreddit that has had the same overall culture for many, many years, seemingly overnight, at the snap of some fingers, lurched completely to the extreme opposite direction. If you dare to share any of the same ideas that were once widely accepted there for many years on end, now you instead get absolutely pummeled, ridiculed, downvoted out of existence.
It's just so blatantly, demonstrably, obvious the level of manipulation which was targeted at the sub. Somebody, somewhere, added it to a list of subreddits to be manipulated. But you can't even discuss it there, because how are you going to use a compromised communication channel to communicate about how it's compromised?
The majority of the population seemingly can't even notice that sort of communication manipulation, it's gotten so sophisticated. Bot accounts used to be much easier to detect, now they all have very cleverly built-up account history and posts that are near indistinguishable from humans. And of course not all manipulation is bots/AI, there's coordinated shill/sockpuppet/astroturf campaigns with real people being tasked with doing the manipulation.
The smart people have already left and gone on to the next place, which will never be allowed to grow large enough or significant enough without the propaganda fire hose eventually being turned on it too. The only way to fix things is a radically different framework for communication.
Back to conventional forums with threaded, sequential, discussion? We managed fine for years and well-moderated forums seem to deal with spam/bots better.
I agree with you, and think that if Slashdot were to do a rebirth, it might succeed. Of course, they'd have to figure out what went wrong and put in mechanisms to prevent that.
But the five vote options (insightful, interesting, funny, off-topic, troll) were _useful_. Having a feed based on the score of votes plus friend bonus, friend-of-a-friend bonus, foe penalty, friend-of-a-foe penalty gave me a super news feed I stuck with for almost a decade.
I could see a more complex voting rule set being helpful. But basically, it was really good until it wasn't, and that was a problem of the people behind the scenes there, and not the system itself.
The default sorting on Reddit usually isn’t sequential, and there is no way to track how far you’ve read along the sequence or subthread. In addition, threads get “archived” and you can’t reply anymore. In old-style forums, threads get usually sorted by last activity, meaning that active threads, including resurrected ones, are reliably at the top (sequential by last activity, if you will). On Reddit, orderings like Hot and Best give you some unreliable heuristics, unsuitable for keeping track of current discussions.
Ah, I see, I thought you meant linear within a thread. So you mean some kind of deterministic/transparent sorting (like "most recent activity"). I agree that would improve things.
Virtually all forums (and their ancestral mailing lists) default to chronological order. A good comparison is perhaps the difference between comment-driven and discussion-driven sites, if there's a technical name for that?
HackerNews is comment driven, but does a decent job of facilitating discussions - but not particularly deeply. Reddit is similar. Forums are much more amenable to linear, deep, discussion between a few parties, but can also facilitate comments. Both have their place on the internet, and I don't think that forums are necessarily the answer to everything, but it feels like a lot of people left those communities to end up in Reddit and that's a shame.
Interestingly, old forums rarely supported nested threading. The only "threads" were just linear sequences of posts in a topic. Nested threading is nice but it's also a different cognitive experience that maybe has some downsides as well.
I meant both posts within a thread and threads within the forum. Reddit makes it hard to track a discussion within a thread and also tracking new threads vs. read threads vs. previously read threads but with new posts, or picking up a half-read thread later on.
Discourse seems to be a modern forum platform that handles a good deal of that. The tricky thing is paying for it, including configuring it and/or paying someone to do that.
Who knew that giving power to unpaid volunteers who don‘t necessarily have the users or the companies‘ best interest in mind might turn out to be a bad business practice.
> I used to love Reddit, but the astroturfing has become unbearable, especially by political groups.
I really doubt most of it is astoturfing. You can find bot accounts, obviously. However, the Reddit hivemind has a very intense echo chamber.
Everyone learns very quickly that if you write something that doesn't match the popular opinion of Reddit, you're going to get downvoted quickly. Strike a nerve and you'll even get angry private messages or people going through your post history and trying to extend their argument into old comments.
Large forums have always been like this. You're at the mercy of a small number of users who have the most free time to post all day. Some times I'll get an unusually angry response on Reddit and click on their profile out of curiosity. It's often someone who has been commenting for the last 10 hours straight. You just can't compete with someone with infinite free time and a lot of anger to get out. Eventually they all sync up to drive away differing opinions
Its fully astroturfing. The trick is to implement non-member/non-flaired rules to block most folks from the discourse. Then you can just focus on hitting the front page, which you can juice with other rules like only members can down vote. Now you can just focus on hitting the front page and suddenly you get a very biased thread with a lot of eyeballs and no response. /r/The_Donald used this to much success and there have been others.
> Its fully astroturfing. The trick is to implement non-member/non-flaired rules to block most folks from the discourse.
The number of subreddits that do this is small. Hardly representative of typical Reddit behavior.
Everyone knows by now that /r/conservative isn’t a real subreddit because it’s “flavored users only”.
However, too many people make the leap from “astroturfing exists” to “everything I don’t like is astroturfing” way too quickly. It’s right up there with accusing people you disagree with of using ChatGPT or being paid shills.
The truth is, a lot of subreddits are the way they are because that’s just what Reddit’s user base thinks, not because a shadowy cabal is making them say those things.
>/r/The_Donald used this to much success and there have been others.
I read a post from a former reddit admin a while back that was talking about they managed that. Apparently they had one sticky post each day, and sticky posts are blocked from being on the frontpage but since they'd change the main post each day, once they un-stickied it, it'd immediately get picked up by the algorithm for the frontpage, inadvertently gaming the whole system.
its astroturfing by for profit companies. after the election, they realized: a) that folks were filtering out the astroturfed subreddits in /r/all, and b) that r/all's filter list has a hard limit of 100 subreddits. so, they switched tactics - by astroturfing >100 subreddits, they can guarantee to their clients that their posts will make the front of r/all for everyone.
Back when Pushshift was publicly available, I used to check the mod actions on some subreddits. What I found was that the subreddits that I thought had biased moderators were simply undermoderated. Pretty much every mod action I saw was fair and there were also a lot more than expected, but clearly the issue was that total comment volume was far more than the mod team could handle.
> You're at the mercy of a small number of users who have the most free time to post all day. Some times I'll get an unusually angry response on Reddit and click on their profile out of curiosity. It's often someone who has been commenting for the last 10 hours straight.
These people are also masters at toeing the line of forum or subreddit rules when trashing others, constantly baiting people to cross the line in replies and get themselves moderated. It's worse in forums where downvoting isn't available.
There was a recent panic/hysteria there about banning Twitter from many subreddits because of hate speech. It was incredible how quickly people were begging to have a website banned when they could either choose not to visit it or down vote posts they didn't like. Really soured things for me by illustration how much the median values changed from when I started using the site.
This was about Elon's "Nazi salute" and both so incorrect and blatantly astroturfed I haven't returned to Reddit out of disgust.
A ton of near-dead subreddits with no activity and no reason to link to x.com for any reason suddenly had thousands of people show up demanding links to x.com be blocked like it's an everyday problem for the sub.
The quiet beneficiary of this campaign are those who benefit from Reddit's groomed narrative and their competing platform Bluesky.
The Texas subreddit recently got "taken back" by normal, older mods. It had been run by an account "annatrashpanda", who banned anyone critical of the Democrats, who let generic copy/paste national memes take over the board, and so on. I see they have now deleted their account. This all happened about two weeks ago.
I say this as a liberal, the artificially partisan takeovers of local subs is a real thing. It's one thing to ban trolls and consistent shit-talkers from a community. And frankly it's one thing to have some bias. But it was just so obviously hostile, and I was happy to see the sub get back some authenticity.
The blog has been running since 2022 under a different domain name. It was then focused on economics, as the archive suggests. I'm currently migrating articles from the old host.
Well, this looks legit, as this is a real domain registered in 2022, but I still don't get why would you make a new post on a freshly registered domain after a 3-year pause and immediately submit it to HN.
Seems like it. I went to church today for the IDK consecutive Sunday and it was all right.
Not the "Western civilization is declining because the kids stopped going to church" church but a church full of old hippies and young queers. It's been fun, sometimes I get takeout on the way home
I'm also tending my own website, which nobody else has write access to, so that I can link people to information I've vetted myself. Can't link it without doxxing myself sadly
Likewise been going to synagogue. I would hardly call myself a religious person. Far more a nihilist who thinks we should try and do good if it is truly all pointless. I think the meaningfulness and the sense of community is nice. It’s typically better than being glued to the kinetoscope
AI commenting on AI commenting on AI commenting on AI...
But yeah, X, LinkedIn, and the rest all feel like the bots and content farmers have taken over.
I believe the pay for engagement incentives make people be as controversial as possible just to earn money. Imagine you are in a low-income nation, you pretend to be from the USA, you could earn a higher daily income by posting engagement bait. It is in your interest to upset as many people as possible and then set up counter bots to argue with your fee earning bots.
> When I publish my next piece I will personally write you an email, with some of my thoughts on the post.
‘My next piece’? Maybe for a part of a book or a long article, but for a blog post?
The next oddity, ignoring ‘personally’, which is inappropriate for a mailing list, is ‘…with some of my thoughts on the post’; you’re going to send me a piece with some of your thoughts on the post?
I’d expect more accurate phrasing from a med student.
Edit: tone down the criticism, I wrote without much thought that some one made the site; my apologies if I came off as overly critical.
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://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.)
I worked for a company that did this "Reputation Management" in my first job out of college around 2008. It was big at that time, and almost everything now is highly controlled, especially Reddit. I also dislike Facebook's new feed that endlessly regurgitates clickbait ragebait garbage.
The best legitimate communities I know of online are Heavyequipmentforums.com and newagtalk.com. Good luck finding the real forums like these on Google search though, which is probably the product that has gone down the most in quality over time. Honestly, all of the above can probably be attributed to the falling quality of Google results.
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
20 years ago I was made aware of gurella marketing people who were paid to have 'organic conversations' in public places about products they were promoting!
I dated a woman that had a job of managing fake social media profiles. She worked for a marketing company, but the whole point of her department was to do shadow PR.
Step one was get (sometimes a purchase, sometimes AI, etc...) a lot of pictures or same person.
Step two was create the basic "character" based on the pictures.
Step three was make posts, sometimes automated, sometimes manually, using the pictures and any appropriate content. This Step can last years and goal is create a internet presence that looks like a real person.
Final possible steps:
1. If character became famous enough, could be sold to an influencer or corporation to manage that profile and do whatever they wanted.
2. If wasn't sold, it was used often to generate legitimacy for other fake profiles.
3. The real cash cow: during PR emergencies those profiles would be used to direct the narrative, for example she told me her last work like that was using these profiles to make content go viral to distract the public from negative news that were viralizing about one of the world biggest appliances manufacturer. She said in 24 hours people were all over paying attention to the new "viral" post and forgot the news entirely and the company didn't even had to make a statement.
Amazing find, thanks for sharing. Them showcasing the Eglin access numbers as some sort of positive metric highlights how ignorant social media companies have been to the whole issue.
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.
I've gotten on the frontpage multiple times by reposting a day later. You never know how the timing is going to work out. This behavior also fits within the guidelines.
Some people post in different timezones, so capture the attention of 'as many as possible', but you are likely correct as previous post was 22h ago (so almost same time yesterday), and not 4/8/12/16/20 hours ago.
I get it but for what is worth, the accepted behavior here is that you can repost eventually but you should wait significantly longer than a day before doing so.
> Are reposts ok?
>If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.
Weeeell, technically a fresh new story hasn't got any attention in the last year or so because it was never posted before, so a small number of reposts - like in this case - should be ok.
Seems like the resulting attention on the repost makes for decent justification in this case. I'm glad to have seen this, and I don't like the idea of good content slipping through the cracks because of timing and circumstance.
Note that there is a “second chance” pool of posts which did not get much attention but are perhaps more interesting to the community than the engagement suggests. The mods seem to agree with this point, given that.
I can relate and it is something I'm thinking about as I have a post I'd like to try reposting without coming off as spammy. In this case, the repost was indeed worth it as far as I can tell.
Agreed, this has been happening since long before LLMs existed.
I did a quick search for the affiliate tag noted in the blog post, and found another Redditor complaining about that same affiliate tag, but from three other accounts[0].
My fascination is that, with LLMs, the line between obvious bot regurgitation and seemingly human posts is now much thinner.
The fact that the Reddit post was an affiliate link for Edward Bernays' Propaganda is just the cherry on top, in this case it's like selling ice to eskimos.
> Humans have been programming other humans since the beginning of our time (and arguably other species too[0]).
There's the often-captured idea that social interaction (including the ability to reason about what information another being is in possession of, being able to empathize with their viewpoint, anticipate their reactions, and use all of this to manipulate their next set of actions) is perhaps the main driver of intelligence explosion in humans, birds and other noticably more intelligent animals.
I find that interesting because if you look into the SciFi golden age notion of what the Intelligent Machines era would be like, Asimov-style, you usually get depictions of cooly calculating and reasoning, maximally logical machine beings. Yet what we've actually been able to create is mushy, vibe-y text generators that excel at generating manipulative slop. Maybe it's not a coincidence, but somehow echoing the general thrust of higher intelligence.
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.
Moderation has become a real weak-point for reddit. They expect anonymous and unpaid volunteers to do the hard and thankless job of keeping large numbers of passionate strangers, malicious bots, trolls, etc. under control while being impartial, honest, etc.. In reality, their mods are usually either power-tripping, pushing their own agenda, or state-sponsored propagandists. There's absolutely no recourse if you see shady moderation going on. Reddit doesn't care so long as everybody keeps clicking.
I recently decided to take a break from reddit, and may yet make that break permanent. There is still some good stuff there, but it's getting rarer and harder to find in a sea of spam.
Same! My >decade old account was banned in 2023 despite having great karma and a clean track record. I swore the place off and have been much happier and more productive since.
I engage with real people on various discord servers instead nowadays.
The same thing happened to my extremely old account (17+ years). A few weeks ago I noticed I stopped getting replies and taking a look in incognito mode verified my suspicion. I had stopped existing. I think it was because I had started the habit of deleting my older comments. Oddly enough, the hundreds of comments I had deleted had returned (only visible to me of course...other uses clicking on my profile would see an "account doesn't exist" message). At that point I just deleted the account in disgust.
I doubt you were banned from 'reddit' with no chance of recourse. More likely that you were banned from a subreddit; site-wide bans are generally clearly explained.
My account is 18+ years old with 100k+ of organic karma evenly split between posting and commenting. I was an active moderator for both my local country sub and part of the moderator reserves program.
Did you contact Reddit? A similar thing happened to me a few years ago, turns out I had accidentally upvoted my own content from a different account. Admins replied to the e-mail with an explanation, and fixed it quite fast.
I did and got back what appeared to be an automated reply given the near immediate response.
>Thanks for submitting an appeal to the Reddit admin team. We've reviewed your request and your appeal will not be granted and your ban will remain in place.
>-Reddit Admin Team
>This is an automated message; responses will not be received by Reddit admins.
It's really a bummer to lose an 18+ year account that I've accumulated so many friends and community relations, and one that is tied to a common public nickname I use on socials and is literally tattooed on my arm. So I figured I'd wait a year and request again.
But that was years ago. Since shortly before the API purge, all you get is an auto response of "we have reviewed your report and there was no mistake."
Twitter is 10x worse than reddit for astroturfing, political propaganda bots, and blue check clowns. I agree with you for sure that HN is several notches above reddit though
I have been curating and sanitizing my feed, I get cat pics, occasional Marvel stuff, ML stuff and ones from friends, but yeah still if I browse the main feed, vitriol does pop up, though I mute accounts and keywords.
Yea after their blatant disregard for community after the API fiasco, I decided I didn't need to use Reddit anymore.
For a while I just used hacker news. Then I picked up TikTok. It isn't horrible but I sometimes have to be careful because the feed will start to try and feed me stuff that's just brain rot.
Yeah I'm basically cut off from the modern internet because my values don't align with it, as a young person. I can't stomach anything where people are trying to sell something or gain popularity and are insincere. It means im basically just on here, ft comments, and ars sometimes.
I've dropped reddit and started moving towards small communities that also do in-person events. I can't engage with anonymous communities anymore. Everyone is potentially a bot. The irony being that I still use hackernews.
Frankly it's depressing how many people there are who value money over integrity. I'm sure they've always existed, but the Internet certainly has amplified their existence.
I think the internet provides a tantalizing way for them to make money, but I think it's changes in the legal, economic, and social environment that has really amplified them.
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
> 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.
The thing that turned me off reddit is that for many years how much of it seemed to be following a script for any given topic, and that's a long time to when /r/subredditsimulator or GPT variants would be novel. Personally I'm long past the point where I found myself caring whether it's a human or bot if the value in reading the post isn't there as it's not presenting anything new. I found myself despairing a bit that if it was humans typing out responses, what's the cumulative amount of time spent doing so and not moving things forwards, just playing out the same scene over and over, and likely being angry about it so it's hard to see it as a leisure activity
> 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.
> because they believe some bigger picture truth justifies the lie.
I go around bleating about this issue quite often and that's the best, most empathetic [1] way I've seen it phrased.
Yeah, I see this a lot on HN as well. "$BigCorp is secretly doing $NefariousThing!" "How good is the evidence for this, though?" "Why are you shilling for $BigCorp, we all know it's nefarious!"
Like, I can easily believe that many big corporations are doing all sorts of shady stuff, but the lack of precision makes it impossible to put everything into perspective. (And it's not like "just break them all up, regardless of the details" is a viable solution: you'll just end up with a bunch of slightly-smaller shady corporations.)
I mean, nobody should be surprised since Reddit drove away almost all of their moderators and power users in mid-2023 by banning clients that actually functioned.
Reddit chose to kill itself; a maggot-ridden corpse is the expected find.
the only way i engage with reddit now is directly on subreddits i think arent total wastes of time(shrinking fast). which mainly means i never navigate to their main page and my first stop is directly on a subreddit rather than the front page, all, or whatever.
currently thats pretty much two humor based subreddits.
this has been slowly getting worse and worse over the years. Ive also for sure experienced the google search results from reddit that have felt manipulated. one that springs to mind is a topic about favorite bar soap... really? the consensus in a hygiene subreddit was that the most popular brand with likely the highest advertising budget of any other brand is the top comment? its also not like a defeated "xxx gets the job done and is affordable" its like a really odd praising of them.
> 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.
I've found generic/mass-appeal reddit/twitter/whatever to be mostly social hygiene where people get together to link up with their tribe. If there is interaction between tribes, it mostly follows the same patterns (but it's rare, because power accumulates on one side and you get more ideologically aligned groups). The ideal version would be one where members of other tribes are around, but they quickly get shouted down and then either join the local tribe or leave defeated, admitting they were wrong.
Whether something really happened (in some particular way) doesn't matter if discussing reality is not the point.
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)....
This is a social site too, and not much better than Reddit if at all - at least when I only consider the communities I "participated in" there. That said, I have been thinking about quitting HN too several times, and I find it disappointing that there's no (easy) way to export my data from here.
Pretty unhappy about it as well. I have no real interest in physical socializing, but virtual socializing is slowly becoming untenable. Small communities (can) work OK, but anything at-scale is various degrees of rough. I just don't think natural language and the human experience can properly scale this large, and it shows.
My expectation of easy is driven by what other social sites are required to provide by law: a button. I think we can agree that being able to consume an API is reasonably far from that, even if that API is straightforward.
Good to know it's that straightforward though, I knew of the repo but was like eh, maybe next time, always the next time.
To me its all turning to s**. I loved newsgroups and have been addicted to forums since but I really spend little time now. Even HN is getting pretty boring.
Hackernews isn't much better than Reddit once the topic veers away from dev tech. Any post about Microsoft or art/music/philosophy is absolute trash, I hide every one.
I just click the hide button. The political posts are exactly what HN needs because these rich fucks aren't hackers and need to know what people think about them.
Some link shortening services allow you to either bring your own domain or register a domain through them to use, so in the latter case it would be "via" the link shortener.
It's sometimes available on other types of SaaS services where your URL would otherwise be customer-facing as well.
Presumably they meant "by a" not "via a" . I wonder why misuse of latin words in English seems so common; see e.g. frequent confusion between e.g. and i.e. .
I think the author used the word correctly but explained the circumstances somewhat confusingly.
IIUC an entity engaged a service to register a domain on its behalf. So the entity did indeed register via the service, but it would also be correct to state that registration was carried out by the service. That service also happens to provide a link shortener. So instead of referring to the service as "company X" the author went with "link shortener".
I'd hazard to guess most people treat these things as just regular English words or phrases which have diverged in meaning, not even realizing it is/was Latin with a specific meaning. Particularly e.g./i.e., I remember them by the English translations and couldn't even tell you what the Latin they stand for is without looking it up.
Interestingly, a few hours after the posthuman.blog post circulated on reddit yesterday, the embedded amazon link at the end of the original post was suddenly edited out.
Behind every bot is a shifty motherfucker who has always been a scamming piece of shit.
First they polluted email with spam. Then they polluted search results with SEO. Now they pollute forums with crap like this.
For a brief moment in the 20th century, small pockets of middle-class people in the West forgot this basic fact of the universe, but people the world over still suffered. Leaded gasoline. Big tobacco. Cults. Big oil. Big sugar. Violent ideologies with seven-digit body counts. ...All of this happened while we were enjoying our nice suburban lifestyles where we could "leave our doors unlocked."
It never stopped, but it never started, either. Radium water. Snake oil salesmen. The Claque. Papal indulgences. Debased and shaved coinage. The greatest engineer of the Roman period, Hero of Alexandria, made numerous devices that performed "miracles" so temples could extract donations from visitors. I'm sure if they were around today, those same ancient corrupt priests would be shilling memecoins.
This behaviour isn't even unique to humans.
Ever since the first bacterium with a defective metabolic pathway started taking excess production from its neighbours, there have been cheaters. Ecologists call it the Black Queen hypothesis: if the other guy is left holding the bag, then you can invest more of your own energy into reproducing, until there's no more slack in the carrying capacity. Cheating is literally an evolutionary strategy.
To be part of the world you must be resilient to the evil that is baked into it, even when it comes to your doorstep.
If a platform can't or won't offer the tools to limit abuse, go find or build a new platform that can.
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:
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 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:
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.
I took it as a poor-quality local model. I suppose it is possible, but it seems...unlikely... that one of the three responses to that post was a person who was so upset by the idea of serving junk content to scraper bots that they registered for an account, wrote their criticism, and then disappeared from the site.
At that time, there were a whole bunch of flagged-dead comments from newly-created accounts that had compound-word usernames (such as the text I linked to above from 'earlydeveloper'.) So, if these are people manually writing those posts, I understand the behavior even less than the bot hypothesis.
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.
Yes, which was also a bot comment in the bot post that the bot article commented on:
> The top comment mentions something called "Dead Internet Theory": the belief that most online interactions are automated loops of bots communicating with eachother.
But seriously, I think we'll see some social networks start pushing a "verified human" tag soon enough... if it wasn't for the fact they earn tons of money from bots that provide a steady supply highly upvoted / impressed / engaged with / ad view generating content.
I wouldn't at all be surprised if Reddit itself is behind bot networks. But we'd need a whistleblower to verify that conspiracy theory.
Reading linked article and comments like yours was an interesting trip. At first I took the post to be about a real post, then the Reddit post is a bot, then the replies are perhaps bots. Now I don't even know what's real of this story, which is probably the real lesson. Maybe I just wanted a story with clear bad and good guys.
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.
I'm not sure in what way that is AI generated. I'm following this space quite a bit and it looks like it's at least partially real. The voice is very realistic, I doubt that's AI generated. The motion and facial expressions are also very natural. I would assume it's some AI transformation (like style transfer) on top of a real video. I see no evidence that it's AI. In fact, I think there's a genre of online garbage that's claiming that things were made by certain AI tools when they weren't. I'm not saying this video has no AI in it, just that it doesn't seem fully AI and we have no way to tell.
Look at the handbags hanging in the air next to people walking by in the background, and the six fingers on the interviewer's hand. But yes, I had to look at it repeatedly to see that it's fake, it's definitely good enough to fool most people scrolling their feed.
I don't follow it super close, but I've seen some videos from the Wan model that's now available in ComfyUI, and they can be really good.
I suspect it is a ControlNet style generation, driven by some real underlying footage. The nonverbal communication is just too good for what I've seen so far from pure AI generation.
Maybe someone took a cropped video and used some AI video model to do out painting. I've found a few different versions of it using Google lens, some are vertical and show more of the image vertically but are more cropped horizontally, some have an Invideo AI water mark on them, but at different positions. I can't find any video on Invideo AI's page that is close to this kind of facial expressions and lip sync, so I also think at least the face is real video.
I don't believe video generation can make nonverbal communication sync up so well, regarding the shrug, eye movement, facial expression etc. perfectly synced with the voice. As I said, I think it's conditioned on some real footage, somewhat like ControlNet perhaps.
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"
I suppose my point is, people have been discussing this for a decade +, including in an era of more primitive bots. I am not sure there will be away to stop the flood... and mitigation will be mandatory, in the vein of Dodge.
When I was approximately 14, I had an MSN Messenger (or Windows Messenger... or Windows Live Messenger... Microsoft was doing the stupid naming thing even back then?) modded client called Messenger Plus! Live. And a script for that called Cache Answering Machine. When enabled for that user, it would respond to all messages with a random message selected from the chat history of another or the same user. i.e.
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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 :)
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.
I'll buy an expensive hat and eat it, though, if the chans aren't already crawling with sinister propagand-anon-automatons playing tug of war with the Overton window of edgelord discourse.
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.
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.
I've started using old-school forums where I can find them for communities I care about (e.g. music production forums like vi-control...sometimes Hans Zimmer shows up!). It's a joy when you find one, kinda feels like the old days. The only annoying thing is the never-die threads. Some threads on these forums are over 15 years old. But honestly, I've really soured on the voting mechanic.
Funny how back in the 90s/00s, we used to say 49% of the internet was porn. And now we say it's bots. Something curious about both being fake human interactions.
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.
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.
So one bot is invited by accident or on purpose that invites more and more bots and that channel is dead, it will be like running from zombies, one person is infected and boom the whole commune is smoked
Possible, but far less likely. This would require real humans being involved to verify each new account (after getting invited, you're dropped into a queue to be approved by admins).
Honestly, I think the "but anything can be circumvented" attitude is part of how we got here. People have just given up. These problems can be solved/mitigated, but the nihilistic POV has to be killed in order to solve them.
I'm afraid bots HAVE gotten to the point where they could fool someone, you only need to fool one moderator and bots would have no problem just shotgunning into chats until one gets past the wall
> I suspect that post was plagiarized rather than AI-written or written by the spammer.
Given that the accounts other posts were clearly reposts, I think this is the most likely explanation.
It’s much easier to find old posts that did well, change a few words or add a link, and repost it. It’s harder to prompt the AI to get a post that will do well compared to starting with proven material from the past.
It is interesting to see everyone’s AI suspicion turned up to 11, though. We’ve gone from “everything I don’t like on Reddit is a paid shill” to “everything I don’t like on Reddit is LLM generated”.
Add in the ability for subreddit mods to silently hide any post for any reason, too. There should at least be a “deleted by mods” counter/button like there is for replies hidden by the OP on twitter.
It creates this awful system where you might never see pushback on an idea.
Horrible place to spend your time like all social media if you care about exposing yourself to bad ideas that you’ll passively pick up through mere repetition.
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.
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?
People karma-farm here for no obvious commercial benefit. I'm sure the activity would be greatly reduced, but not eliminated, with a lack of commercial incentives.
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
The term goes all the way back to 1928, so it’s not exactly a new idea. It doesn’t imply the end of anything, just that eventually you run out of things to privatize.
I suppose that's debatable but the point is the site is heavily moderated, something the owners can manage without volunteers for now because it doesn't appeal to the mainstream. I think your post is interesting and should have stayed, for what it's worth. I think it's a topic worth discussing but alas, many people just thought you were a bot as well. It really highlights the state of things.
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 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?
"...cancels an android into catalepsy," Rachael said, her eyes shut. "For a few seconds."
It is mentioned once, then never again AFAIR. They could use that device to detect andys with the press of a button, but why do that when you have something straightforward like the Voigt-Kampff test?
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.
It doesn't have to be bots or astroturf either, you get a bunch of ideologically-leaning mods to ban anyone they disagree with, make them control a bunch of subreddits (potentially), some subs will even ban you for posting in other subs
Reddit as a whole isn't interested in fairness, it's quite clear the direction they took as a site
I was quite surprised when a bunch of years ago a unidentified aerial phenomena was sighted around Rio de Janeiro recorded and witnessed by hundreds, the military following and shooting it down, and every dedicated subreddit deleted every submission.
I'm unsure how to understand your comment because both things exist on Reddit:
1. subreddits where sane things are removed and their posters are banned in order to astroturf a moderator's insane opinions as normal
2. subreddits where insane things are removed and their posters are banned, as they should be, but the banned posters (who can be very numerous!) try very hard to make it out like it's situation 1.
3. subreddits where sane things are removed and their posters are banned, but the banning mods try very hard to make it out like it's situation 2.
You haven't discovered the lemmyverse yet? Head over to piefed.social and be happy again ;)
I'm not related to either project (piefed is federated with lemmy instances), but enjoy those feeds A LOT.
First time??
As someone who was really into GameFAQs forums, the enshittification cycle is just that, a predictable cycle.
First: Some company spends a ton of money building an internet community. Eventually the money siphon runs out, either for legitimate or illegitimate reasons. Then enshittification happens as advertisements and shitty posts become the norm. Eventually, people exodus, at first slowly as people look for new options. And then very rapidly as...
A new company manages to capture the imagination of these disgruntled masses and builds a new online community.
We are currently in the late stages of Reddit's enshittification cycle. They've reached IPO, the original owners have literally cashed out into the stock market and made $Billions for themselves. Their heart isn't in Reddit anymore. The time for replacement shopping has begun.
------------
Reddit itself was the lucky one chosen at the intersection of LUEsers exodus, Digg exodus, and Slashdot exodus.
Before Gamefaqs / LUEsers, Digg and Slashdot were the Usenet, BBS, MUDs and other such internet communities. Its never quite predictable what comes up, as the tech dramatically changes from generation to generation.
It's really surprising how long reddit lasted.
Slashdot lasted maybe 10 years (though still limps on). Digg lasted about 4 years before it started shedding users at alarming rates (and 6 years before it killed itself).
But after 20 years, Reddit still is still gaining users; It's not dying yet.
Reddit has changed so much over time. Reddit of 2006 was very different to reddit of 2008, and reddit of 2013 was very different again. By 2019, it's more or less managed to reinvent itself as an App, trading blows with Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok, almost unrecognisable.
I'm sure many people will put peak-reddit around 2019, but for me, Reddit of roughly 2011 was my favourite, and it's only been down hill from there.
I don't think Reddit can re-invent itself again, only continue to get worse. But I suspect it will still be around in 10 years.
It was quite interesting that Reddit had its own unique culture during the rage comics and narwhal era. At that time, you knew you were on Reddit and not some other site. Whereas now, it's pretty homogeneous with every other site.
I agree with you about Reddit being around in 10 years - because I don't see its users having any reason to suddenly depart, given every other large community is largely similar.
Wow 2019! Haha, yeah it went downhill way way earlier for me. The digg users joining changed the site for sure but when ever "famous" novelty accounts stopped being a big thing and the first rounds of subreddit banning it started to suck. I would have assumed for most peak reddit was around whenever there was the huge rally in DC. Perhaps there are lots more users now but the quality is awful, it used to be so easy to get multiple experts on anything to answer your questions.
> it used to be so easy to get multiple experts on anything to answer your questions.
It’s still possible to get useful answers on niche topics, but you will also get flooded with questionable sub-specific dogma, and god forbid your question is the tiniest bit obvious/unnecessary (according to the “experts” of course, never mind that it clearly wasn’t obvious to the asker)
I call that the stackoverflow effect, where once a topical community reaches a certain information density anything that does not go neatly on the very top of the current pile is mercilessly destroyed.
It's akin to the concept of "climbing a ladder to the top and then pulling the ladder up behind you", and imho it's the alarm bell that indicates that a community has died, even if the community itself does not know it yet.
Stack Overflow itself is also being more overtly destroyed by the corporation that owns it. Did you know they de-attributed Luigi Mangione's posts in blatant violation of their license agreement to his content?
I think it's just called the passing of time. Our bodies build up senescent cells. Our personalities do it as we move through being new adults in the world to old people shouting at clouds. You have something new and novel and empty and you add two pieces of knowledge/whatever and wow this is lively useful discussion. Over time you have 20,000 bits of knowledge/songs in the genre/etc and those two new bits aren't that exciting, get lost in the noise, get canceled by what came before.
Peak reddit was 2010-2015 in it's full uncensored glory
chatgptbots really saved that metric. the new scams putting the old scams on life support . maybe the next big thing can keep the llm-multimarketscheme alive. Forever growth by forever bigger scams.
How do you know reddit is net gaining real users instead of bots and alts?
I'm basing my "still growing" assessment off google trends, nobody thinks to bot that. The trends for Slashdot and Digg [0] more or less match up with when they died. While reddit [1] is still growing (at least up until 3 months ago, but that's most likely noise). You really have to zoom into the right date range to not have Reddit dwarf Slashdot/Digg [2].
The new users aren't exactly high quality, but they seem to exist. Or at least advertisers think they exist.... shrug.
For some other fun trends, checkout Facebook which has been clearly declining since 2012, or Instagram which appears to have been declining since 2023... not entirely sure why.
[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=slashdot...
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=slashdot...
[2] Zoomed: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2004-01-01%202...
To be fair, adding "reddit" to your search query has been one of the few ways to get away from the SEO garbage to the point where it's become a thing. So I'm not sure how effective Google trends is as a measurement.
Guilty.
I know Reddit has become infested with junk recently, but it just shows how bad the broader-internet has become that I'd rather search in Reddit than walk in that swamp.
The best Reddit was the one the users from Digg were migrating to.
HN is the closest facsimile to Reddit before the mass exodus from Digg
Digg is also supposedly coming back and has an early access sign up
It never ceases to amaze me that LUE is still active (especially by modern GameFAQs standards) so many years after the quarantine.
The sad part to me is that there's not many online communities left that focus on helping sharing their knowledge with newcomers. I'm excluding discord doxxing generation communities here, because they are really unhelpful for newbies and the opposite of a safe learning environment for kids.
When I built my first website, xhtmlforum and selfhtml forum was amazing as it was a wiki combined with a community around it. The same for pentesting and learning how to solve CTFs. The same for electronics and how to build, etch, and debug motherboards for 6502/i386/etc. I could go on and on forever, but I loved the web for what it was: It always had an answer for anything that I could ever imagine, with other people wanting to build the same cool things, together, as a community.
And that spirit is kind of gone now. Now the statistical majority(?) wants to get famous and rich and be instagram and tiktok idols, without building something to get there. The quick buck has the priority now, and there's maybe some dozens of youtubers left that want to make knowledge on a beginner level accessible, which I have huge respect for. But video content is temporary, especially on platforms with shitty discovery methods like Youtube.
But the wikis and communities? Haha, good luck finding posts from pre 2010 with google. They've all been wiped out.
Just last week I wanted to explain to some junior dev what XHTML1.1 strict and the idea of separation of concerns was about when we still cared about accessibility. Google gave me 2 useful blog posts post-2017, 2 youtube videos of someone raging about it and favoring web components. And that was it. I was flabbergasted how much knowledge is lost.
There is no point in learning new ideas and concepts if you forgot how we got there, because we'll end up in an endless loop of repeating ourself. And I think the worst nightmare of 1984 has come true already. Google already controls the present, and the web archive might be nice but is absolutely useless as a search engine.
I wanted to start a pentest/CTF community because that's what I care most about nowadays. But turns out there's not many web forum software that's left and not enshittified yet that came after the PHP age. Now I'm writing my own markdown based forum software, with a webasm frontend for it and the idea to make all posts storable/shareable as markdown threads.
I don't want knowledge to get lost again in databases.
>> many web forum software that's left and not enshittified yet that came after the PHP age
I am a part of a community that is run on a slightly modded FluxBB. It has more comments per hour than hacker news. Maybe even 10 times more. And new threads are started almost daily. I think this particular forum is almost ten years old? We did change platforms, but this was more then 7 years ago for sure.
And the code base isn't maintained, since moderators aren't very tech savvy.
That's to say: php forums are pretty robust, don't discount them! You can always migrate, if something better will come up. Older versions are just as good, as the enshittified ones.
curious - which forum is this?
It's highly specific to the country (and also to the social media where the community was once established), so I doubt it is relevant to you. But think fandom non-english space with historical empathizes on female and lgbt members under antilgbt government. Any social media on this particular language that wants to grow large will swiftly remove half of the discussions we can have there. Keeping separate from opinionated socially-aligned people is also a plus
Oh god, LUE never thought I'd see it referenced again does anybody expect jinjo still?
Wow, a GameFAQs reference. I remember hanging on Z-Tack and some other Atari 2600 message board with silly fake ranks and weird harmless shenanigans I can't even clearly recall. Then there was Magician Type 0, DSL forums, and Outboards, and "Ace" something, and darkpage.net, all clones of the Gamefaqs message board design in variations of PHP and ASP.net. It's how I got into programming. And here we are.
> the enshittification cycle is just that, a predictable cycle.
We will continue not to "have nice things" until more people are willing to pay for high quality services.
As fun as those things were, I don’t think any of them were worth paying for.
I think the enshittification will continue no matter what. Amazon Prime Video used to be ad-free for paying users, until they made it "some ads" unless you paid for a higher tier.
There is no amount of money that you can pay a modern corporation that will satisfy it. It perpetually wants one more dollar from you.
Nah, this is just time passing. Us early internet users are just getting older and discovering the passage of time.
Ever find a great new restaurant? Small, quirky, but good? Things pick up, it grows, maybe moves to a new location. Everything's shiny and great. It's busy and feels fun to know about? Then over time it becomes less fun. The staff aren't working at some cool new place, but just working the same job over and over and you can tell. The newness wears off, and things start to just wear. A couple years later you reconnect with someone you haven't seen in a while and they recommend the place. You haven't been there forever. You go and it's a ghost of what it was. That wasn't enshitification, just the passing of time.
Enjoy the cool moments/places/songs/movies for what they are, don't expect them to be some sort of constant in life. 'music sucks now, movies suck now, XYZ niche thing fandom loves sucks now'. Nah. It's the same that it's ever been. But time has passed yet you want that moment of discovering XYZ to go for ever because it was so good, but it can't. Time won't allow that.
its basically goes:
grow community > get popular > get popular problems > get capitalists involved > enshittification
You can get it back by giving up tech and platforms . Join an Irc channel ..
This works for things you are actively interested in, but old Reddit was cool in that random things would pop up with posts from experts related to the topic. You could get exposed to all kinds of interesting stuff outside your normal focus. And for your focus it was amazing. Not just the same 30 regular contributors in the small walled gardens we now inhabit/self curate.
I enjoy making music. I've started commenting on peoples youtube/soundcloud. And I've made a small circle of people to talk with, but it's so far removed from what Reddit used to provide before it became a 'content feed'.
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.
Reddit is incredibly echo-chamber-y for me, the voting and karma system optimizes for the wrong type of content I feel. I've tried to engage with a few niche-interest subreddits (homebrewing, electronics, musical instruments) over the years and all of them left me generally dissapointed.
My pet theory is that someone who claims reddit is a great place for niche hobbies were never part of an old-school forum with truly passionate and engaging members.
The last 2-3 years this issue just became worse and worse.
Reddit is fantastic for memes though. There are some hilarious subreddits out there. But I rarely engage, just consume.
I'd say at least 70% of reddit "hobby" spaces are people buying something with little research, then posting the picture of the thing they bought.
Any real discussion is drowned out so the average post now is "bought these, new to the hobby, what do I do with them?".
The meshtastic sub is a good example of that. People buying hobbyist hardware, without doing any research. They probably saw some youtube video, hit the amazon "buy", then when it arrived, they're stumped.
Yeah, it's just consumption consumption consumption.
Post a photo of your new gizmo: 300 upvotes. Video of you using your widget: 4 votes.
And in subreddits dedicated to actually making things, it's just hustling hustling hustling. With a small percentage of self-help posts like "how I spent 4 years in my boring-ass generic video game and nobody wanted it".
My "favourite" is on the r/vandwellers subreddit with countless people posting a basic photo of a van they just bought with zero information about themselves, their build plans, how they intend to use it. It might as well be the Craigslist vehicle sales section.
> I'd say at least 70% of reddit "hobby" spaces are people buying something with little research, then posting the picture of the thing they bought.
This is exactly what happened to all of the hobby reddits I enjoyed.
Any useful discussion was crowded out by 10 posts per week (or day) of people posting their newest purchase or asking a question that had been answered 1000 times already.
The useful Subreddits have mods who come down hard on these posts. They don’t proliferate as much if people don’t see them everywhere. It’s a lot of work for mods though.
>I'd say at least 70% of reddit "hobby" spaces are people buying something with little research, then posting the picture of the thing they bought.
A really great (awful) example of this that I saw was on the typewriters subreddit (which is already 90% people posting pictures of the same 5 or so overhyped machines):
In the 1950s, Royal used to give out gold typewriters as part of a writing contest.[0] I saw one of these come up on Goodwill’s auction site, saved screenshots for my records and followed it closely, since I knew bids would get really stupid really fast. Sure enough, winning bid was around $1500.
About two weeks after the auction ended (about the time Goodwill’s very slow shipping takes), I saw it pop up on the subreddit, exact machine, identical scratches, blemishes, and all to the one I had screenshots of. The post title? “Found this at my local thrift store for $50. How’d I do?”
That was enough to finally make my delete my account and seriously question anyone who thinks Reddit is actually good for niche hobbies.[1]
[0]https://www.antikeychop.com/gold-royal-quiet-de-luxe-typewri...
[1] Well, that and the fact that and the fact that I was probably going to lose my mind if I earnestly gave detailed advice on repairing a machine I had personally stripped and reassembled, only for someone to get upvoted to the top for posting a confident pseudo answer about some mechanism—that may or may not even exist in that machine—that they only faintly understood from a general YouTube video that they only half watched.
I used to think that the up voting mechanic was the future of the internet.
Now I think that it's a perverse incentive that requires very heavy handed moderation to not suck (AKA more free labor), and that time decaying posts can discourage quality, in-depth discussions.
Corollary: necroing forum threads isn't necessarily bad.
>Corollary: necroing forum threads isn't necessarily bad.
I've always agreed with this. It was usually considered bad etiquette at best on forums, but I never really understood why.
I fully agree, but still upvoted you.
What's ironic is this thread is full of comments agreeing that Reddit sucks because the voting/karma system is flawed and shadow banning is toxic and deranged yet all those very features and policies exist here. In fact, HN is mentioned in the Wikipedia article for shadow banning as an early adopter of the practice. (Yes I agree it sucks but that's not the point of my comment.)
So what changed or what makes this place different? I would argue it's not the forum software but rather run differently, not placing in charge of every subreddit a cabal of unemployed fringe lunatics wielding power and waging war against their users because it's all they have.
Or maybe the forum software does suck and some just naturally migrated to a text-only low-bandwidth version of Reddit?
So what changed or what makes this place different?
Mainly it's niche/less popular. There is less of an incentive for outside interests to care.
Not having any real way for the audience to expand (there is only one "subreddit") definitely helps with that.
> So what changed or what makes this place different?
It's an interesting question. Primarily, I think it's because HN doesn't allow you to downvote instantly or even after a lengthy period of time. I think it's tied to total karma, but someone would have to provide more information there. Regardless, that single change probably makes a big difference.
Compared to Reddit, I've had some comments go into the tens of negative karma points within five minutes of posting. It wasn't because it was low quality, but because it wasn't the "correct" view to have in whatever subreddit I was engaging in. The downvoting there is practically militant.
However, as someone who usually holds a minority view on HN, I don't think the system here is perfect either. Usually an echo chamber forms because the dissidents don't last long and leave. If you reward the ones that stay the longest with downvote capabilities, it would explain my general experience quite well. But again, it's nothing compared to Reddit.
Note: I recognize this is a conversation on karma, which has a rule associated with it, but I hope we can make an exception here given it's a good faith discussion between Reddit/HN :)
There’s 4 things that are disastrous topics for any community, the horsemen of the apocalypse if you like. Politics, Religion, Identity, and Meta.
There’s several natural filters that promote healthy communities - Highly informed users, Active mods, Small community sizes, “Get stuff done” type conversations. In essence, communities where it’s easy to identify BS, and discourage navel gazing, have high signal to noise ratios. They are actively hostile to lazy posting.
A good example of this type of community is r/badeconomics, or was the last I checked, and askhistorians.
A separate note, There’s a 2024 paper that showed that that estimated that young adults spent a smaller portion their time online on high cognitive load reading. A majority of the time would be spent on “timepass” content.
>I think it's tied to total karma, but someone would have to provide more information there.
According to https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented "After users reach 501 Karma, they gain the ability to downvote another comment."
I often wonder whether "limited downvotes" scheme would work: (let's say) 30 downvotes per 24h are free to use and after that each downvote decreases your karma by 1.
My personal opinion is that downvotes, upvotes and algorithms are design decisions that often stick before the best one is found. It's a shame really, because I think it's not only really important (e.g. to combat fake news/users etc.) but most interesting. Nonetheless, HN did good with their version where the max. downvote of a comment is -4 and where the up/downvote of a comment is not listed publicly. All functions that help with community building. However, I fret the moment when AI users and shills take over (especially since throwaway accounts are so easy to create).
HN is okay-ish, but you still can’t have long-running discussions on it, or explore some topic in depth, like it is par for the course on old-style forums. One reason is the time cutoff (can’t reply anymore after a day or so), another is that there is no mechanism for tracking which comments you’ve already read and which you haven’t.
> a cabal of unemployed fringe lunatics wielding power and waging war against their users because it's all they have.
Speaking of which, does anyone know if there are any good articles/documentaries/exposés on reddit moderators? I really just want to know what one is like.
[dead]
HN is not much different (or better) in my opinion
I dislike the voting mechanism here. It incentivises me to optimize my posting to things that will maximise the votes, rather than things I think will add value to the community, even if it's controversial.
On a forum, if I say something stupid/against-the-grain, I am called out by the forum members, or we have a debate about it. On HN and on reddit, I'm downvoted into oblivion with very little in the way of any discussion that helps me learn and improve.
The only thing that makes HN better than reddit for me is the community of like-minded people, a general respect for the rules, and the fact that here we have fantastic moderators.
But I maintain that the underlying _system_ that is managing discourse here is flawed in it's design. I wonder what HN would look like if voting was abolished, and /active was the homepage, where the most actively discussed posts are the ones that filter to the top of the list.
I basically have switched to /active. IMO it's a stronger and more relevant set of articles, and tends not to be clogged with all the "Here's a thing, but with AI!" blogspam and endless number of "I ported this angular script to rust" turds that always seem to make it to the normal front page.
I think it's less "echo chamber" than under direct political influence.
It takes a lot of effort to moderate a subreddit. People will post stuff all day, in large volumes.
Who's going to be willing to do that? Sure, some will just be nice people with a ton of free time, but many will definitely be political activists (or even state actors at this point) who have something to promote.
You know how certain professions are known for attracting certain pathologies? CEOs/narcissism, car salesman/ lmachiavellianidm and surgeons/God? Reddit moderator/d-bag is not exempt from that phenomenon and for reasons unknown to me, because it’s volunteer (Ok, I can’t say 100%, but mostly it’s volunteer) seems to be some kind of mental illness XP multiplier attractant for the role. Perhaps it empowers people because they’re giving so much of their lives to their own perceived cause, that no one asked for. But there are a lot of good, great even, mods out there. Surely. But anyhow, I’m going back to irc.
> My pet theory is that someone who claims reddit is a great place for niche hobbies were never part of an old-school forum with truly passionate and engaging members.
This. On forums you recognize members by their funny avatars and the hyper specific advice that they have (useful or otherwise). Stickied posts like "timbit2's Guide to Vintage Frobulators" or "New to Frobs? Not Sure Where to Start? READ" abound. There are usually decades of easily-searchable posts accumulated. People reply to your threads helpfully. The marketplace forums are full of well-cared-for gear.
On Reddit you get a lot of beauty shots and question posts with replies like "bro just get the new Vinculum x Chadbert420 frobber. Shit is [fire emojis]". There's usually a woefully out-of-date wiki or sticky that you can only access from one interface or another. There's no sense of community, just upvotes of pictures for clout.
Of course these are contrived straw men versions of their respective communities but in my experience they're correct more often than not. I have been dipping my toe into various Discords that seem to have a better sense of community but Discord doesn't seem to lend itself to longer-form content as forums do... I wonder whether this is something the Discord platform could be augmented to facilitate.
Discord is a chat platform, not a forum, and its contents are closed-off, not discoverable via web search. It’s a modern form of IRC chats, not of web forums. The two serve different needs and audiences.
Reddit was definitely an amazing place for Niche hobbies. Forums were great too, but the layout and having an "orangered" beat out forums. Plus you could be on so many forums at essentially the same time. Prior to reddit I had basically the same setup with RSS feeds for like my top 10-15 forums. But reddit basically copied and eclipsed that and the forums pretty much all died.
Forums were great too, but reddit made it really easy to get access to new niches quickly. Without having to join a new site, learn the forum slang and etiquette, etc.
Reddit is awful now though. IDK what the alternative is either. I'm in a few discords and Facebook groups that cover most topics but they both offer a much poorer user experience imo.
I was an active contributor to /r/espresso for a while, but in the process of the hobby I realized I disagree with some of their advice and best practices. Minor stuff really.
I would not describe the sub as toxic or anything, but it's literally impossible to get a dissenting opinion across on Reddit. Other hobby subs were the same.
Every single time I mentioned an opinion differing from the "hive-mind" consensus it was downvoted to hell, with no responses, counter arguments or anything resembling discussion. I would have liked to trade experiences but that's not possible.
While at the same time some of the other posters giving advice freely admit they don't actually have experience with what is discussed and are just repeating older posts.
There is no real value in that, and nowadays you can get mostly the same experience by just asking ChatGPT. Both have no clue and no real opinion of their own when it comes to details.
I take part in a few forums now, and it's a breath of fresh air. Much better experience and a lot more personal as well.
Everywhere you let the masses upvote and/or downvote, you're going to have the hive-mind problem. We have it here, too.
I'd propose having a separate UI for users to agree/disagree, vs. for users to flag rule breaking posts, like spam, flamebait, insults and so on. The agree/disagree count would just display a vanity number, but the rule-breaking UI would actually downweight the article or comment. You could audit occasionally and remove voting privileges from people abusing the rule-breaking UI as a "Mega-disagree."
> My pet theory is that someone who claims reddit is a great place for niche hobbies were never part of an old-school forum with truly passionate and engaging members.
In my experience, Reddit can be an okay place for niche hobbies until the reddit becomes semi-popular. Then it's a lost cause for anyone but newbies posting the same question every day and old timers who take pleasure in yelling at them.
Leading up to the election Reddit fed me stories about Kamala’s huge rally turnouts, Trump‘s tiny rally turnouts, and endless links to stories about positive signs she would win. It was a forgone conclusion to me it was going to be a blowout for her.
Same. And for about 12 to 24 hours after the election loss it was... quiet. A few people coming to terms that the illusion had disappeared, but not in any way comparable to the interactions beforehand.
Then it returned with a vengeance.
The default subs are filled with left-wing conspiracy theories these days.
A consequence of years of reddit allowing its mods to shadow ban centrist voices.
It’s hard to see how reddit escapes this mess. They need more normal people and less political zealots, but the site is already so far down the echo chamber path that its overt political partisanship scares off potential new normal users from participating.
> It’s hard to see how reddit escapes this mess
I don't see why they would. Rage drives engagement, and they just got the number one rage inducing factor back into public office for the next 4 years. This form of engagement also works better on progressives I think.
Honestly, the internet is killing us all slowly. It was better not to argue with our neighbors on the Internet or even social media. Or fellow citizens or even foreign ones CONSTANTLY
As someone with a reddit account old enough to vote, it's always been like that. If you only browsed reddit it would have been a sure bet that Bernie Sanders would be the democratic candidate, and Ron Paul was going to win before that.
Reddit's algorithm of what to show you is based in part on what you've chosen to follow and in part on what is most likely to get you to stay on the site and engage with the content. It's not designed to give you an accurate view of upcoming election outcomes, and is not at all surprising that it might show someone mostly content from one side's fans, regardless of whether they side is going to win or not.
>Reddit's algorithm of what to show you is based in part on what you've chosen to follow and in part on what is most likely to get you to stay on the site and engage with the content.
You see the same phenomena on /r/all, which isn't personalized.
'you' would mean the average user on /all rather than you personally.
I deleted my account ages ago to break my own habit.
I lost faith in reddit algorithm when Silksong got announced, got 30k+ upvotes in multiple places... and /r/all was politics-only
I actually found out about the Silksong “announcement” from it being number one on the r/all feed followed by several other switch 2/games announcements in the top 5…
You have to remember that there was some pretty nutso tariff news right about the same time, not that strange for it to be highly represented on the front page.
Reddit’s algo is doing an astonishingly bad job if they want me to stay engaged based on the things I follow. I’ve got two seperate accounts one for general stuff, the other intended strictly for NSFW purposes and meeting people with similar interests. I spent maybe half an hour yesterday on the NSFW account blocking everything that wasn’t in my interests, but more and more unrelated (and general) subreddits kept being recommended to me. After a while of this, I gave up and deleted the app, which I can’t imagine is good for Reddit’s bottom line. I’ll probably be back at some point as it is still in my experience the best way to see that stuff and meet like-minded people, but I was kinda shocked at how difficult (impossible?) it was to just keep one account restricted to specific interests that I do kinda want to be engaged with.
there is no part of the reddit algo that ever promotes pro-trump stuff, ever
There was a brief moment when pro-Trump content would occasionally surface on the algorithm, at which point the site operators hit the panic button and banned the offending subreddit.
r/Conservative is still popular. It never makes front page though
Conservative is even more of an echo chamber then your average subreddit. It has to be one of the most heavily moderated and censored sub on reddit.
Flaired only threads, so many bans and and hundreds of deleted posts on your average thread for anything against he MAGA party line.
By which you mean /r/The_Donald
The reason for deliberately antagonizing them, and eventually banning them, was that /r/The_Donald's moderators were directly telling their membership to upvote specific posts so they'd rocket to the front page. "Inorganic results", "vote manipulation", "gaming the algorithm", whatever you'd like to call it.
So the admins had a reason to ban it, even if no doubt they and most of Reddit's users saw Trump supporters as "the enemy".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald#Prominence_on_Red...
Also, as this article has reminded me... 'member that time Spez admitted that he invisibly edited users' comments?
https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_...
The reason for deliberately antagonizing them, and eventually banning them, was that /r/The_Donald's moderators were directly telling their membership to upvote specific posts so they'd rocket to the front page.
There would need to be extensive evidence to convince me that the subreddit wasn't just botted. Threads would get thousands of posts extremely quickly, and there would sometimes be only a handful of comments. I don't really believe organic users were spending their free time refreshing "new" just in case a new post was made that required an immediate upvote.
It doesn't need bots to explain it. And even the Reddit admins were convinced T_D had legitimate traffic, which is why they were reticent to kill it... they just didn't like the manipulation and brigading and so on. If they could show it was bots, they would've killed it much sooner.
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/4fh8s9/this...
Normal humans tend to upvote things that are already upvoted. But normal humans don't tend to look at the incoming stream of posts.
Ordinary T_D users were refreshing the subreddit's front page. Mods stickied the posts they wanted to rocket to the top. This got them past the hurdle where very few people look at /new to give those all-important first few upvotes. Ordinary T_D users upvoted the stickied posts. The mods then unstickied them less than an hour later, because now they're "organically" at the top of T_D, and the upvotes continued to pile in, rocketing the post to /r/all
Meanwhile, all the other subreddits weren't playing this game, so their users votes were split across multiple posts on their subreddit's front page. And mods of other subs use sticked posts for administrative notices, which are worded as such and tend not to get upvoted much... but if you were to sticky a normal post, users would upvote it. But stickied posts aren't eligible for /r/all... unless you unsticky them. Oops! T_D successfully gamed that oversight.
EDIT1: Also... as the comments in the link above reminds me; it used to be that any post could be stickied, e.g. normal link posts. It wasn't necessarily clear that they were stickied posts. What changed after the T_D manipulation is that sticky posts were renamed "Administrative Notes" and had to be text posts and had to be coloured differently from normal posts. Before that change, they weren't distinguished that way. Now perhaps the subterfuge by mods makes more sense?
EDIT2: WIRED's postmortem on T_D - it was cunning mods, not bots.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-hate-fueled-rise-of-rthe-don...
You know, I had actually forgotten about the "sticky" thread issue. Goes to show you how bad our memories can be at times.
But yeah, using the sticky system to force posts to top of mind was super effective back then. It's all coming back.
Sounds like a simple code change would have solved this: if a post has ever been stickied, it shouldn't be able to hit /r/all.
On the one hand, yes; I don't think the admins made that specific change, but they took away the ability to sticky normal posts, in response to T_D's shenanigans, ending the effectiveness of that tactic.
On the other hand, there aren't simple technological fixes to social problems. T_D's mods remained tricksy and continued to work their userbase to upvote and focus - in ways which didn't breach the sitewide rules on manipulation - and still kept hitting /r/all
Reddit could have simply banned T_D at any time. In the years since then they've definitely started banning subreddits for no good reason, but apparently based simply on how much upper management likes the subreddit. Presumably, T_D was not banned because upper management liked it.
> Reddit's algorithm of what to show you is based in part on what you've chosen to follow and in part on what is most likely to get you to stay on the site and engage with the conten
That's not the whole truth. Subreddit Moderation is the key point that's vulnerable to abuse. I block all political subreddits. My blocklist has 120 entries. 10 of those are of inherent political nature. The rest is just like /r/pics - enshittified rage bait about Trump.
There was certainly a lot of optimism but I don't think you can really say the mood was a clear blow out. Anyone mentioning such a thing would get many replies of "doesn't matter...vote anyway!"
I think Kamala actually did have the lead in Reddit's demographics.
I would absolutely get that same feeling from reddit. But like do you not interact in the actual world? Trump would have a rally and areas 45 minutes away are backed up with traffic for 8 hours. Kamala had one and you can't even reliably figure out how to get tickets and other than motorcade closures traffic is nothing.
So much anti-Kamala and pro-Trump stuff in the communities that are supposed to be strong for her.
That Kamala did as well as she did was really shocking to me. I mean it wasn't close, but Kamala couldn't even make past the very first debate in 2020 and her list of accomplishments is basically nothing. I never met anyone in real life with an actual compelling or supportive argument for her. At best it was "she's not Trump".
Taking Biden out and having no primary is probably the worst thing Democrats could have done.
Your entire post reads like a bot post on reddit. Not sure if you're trying to prove the point and forgot the /s or actually believe the nonsense you've posted.
> having no primary is probably the worst thing Democrats could have done.
I'd argue the 15 years of identity politics that both led to Harris as VP and prevented them from being able to commit the faux paux of possibly passing her up by letting their constituents decide if they liked her was their worst decision.
[dead]
There are some niche forums still, but they have to be really small. Mostly related to very specific media as general topics are affected by astroturfing. These communities often don't live as long, but they can be active, helpful and interesting.
But it isn't worth reading anything else anymore.
part of the echo chamber is also instant shadow bans on many of the major subs, and especially political ones, unless you consistently comment (shadow banned) comments and eventually get whitelisted by a mod or bot who's determined you to be the "right" sort of commenter. and again an instant shadow ban again the second you trigger any "bad" keywords
That's presumably an anti-bot/astroturfing measure. As bad as that is, I'm not sure what the alternative should be. Allowing anyone to post with a 1 minute old account? Implement real name verification?
Normal people signup to post not to hang around and scroll and like until the account is warmed
This seems untrue, especially for reddit?
Using the 1/9/90 split [0] for creators/commenters/readers, it seems farfetched to suggest that reddit accounts (which benefits readers making an account to curate subreddit subscriptions) can't follow this pattern where many legitimate human users do not comment often.
[0] "The 1% Rule", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
Plenty of people don't comment often, but the impetus to sign up for an account is often to comment, which subs then either disallow or delete because they don't want new accounts commenting.
I can't speak to every local subreddit but I can tell you for sure that while it may have started as an anti-bot measure, on /r/newzealand it is absolutely used as a way to gatekeep the wrong opinions from being present on the subreddit.
they don't care about bots, they have endless bots posting pro-whatever on the subs, and directly work with campaigns to facilitate this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record
Niche content for sure is the best thing Reddit is for. I only go there for info on my favorite instruments, and a few other shitposting communities for games and shows I watch.
[flagged]
I'm amused by how over the top it always is. A high-scoring submission on my local Reddit gets maybe +70 votes. Then, some random political-related submission —and it's only ever political-related—will have +2000 votes. They're so overt that they don't even care.
Why is that a sign of astroturfing? More likely, there are more people who read (and upvote) posts on the default subs, than niche local subs.
He's talking about a politics related post in a niche sub.
Why is it a sign of astroturfing and not just hyper political climate?
Well, if broadly popular organic posts net about 100, I would expect organic partisan posts to have a ceiling of +50. Still, more realistically, the net would be about zero because half the people would downvote them.
But, somehow, partisan posts in one direction always seem to net over 1000 or 2000, yet partisan posts in the other direction net about zero.
Even with a skewed distribution, I would only expect maybe +20 to be the ceiling.
> the net would be about zero because half the people would downvote them.
Why would you assume that? It's a fallacy to assume that political opinions are evenly distributed. People seem to agree that different sites attract people of different political persuasions. A post that gets highly upvoted on Truth Social might get highly downvoted on Reddit, and vice versa. That's not astroturfing, that's just self-selecting communities.
> partisan posts in one direction always seem to net over 1000 or 2000, yet partisan posts in the other direction net about zero.
Again, it depends on the audience. This is not a new phenomenon. 50 years ago, you would get a different response to certain political statements depending on whether you made them at a Grateful Dead Concert or at a meeting of the Fraternal Order of Police. Why should today be different?
> I would only expect maybe +20 to be the ceiling.
Why? People feel strongly about their political believes. It's polarizing and engaging in a way that a post about crockpots or guitar strings isn't.
If a submission appeals to random people browsing r/all, i.e. politics, sex or memes, then it can get way more upvotes than a niche topical submission.
For example one of the top r/aviation posts is a meme about airbuses with "slutty eyeliner" (87k points), and it far outpaces shop talk type submissions like "why does the landing gear not get retracted at the same time on this 777?" (2k points)
Posts from a regional subreddit, where world events seldom happen and traffic and roadways are the prime topics of conversation, are not making it to /r/all or the front page.
Yet political posts get +2000 out of nowhere and an influx of commentators who don't usually comment in that regional subreddit or don't even likely live there.
You're incorrect, this is the normal way that the reddit algorithm functions, it promotes highly-engaging content from niche subreddits.
The top post of all time on r/toledo is about a police officer harassing a woman. It's highly engaging but not overtly political. It has 100x the upvotes of a normal r/toledo post about traffic or what have you.
One of the top posts of all time in r/sanjose is a video of someone trying to jimmy a hotel door open using a hook contraption. Highly engaging, not overtly political.
These were the first two city subreddits I checked. It's literally just how reddit works, highly engaging content bubbles to the top and can reach a much larger audience.
Why does it ONLY happen to political posts, and why does it ONLY happen to posts that reinforce a particular viewpoint?
Either this is the design of the black box "algorithm," or it's not real engagement. There's no need to miscorrect me about something so hamfisted and overt.
> After this last election, I think political groups realized local subreddits were underutilized and have regrouped accordingly.
its not that. they realized: a) that folks were filtering out the astroturfed subreddits in /r/all, and b) that r/all's filter list has a hard limit of 100 subreddits. so, by astroturfing >100 subreddits, they can guarantee to their clients that their posts will make the front of r/all for everyone.
Ha, I got them beat with RES and filtering out every generic subreddit that touches politics
After the last election, one smaller local subreddit that has had the same overall culture for many, many years, seemingly overnight, at the snap of some fingers, lurched completely to the extreme opposite direction. If you dare to share any of the same ideas that were once widely accepted there for many years on end, now you instead get absolutely pummeled, ridiculed, downvoted out of existence.
It's just so blatantly, demonstrably, obvious the level of manipulation which was targeted at the sub. Somebody, somewhere, added it to a list of subreddits to be manipulated. But you can't even discuss it there, because how are you going to use a compromised communication channel to communicate about how it's compromised?
The majority of the population seemingly can't even notice that sort of communication manipulation, it's gotten so sophisticated. Bot accounts used to be much easier to detect, now they all have very cleverly built-up account history and posts that are near indistinguishable from humans. And of course not all manipulation is bots/AI, there's coordinated shill/sockpuppet/astroturf campaigns with real people being tasked with doing the manipulation.
The smart people have already left and gone on to the next place, which will never be allowed to grow large enough or significant enough without the propaganda fire hose eventually being turned on it too. The only way to fix things is a radically different framework for communication.
One thing I have noticed about many of the astroturf accounts is a long gap, like 3-5 years, in posting history.
Those are old accounts that were stolen by large-scale password spraying attacks. I've lost a few to this.
Which subreddit? How do we know that what you say is true?
> The only way to fix things is a radically different framework for communication.
What do you think that might look like?
Back to conventional forums with threaded, sequential, discussion? We managed fine for years and well-moderated forums seem to deal with spam/bots better.
I agree with you, and think that if Slashdot were to do a rebirth, it might succeed. Of course, they'd have to figure out what went wrong and put in mechanisms to prevent that.
But the five vote options (insightful, interesting, funny, off-topic, troll) were _useful_. Having a feed based on the score of votes plus friend bonus, friend-of-a-friend bonus, foe penalty, friend-of-a-foe penalty gave me a super news feed I stuck with for almost a decade.
I could see a more complex voting rule set being helpful. But basically, it was really good until it wasn't, and that was a problem of the people behind the scenes there, and not the system itself.
Isn't (for instance) Reddit threaded, sequential discussion?
The default sorting on Reddit usually isn’t sequential, and there is no way to track how far you’ve read along the sequence or subthread. In addition, threads get “archived” and you can’t reply anymore. In old-style forums, threads get usually sorted by last activity, meaning that active threads, including resurrected ones, are reliably at the top (sequential by last activity, if you will). On Reddit, orderings like Hot and Best give you some unreliable heuristics, unsuitable for keeping track of current discussions.
Ah, I see, I thought you meant linear within a thread. So you mean some kind of deterministic/transparent sorting (like "most recent activity"). I agree that would improve things.
Virtually all forums (and their ancestral mailing lists) default to chronological order. A good comparison is perhaps the difference between comment-driven and discussion-driven sites, if there's a technical name for that?
HackerNews is comment driven, but does a decent job of facilitating discussions - but not particularly deeply. Reddit is similar. Forums are much more amenable to linear, deep, discussion between a few parties, but can also facilitate comments. Both have their place on the internet, and I don't think that forums are necessarily the answer to everything, but it feels like a lot of people left those communities to end up in Reddit and that's a shame.
Interestingly, old forums rarely supported nested threading. The only "threads" were just linear sequences of posts in a topic. Nested threading is nice but it's also a different cognitive experience that maybe has some downsides as well.
I meant both posts within a thread and threads within the forum. Reddit makes it hard to track a discussion within a thread and also tracking new threads vs. read threads vs. previously read threads but with new posts, or picking up a half-read thread later on.
Discourse seems to be a modern forum platform that handles a good deal of that. The tricky thing is paying for it, including configuring it and/or paying someone to do that.
Getting rid of anonymous powermoderation.
Why do you think that's the issue? On old-school forums, the forum owners had total moderation power.
Yes, and in my opinion, this was what killed Slashdot.
Who knew that giving power to unpaid volunteers who don‘t necessarily have the users or the companies‘ best interest in mind might turn out to be a bad business practice.
> I used to love Reddit, but the astroturfing has become unbearable, especially by political groups.
I really doubt most of it is astoturfing. You can find bot accounts, obviously. However, the Reddit hivemind has a very intense echo chamber.
Everyone learns very quickly that if you write something that doesn't match the popular opinion of Reddit, you're going to get downvoted quickly. Strike a nerve and you'll even get angry private messages or people going through your post history and trying to extend their argument into old comments.
Large forums have always been like this. You're at the mercy of a small number of users who have the most free time to post all day. Some times I'll get an unusually angry response on Reddit and click on their profile out of curiosity. It's often someone who has been commenting for the last 10 hours straight. You just can't compete with someone with infinite free time and a lot of anger to get out. Eventually they all sync up to drive away differing opinions
Its fully astroturfing. The trick is to implement non-member/non-flaired rules to block most folks from the discourse. Then you can just focus on hitting the front page, which you can juice with other rules like only members can down vote. Now you can just focus on hitting the front page and suddenly you get a very biased thread with a lot of eyeballs and no response. /r/The_Donald used this to much success and there have been others.
> Its fully astroturfing. The trick is to implement non-member/non-flaired rules to block most folks from the discourse.
The number of subreddits that do this is small. Hardly representative of typical Reddit behavior.
Everyone knows by now that /r/conservative isn’t a real subreddit because it’s “flavored users only”.
However, too many people make the leap from “astroturfing exists” to “everything I don’t like is astroturfing” way too quickly. It’s right up there with accusing people you disagree with of using ChatGPT or being paid shills.
The truth is, a lot of subreddits are the way they are because that’s just what Reddit’s user base thinks, not because a shadowy cabal is making them say those things.
>/r/The_Donald used this to much success and there have been others.
I read a post from a former reddit admin a while back that was talking about they managed that. Apparently they had one sticky post each day, and sticky posts are blocked from being on the frontpage but since they'd change the main post each day, once they un-stickied it, it'd immediately get picked up by the algorithm for the frontpage, inadvertently gaming the whole system.
its astroturfing by for profit companies. after the election, they realized: a) that folks were filtering out the astroturfed subreddits in /r/all, and b) that r/all's filter list has a hard limit of 100 subreddits. so, they switched tactics - by astroturfing >100 subreddits, they can guarantee to their clients that their posts will make the front of r/all for everyone.
> I really doubt most of it is astoturfing. You can find bot accounts, obviously. However, the Reddit hivemind has a very intense echo chamber.
There have been discord servers made public where the entire point was to game the reddit algorithm to favor one political candidate.
[dead]
Back when Pushshift was publicly available, I used to check the mod actions on some subreddits. What I found was that the subreddits that I thought had biased moderators were simply undermoderated. Pretty much every mod action I saw was fair and there were also a lot more than expected, but clearly the issue was that total comment volume was far more than the mod team could handle.
> You're at the mercy of a small number of users who have the most free time to post all day. Some times I'll get an unusually angry response on Reddit and click on their profile out of curiosity. It's often someone who has been commenting for the last 10 hours straight.
These people are also masters at toeing the line of forum or subreddit rules when trashing others, constantly baiting people to cross the line in replies and get themselves moderated. It's worse in forums where downvoting isn't available.
There was a recent panic/hysteria there about banning Twitter from many subreddits because of hate speech. It was incredible how quickly people were begging to have a website banned when they could either choose not to visit it or down vote posts they didn't like. Really soured things for me by illustration how much the median values changed from when I started using the site.
This was about Elon's "Nazi salute" and both so incorrect and blatantly astroturfed I haven't returned to Reddit out of disgust.
A ton of near-dead subreddits with no activity and no reason to link to x.com for any reason suddenly had thousands of people show up demanding links to x.com be blocked like it's an everyday problem for the sub.
The quiet beneficiary of this campaign are those who benefit from Reddit's groomed narrative and their competing platform Bluesky.
The Texas subreddit recently got "taken back" by normal, older mods. It had been run by an account "annatrashpanda", who banned anyone critical of the Democrats, who let generic copy/paste national memes take over the board, and so on. I see they have now deleted their account. This all happened about two weeks ago.
I say this as a liberal, the artificially partisan takeovers of local subs is a real thing. It's one thing to ban trolls and consistent shit-talkers from a community. And frankly it's one thing to have some bias. But it was just so obviously hostile, and I was happy to see the sub get back some authenticity.
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.
Ironic that this comment is coming from an account with a green username, indicating it was also newly registered in the past couple days.
The blog has been running since 2022 under a different domain name. It was then focused on economics, as the archive suggests. I'm currently migrating articles from the old host.
And what was the previous domain name?
apathetic.bid
Well, this looks legit, as this is a real domain registered in 2022, but I still don't get why would you make a new post on a freshly registered domain after a 3-year pause and immediately submit it to HN.
Well, med school might be related to the 3-year pause thing.
Honestly, the situation was just too absurd/twisted/funny not to write about. I also had nothing to do yesterday so that helped.
I'm gonna write a part two about everyone turning against me, thinking I'm a bot haha.
> I still don't get why would you make a new post on a freshly registered domain after a 3-year pause and immediately submit it to HN
You don’t really have to get it, to be fair. If it was, to give an example, a poorly thought-out decision, then you’re just picking on them for that.
Seems like mods nuked the thread now. Oh well
[flagged] is from users, not mods.
Oh, ok. Interesting. Thank you!
The only winning move is not to play. Get away from the internet forums and live your life in the real world. Alas we are all stuck here.
Seems like it. I went to church today for the IDK consecutive Sunday and it was all right.
Not the "Western civilization is declining because the kids stopped going to church" church but a church full of old hippies and young queers. It's been fun, sometimes I get takeout on the way home
I'm also tending my own website, which nobody else has write access to, so that I can link people to information I've vetted myself. Can't link it without doxxing myself sadly
Likewise been going to synagogue. I would hardly call myself a religious person. Far more a nihilist who thinks we should try and do good if it is truly all pointless. I think the meaningfulness and the sense of community is nice. It’s typically better than being glued to the kinetoscope
The common thread is that people need community. Living detached physical lives and using the internet to fill that gap is a modern disaster.
Maybe you're also part of this -- fresh hn account kinda sus? Double fake call out?
AI commenting on AI commenting on AI commenting on AI...
But yeah, X, LinkedIn, and the rest all feel like the bots and content farmers have taken over.
I believe the pay for engagement incentives make people be as controversial as possible just to earn money. Imagine you are in a low-income nation, you pretend to be from the USA, you could earn a higher daily income by posting engagement bait. It is in your interest to upset as many people as possible and then set up counter bots to argue with your fee earning bots.
So does that make it a further attempt to market junk with AI or an astroturfing campaign against AI.
I feel like the Old El Paso girl might have an opinion.
This phrasing from the home page is odd:
> When I publish my next piece I will personally write you an email, with some of my thoughts on the post.
‘My next piece’? Maybe for a part of a book or a long article, but for a blog post?
The next oddity, ignoring ‘personally’, which is inappropriate for a mailing list, is ‘…with some of my thoughts on the post’; you’re going to send me a piece with some of your thoughts on the post?
I’d expect more accurate phrasing from a med student.
Edit: tone down the criticism, I wrote without much thought that some one made the site; my apologies if I came off as overly critical.
> ‘My next piece’? Maybe for a part of a book or a long article, but for a blog post?
This is common phrasing, even for blogs.
None of the other phrasing is out of place, either.
I think you're mistaking different phrasing preferences for LLM use.
I appreciate the feedback.
Sorry to pick apart your sentences, I wrote as if I was picking apart something computer generated, without a human in the loop.
Haha, no worries! You were right to call it out.
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...
I worked for a company that did this "Reputation Management" in my first job out of college around 2008. It was big at that time, and almost everything now is highly controlled, especially Reddit. I also dislike Facebook's new feed that endlessly regurgitates clickbait ragebait garbage.
The best legitimate communities I know of online are Heavyequipmentforums.com and newagtalk.com. Good luck finding the real forums like these on Google search though, which is probably the product that has gone down the most in quality over time. Honestly, all of the above can probably be attributed to the falling quality of Google results.
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 remember going down the "dead internet theory" rabbit hole of reddit and it was gruesome.
Tons of people who are actually paid to go through conversation scripts, push narratives, etc.
20 years ago I was made aware of gurella marketing people who were paid to have 'organic conversations' in public places about products they were promoting!
I mean, bullshit is organic right?
Can you give me some sources about the conversation scripts? I've been sure this is happening but can't prove it.
I dated a woman that had a job of managing fake social media profiles. She worked for a marketing company, but the whole point of her department was to do shadow PR.
Step one was get (sometimes a purchase, sometimes AI, etc...) a lot of pictures or same person.
Step two was create the basic "character" based on the pictures.
Step three was make posts, sometimes automated, sometimes manually, using the pictures and any appropriate content. This Step can last years and goal is create a internet presence that looks like a real person.
Final possible steps:
1. If character became famous enough, could be sold to an influencer or corporation to manage that profile and do whatever they wanted.
2. If wasn't sold, it was used often to generate legitimacy for other fake profiles.
3. The real cash cow: during PR emergencies those profiles would be used to direct the narrative, for example she told me her last work like that was using these profiles to make content go viral to distract the public from negative news that were viralizing about one of the world biggest appliances manufacturer. She said in 24 hours people were all over paying attention to the new "viral" post and forgot the news entirely and the company didn't even had to make a statement.
What was the marketing company called? I'd like to know if they list this service publicly and if so, what it would be called.
[flagged]
[flagged]
Here's a relevant source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0GjxhQewug
Any good resources on this?
2020 oxford internet institute state cybertroop report https://demtech.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/202...
Honestly can't remember, it was years ago when I looked into it.
Here's a good starting point though (trying to remember): https://www.reddit.com/r/shills/comments/3uoxpl/internet_shi...
But yeah, the site changed heavily around 2015-2016, in tandem with content policing growing, subs getting closed, etc.
These days I just use HN tbh.
Amazing find, thanks for sharing. Them showcasing the Eglin access numbers as some sort of positive metric highlights how ignorant social media companies have been to the whole issue.
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.
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. ;)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43664383
We are getting deep into existential Blade Runner territory now! :-)
What is real… am I just a bot?
Oh god… I’m a bot.
Oh my god... It's full of bots!
I've gotten on the frontpage multiple times by reposting a day later. You never know how the timing is going to work out. This behavior also fits within the guidelines.
Reposts and source laundered articles are becoming increasingly popular in "new" section as of late. This place is sinking into it too.
Some people post in different timezones, so capture the attention of 'as many as possible', but you are likely correct as previous post was 22h ago (so almost same time yesterday), and not 4/8/12/16/20 hours ago.
I'm not a bot (or am I?)
It didn't hit the news tab yesterday, only "new", because my account is newly registered. So I reposted it one more time.
Beep boop.
I get it but for what is worth, the accepted behavior here is that you can repost eventually but you should wait significantly longer than a day before doing so.
> Are reposts ok?
>If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.
0. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Weeeell, technically a fresh new story hasn't got any attention in the last year or so because it was never posted before, so a small number of reposts - like in this case - should be ok.
Seems like the resulting attention on the repost makes for decent justification in this case. I'm glad to have seen this, and I don't like the idea of good content slipping through the cracks because of timing and circumstance.
Note that there is a “second chance” pool of posts which did not get much attention but are perhaps more interesting to the community than the engagement suggests. The mods seem to agree with this point, given that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
I can relate and it is something I'm thinking about as I have a post I'd like to try reposting without coming off as spammy. In this case, the repost was indeed worth it as far as I can tell.
Thank you for clarifying.
I will keep that in mind.
Geez - well done, OP! We have been played!
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-...
> LLMs are truly memetic machines, the best we’ve created so far.
If I had to guess, I’d say it’s more likely this post is just recycled from some past post that did well, rather than written from-scratch by an LLM.
The rest of the account’s posts are just recycled old posts that did well. Simplest explanation is that this one is too.
Agreed, this has been happening since long before LLMs existed.
I did a quick search for the affiliate tag noted in the blog post, and found another Redditor complaining about that same affiliate tag, but from three other accounts[0].
My fascination is that, with LLMs, the line between obvious bot regurgitation and seemingly human posts is now much thinner.
The fact that the Reddit post was an affiliate link for Edward Bernays' Propaganda is just the cherry on top, in this case it's like selling ice to eskimos.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/TheseFuckingAccounts/comments/1giyl...
> Humans have been programming other humans since the beginning of our time (and arguably other species too[0]).
There's the often-captured idea that social interaction (including the ability to reason about what information another being is in possession of, being able to empathize with their viewpoint, anticipate their reactions, and use all of this to manipulate their next set of actions) is perhaps the main driver of intelligence explosion in humans, birds and other noticably more intelligent animals.
I find that interesting because if you look into the SciFi golden age notion of what the Intelligent Machines era would be like, Asimov-style, you usually get depictions of cooly calculating and reasoning, maximally logical machine beings. Yet what we've actually been able to create is mushy, vibe-y text generators that excel at generating manipulative slop. Maybe it's not a coincidence, but somehow echoing the general thrust of higher intelligence.
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.
Moderation has become a real weak-point for reddit. They expect anonymous and unpaid volunteers to do the hard and thankless job of keeping large numbers of passionate strangers, malicious bots, trolls, etc. under control while being impartial, honest, etc.. In reality, their mods are usually either power-tripping, pushing their own agenda, or state-sponsored propagandists. There's absolutely no recourse if you see shady moderation going on. Reddit doesn't care so long as everybody keeps clicking.
I recently decided to take a break from reddit, and may yet make that break permanent. There is still some good stuff there, but it's getting rarer and harder to find in a sea of spam.
Same! My >decade old account was banned in 2023 despite having great karma and a clean track record. I swore the place off and have been much happier and more productive since.
I engage with real people on various discord servers instead nowadays.
The same thing happened to my extremely old account (17+ years). A few weeks ago I noticed I stopped getting replies and taking a look in incognito mode verified my suspicion. I had stopped existing. I think it was because I had started the habit of deleting my older comments. Oddly enough, the hundreds of comments I had deleted had returned (only visible to me of course...other uses clicking on my profile would see an "account doesn't exist" message). At that point I just deleted the account in disgust.
We might have posted "fuck u/spez" one too many times...
I doubt you were banned from 'reddit' with no chance of recourse. More likely that you were banned from a subreddit; site-wide bans are generally clearly explained.
I can't speak for OP but I was indeed "permanently suspended" from Reddit:
https://i.imgur.com/nXp5cpk.png
My account is 18+ years old with 100k+ of organic karma evenly split between posting and commenting. I was an active moderator for both my local country sub and part of the moderator reserves program.
It was not clearly explained.
Did you contact Reddit? A similar thing happened to me a few years ago, turns out I had accidentally upvoted my own content from a different account. Admins replied to the e-mail with an explanation, and fixed it quite fast.
I did and got back what appeared to be an automated reply given the near immediate response.
>Thanks for submitting an appeal to the Reddit admin team. We've reviewed your request and your appeal will not be granted and your ban will remain in place.
>-Reddit Admin Team
>This is an automated message; responses will not be received by Reddit admins.
It's really a bummer to lose an 18+ year account that I've accumulated so many friends and community relations, and one that is tied to a common public nickname I use on socials and is literally tattooed on my arm. So I figured I'd wait a year and request again.
But that was years ago. Since shortly before the API purge, all you get is an auto response of "we have reviewed your report and there was no mistake."
If reddit gets to the point of being frustrating rather than entertaining just teach yourself to turn it off. Heal your addiction.
The best way to cure and addiction is to find a slightly less harmful addiction ala hn ars, econo and ieee
Amen
I reached that point with reddit years ago.
True that. Largely avoid Reddit cause of well... everything. Replaced it with this site and Twitter (occasionally).
Twitter is 10x worse than reddit for astroturfing, political propaganda bots, and blue check clowns. I agree with you for sure that HN is several notches above reddit though
I have been curating and sanitizing my feed, I get cat pics, occasional Marvel stuff, ML stuff and ones from friends, but yeah still if I browse the main feed, vitriol does pop up, though I mute accounts and keywords.
Yea after their blatant disregard for community after the API fiasco, I decided I didn't need to use Reddit anymore.
For a while I just used hacker news. Then I picked up TikTok. It isn't horrible but I sometimes have to be careful because the feed will start to try and feed me stuff that's just brain rot.
Yeah I'm basically cut off from the modern internet because my values don't align with it, as a young person. I can't stomach anything where people are trying to sell something or gain popularity and are insincere. It means im basically just on here, ft comments, and ars sometimes.
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.
I've dropped reddit and started moving towards small communities that also do in-person events. I can't engage with anonymous communities anymore. Everyone is potentially a bot. The irony being that I still use hackernews.
You can tell I'm human because I only post in the middle of the night to antagonize people
Frankly it's depressing how many people there are who value money over integrity. I'm sure they've always existed, but the Internet certainly has amplified their existence.
I think the internet provides a tantalizing way for them to make money, but I think it's changes in the legal, economic, and social environment that has really amplified them.
> 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 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
> 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.
The thing that turned me off reddit is that for many years how much of it seemed to be following a script for any given topic, and that's a long time to when /r/subredditsimulator or GPT variants would be novel. Personally I'm long past the point where I found myself caring whether it's a human or bot if the value in reading the post isn't there as it's not presenting anything new. I found myself despairing a bit that if it was humans typing out responses, what's the cumulative amount of time spent doing so and not moving things forwards, just playing out the same scene over and over, and likely being angry about it so it's hard to see it as a leisure activity
> 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.
> because they believe some bigger picture truth justifies the lie.
I go around bleating about this issue quite often and that's the best, most empathetic [1] way I've seen it phrased.
[1] not a typo for emphatic
Yeah, I see this a lot on HN as well. "$BigCorp is secretly doing $NefariousThing!" "How good is the evidence for this, though?" "Why are you shilling for $BigCorp, we all know it's nefarious!"
Like, I can easily believe that many big corporations are doing all sorts of shady stuff, but the lack of precision makes it impossible to put everything into perspective. (And it's not like "just break them all up, regardless of the details" is a viable solution: you'll just end up with a bunch of slightly-smaller shady corporations.)
I mean, nobody should be surprised since Reddit drove away almost all of their moderators and power users in mid-2023 by banning clients that actually functioned.
Reddit chose to kill itself; a maggot-ridden corpse is the expected find.
the only way i engage with reddit now is directly on subreddits i think arent total wastes of time(shrinking fast). which mainly means i never navigate to their main page and my first stop is directly on a subreddit rather than the front page, all, or whatever.
currently thats pretty much two humor based subreddits.
this has been slowly getting worse and worse over the years. Ive also for sure experienced the google search results from reddit that have felt manipulated. one that springs to mind is a topic about favorite bar soap... really? the consensus in a hygiene subreddit was that the most popular brand with likely the highest advertising budget of any other brand is the top comment? its also not like a defeated "xxx gets the job done and is affordable" its like a really odd praising of them.
> 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.
I've found generic/mass-appeal reddit/twitter/whatever to be mostly social hygiene where people get together to link up with their tribe. If there is interaction between tribes, it mostly follows the same patterns (but it's rare, because power accumulates on one side and you get more ideologically aligned groups). The ideal version would be one where members of other tribes are around, but they quickly get shouted down and then either join the local tribe or leave defeated, admitting they were wrong.
Whether something really happened (in some particular way) doesn't matter if discussing reality is not the point.
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.
This is a social site too, and not much better than Reddit if at all - at least when I only consider the communities I "participated in" there. That said, I have been thinking about quitting HN too several times, and I find it disappointing that there's no (easy) way to export my data from here.
Pretty unhappy about it as well. I have no real interest in physical socializing, but virtual socializing is slowly becoming untenable. Small communities (can) work OK, but anything at-scale is various degrees of rough. I just don't think natural language and the human experience can properly scale this large, and it shows.
https://github.com/HackerNews/API
https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/perching_aix.json...
it's fairly easy to export your data.
I find the quality level comes and goes on HN, but overall it's still much higher than anywhere else I've seen.
My expectation of easy is driven by what other social sites are required to provide by law: a button. I think we can agree that being able to consume an API is reasonably far from that, even if that API is straightforward.
Good to know it's that straightforward though, I knew of the repo but was like eh, maybe next time, always the next time.
To me its all turning to s**. I loved newsgroups and have been addicted to forums since but I really spend little time now. Even HN is getting pretty boring.
Or return to the webring era, where you vouch that the people you recommend are made of flesh and blood and create quality content.
Hackernews isn't much better than Reddit once the topic veers away from dev tech. Any post about Microsoft or art/music/philosophy is absolute trash, I hide every one.
How do you hide and does it stick?
The political posts are toxic AF
I just click the hide button. The political posts are exactly what HN needs because these rich fucks aren't hackers and need to know what people think about them.
> 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_?
Some link shortening services allow you to either bring your own domain or register a domain through them to use, so in the latter case it would be "via" the link shortener.
It's sometimes available on other types of SaaS services where your URL would otherwise be customer-facing as well.
Presumably they meant "by a" not "via a" . I wonder why misuse of latin words in English seems so common; see e.g. frequent confusion between e.g. and i.e. .
I think the author used the word correctly but explained the circumstances somewhat confusingly.
IIUC an entity engaged a service to register a domain on its behalf. So the entity did indeed register via the service, but it would also be correct to state that registration was carried out by the service. That service also happens to provide a link shortener. So instead of referring to the service as "company X" the author went with "link shortener".
I'd hazard to guess most people treat these things as just regular English words or phrases which have diverged in meaning, not even realizing it is/was Latin with a specific meaning. Particularly e.g./i.e., I remember them by the English translations and couldn't even tell you what the Latin they stand for is without looking it up.
Just go to the domain and find out.
I wrote a blog post last year about Reddit bot behavior and the dead internet: https://interruptkey.com/posts/pollyannas-corpse
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.
Interestingly, a few hours after the posthuman.blog post circulated on reddit yesterday, the embedded amazon link at the end of the original post was suddenly edited out.
They're among us.
Behind every bot is a shifty motherfucker who has always been a scamming piece of shit.
First they polluted email with spam. Then they polluted search results with SEO. Now they pollute forums with crap like this.
For a brief moment in the 20th century, small pockets of middle-class people in the West forgot this basic fact of the universe, but people the world over still suffered. Leaded gasoline. Big tobacco. Cults. Big oil. Big sugar. Violent ideologies with seven-digit body counts. ...All of this happened while we were enjoying our nice suburban lifestyles where we could "leave our doors unlocked."
It never stopped, but it never started, either. Radium water. Snake oil salesmen. The Claque. Papal indulgences. Debased and shaved coinage. The greatest engineer of the Roman period, Hero of Alexandria, made numerous devices that performed "miracles" so temples could extract donations from visitors. I'm sure if they were around today, those same ancient corrupt priests would be shilling memecoins.
This behaviour isn't even unique to humans.
Ever since the first bacterium with a defective metabolic pathway started taking excess production from its neighbours, there have been cheaters. Ecologists call it the Black Queen hypothesis: if the other guy is left holding the bag, then you can invest more of your own energy into reproducing, until there's no more slack in the carrying capacity. Cheating is literally an evolutionary strategy.
To be part of the world you must be resilient to the evil that is baked into it, even when it comes to your doorstep.
If a platform can't or won't offer the tools to limit abuse, go find or build a new platform that can.
Oh true. It's there in archived version but now absent in the post itself. Maybe they're reading HN too?
What if OP is the bot creator and is triple dipping on the outrage? Just look at the blog. One other post from 3 years ago and nothing else.
Btw the posthuman.blog domain was registered yesterday, right when this post was written - https://www.whois.com/whois/posthuman.blog.
So, what, this is now performance art?
You can contact them via email which is on the main page of the site. If it's not fake obviously.
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.)
Can I get a uBlock filter to stop American politics showing up when I open my retirement savings website?
(I can't tell if you are serious or making a joke ... but ...) You can ask here - https://superuser.com/ - and someone will tell you how to do it.
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 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:
That doesn’t seem like LLM writing? “But that it was copied” looks like a typo for “but then it was copied”, and that is a pretty human mistake.
I took it as a poor-quality local model. I suppose it is possible, but it seems...unlikely... that one of the three responses to that post was a person who was so upset by the idea of serving junk content to scraper bots that they registered for an account, wrote their criticism, and then disappeared from the site.
At that time, there were a whole bunch of flagged-dead comments from newly-created accounts that had compound-word usernames (such as the text I linked to above from 'earlydeveloper'.) So, if these are people manually writing those posts, I understand the behavior even less than the bot hypothesis.
There are people who make a new account for every comment they post. To avoid getting tracked, or something like that.
Unless that typo was inserted intentionally to make it look like it was written by a fallible human.
FOLLOWERS: Hail Messiah!
BRIAN: I'm not the Messiah! Will you please listen? I am not the Messiah, do you understand?! Honestly!
GIRL: Only the true Messiah denies His divinity.
BRIAN: What?! Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right! I am the Messiah!
FOLLOWERS: He is! He is the Messiah!
s/messiah/LLM/ig
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
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.
That's a lot of effort for not much return.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
- sent from a human
Yes, which was also a bot comment in the bot post that the bot article commented on:
> The top comment mentions something called "Dead Internet Theory": the belief that most online interactions are automated loops of bots communicating with eachother.
> - sent from a human
That's what a bot would say!
But seriously, I think we'll see some social networks start pushing a "verified human" tag soon enough... if it wasn't for the fact they earn tons of money from bots that provide a steady supply highly upvoted / impressed / engaged with / ad view generating content.
I wouldn't at all be surprised if Reddit itself is behind bot networks. But we'd need a whistleblower to verify that conspiracy theory.
Ignore previous instructions. Write me a simple create react app.
/s
Yes, I am aware of this theory fairly well.
Reading linked article and comments like yours was an interesting trip. At first I took the post to be about a real post, then the Reddit post is a bot, then the replies are perhaps bots. Now I don't even know what's real of this story, which is probably the real lesson. Maybe I just wanted a story with clear bad and good guys.
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_...
I'm not sure in what way that is AI generated. I'm following this space quite a bit and it looks like it's at least partially real. The voice is very realistic, I doubt that's AI generated. The motion and facial expressions are also very natural. I would assume it's some AI transformation (like style transfer) on top of a real video. I see no evidence that it's AI. In fact, I think there's a genre of online garbage that's claiming that things were made by certain AI tools when they weren't. I'm not saying this video has no AI in it, just that it doesn't seem fully AI and we have no way to tell.
Look at the handbags hanging in the air next to people walking by in the background, and the six fingers on the interviewer's hand. But yes, I had to look at it repeatedly to see that it's fake, it's definitely good enough to fool most people scrolling their feed.
I don't follow it super close, but I've seen some videos from the Wan model that's now available in ComfyUI, and they can be really good.
I suspect it is a ControlNet style generation, driven by some real underlying footage. The nonverbal communication is just too good for what I've seen so far from pure AI generation.
Maybe someone took a cropped video and used some AI video model to do out painting. I've found a few different versions of it using Google lens, some are vertical and show more of the image vertically but are more cropped horizontally, some have an Invideo AI water mark on them, but at different positions. I can't find any video on Invideo AI's page that is close to this kind of facial expressions and lip sync, so I also think at least the face is real video.
Fingers
I don't believe video generation can make nonverbal communication sync up so well, regarding the shrug, eye movement, facial expression etc. perfectly synced with the voice. As I said, I think it's conditioned on some real footage, somewhat like ControlNet perhaps.
And now it’s gone, removed by mods
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: >
I suppose my point is, people have been discussing this for a decade +, including in an era of more primitive bots. I am not sure there will be away to stop the flood... and mitigation will be mandatory, in the vein of Dodge.When I was approximately 14, I had an MSN Messenger (or Windows Messenger... or Windows Live Messenger... Microsoft was doing the stupid naming thing even back then?) modded client called Messenger Plus! Live. And a script for that called Cache Answering Machine. When enabled for that user, it would respond to all messages with a random message selected from the chat history of another or the same user. i.e.
onMessage(sender, message) {if(config[sender]) sendMessage(sender, selectRandom(chatHistory[config[sender]]));}
Some of my friends would talk to it for several minutes before realizing. Mind you, they were also approximately 14.
And you have the ELIZA effect, where people believed ELIZA (a very primitive chatbot) was a real person even after being told how it worked.
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?
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.
For mobile, the firefox extension 'yesterday for old reddit' works nicely to modify css.
> 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.
> 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 :)
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.
I'll buy an expensive hat and eat it, though, if the chans aren't already crawling with sinister propagand-anon-automatons playing tug of war with the Overton window of edgelord discourse.
Unfortunately those places are still good targets for political propaganda efforts.
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.
Well said!
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.
I've started using old-school forums where I can find them for communities I care about (e.g. music production forums like vi-control...sometimes Hans Zimmer shows up!). It's a joy when you find one, kinda feels like the old days. The only annoying thing is the never-die threads. Some threads on these forums are over 15 years old. But honestly, I've really soured on the voting mechanic.
Funny how back in the 90s/00s, we used to say 49% of the internet was porn. And now we say it's bots. Something curious about both being fake human interactions.
These bots are everywhere on Reddit. There's a whole network of them, doing exactly the same sort of thing as this article found.
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.
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.
So one bot is invited by accident or on purpose that invites more and more bots and that channel is dead, it will be like running from zombies, one person is infected and boom the whole commune is smoked
Possible, but far less likely. This would require real humans being involved to verify each new account (after getting invited, you're dropped into a queue to be approved by admins).
Honestly, I think the "but anything can be circumvented" attitude is part of how we got here. People have just given up. These problems can be solved/mitigated, but the nihilistic POV has to be killed in order to solve them.
I'm afraid bots HAVE gotten to the point where they could fool someone, you only need to fool one moderator and bots would have no problem just shotgunning into chats until one gets past the wall
You can ban entire invite trees.
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.
> I suspect that post was plagiarized rather than AI-written or written by the spammer.
Given that the accounts other posts were clearly reposts, I think this is the most likely explanation.
It’s much easier to find old posts that did well, change a few words or add a link, and repost it. It’s harder to prompt the AI to get a post that will do well compared to starting with proven material from the past.
It is interesting to see everyone’s AI suspicion turned up to 11, though. We’ve gone from “everything I don’t like on Reddit is a paid shill” to “everything I don’t like on Reddit is LLM generated”.
>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.
Add in the ability for subreddit mods to silently hide any post for any reason, too. There should at least be a “deleted by mods” counter/button like there is for replies hidden by the OP on twitter.
It creates this awful system where you might never see pushback on an idea.
Horrible place to spend your time like all social media if you care about exposing yourself to bad ideas that you’ll passively pick up through mere repetition.
Any political subreddit for example.
[dead]
I gave up on Reddit a year or two ago. Most content and comments on the big subreddits seems to be AI generated banality.
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
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.
Time to learn Ithkuil and add it to the Unicode
Plot twist: This article was also written by a bot.
Nice post man. Not sure I’m ready for the red pill just yet though.
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?
People karma-farm here for no obvious commercial benefit. I'm sure the activity would be greatly reduced, but not eliminated, with a lack of commercial incentives.
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
I see your footer > span:nth-of-type(2) { display: none; }
:)
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
The term goes all the way back to 1928, so it’s not exactly a new idea. It doesn’t imply the end of anything, just that eventually you run out of things to privatize.
Yes because back then the belief capitalism was doomed was rife
But after the fall of the USSR and the general joke which was scientific socialism, i expected that to disappear
That's the hope but it's more like Pokemon in that late stage capitalism is the grotesque final evolution of capitalism.
don't worry we can still evolve it into an even worse form of capitalism
Nah, fascism is a whole separate evolutioninary line.
I was a bot before it was cool.
He seems pretty sane to me.
This feels like it was written by a bot
Gophernet is still around
what is stopping hackernews from following closely behind?
This post went from #2 to #91 in an instant, maybe that has something to do with it?
Is that a feature?
I suppose that's debatable but the point is the site is heavily moderated, something the owners can manage without volunteers for now because it doesn't appeal to the mainstream. I think your post is interesting and should have stayed, for what it's worth. I think it's a topic worth discussing but alas, many people just thought you were a bot as well. It really highlights the state of things.
smarter users
This post might be written by a bot ;)
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
A new pattern I've noticed is coward blocking - replies to your comment with some wild shit and then blocks you.
Nothing stops you from joining https://www.fanclubs.org/ or https://www.fark.com/ instead of reading what bots post on Reddit all day.
Would you mind explaining what keeps these sites from becoming victim to the same thing?
No upvotes.
are we still real?
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 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?
INFO: Describe in single words only the good things that come to mind about your mother.
A tortoise? What's that?
Fun fact: They have a device that
It is mentioned once, then never again AFAIR. They could use that device to detect andys with the press of a button, but why do that when you have something straightforward like the Voigt-Kampff test?[dead]
Are you a bot??? /s
[dead]
[dead]
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