- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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If the rumor is true that a reddit/google training deal is what led to reddit getting boosted in search results, this would be a direct result of reddit’s own actions.
It’s gross, but also inevitable. If there’s an untapped niche to make money from, somebody’s going to try it – plus if they want to waste their money on generating accounts only to have them be banned, then so be it.
Makes me kinda thankful that this community is smaller and less likely to be targeted by this sort of crap.
What’s funny is I think it would be profitable for maybe, like, a year, before everyone starts doing it and then even normal people stop trusting reddit comments.
It’s like pissing in a pool to sell people soap. What’s the plan once people stop using the pool?
Buy a new pool and piss in again to sell new soaps.
By the time that the cow is bled dry, someone is stuck holding the bag while some people made out like bandits.
That is the stock market for you. Create no value, just wealth transfer.
Create no value, just wealth transfer.
In this case it’s creating a kind of anti-value - harm, I guess.
Also I bow to your superior and brazen use of mixed metaphors. You got double what I did. “Bleeding” a cow dry? It adds impact over the usual “milking” even!
Milking assume that you don’t kill the cow, which isn’t the case here.
Some people are specialized at being hired at startups to prop up the startup to be sold and make a quick buck.
Then they move on to the next startup, wash rinse and repeat. It tells a lot about the state of innovation.
Innovation’t 😒
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Just wait, in a near future there will be floods of bots quelling and stoking tempers to control opinions online, and in the real world.
We already get some of this, but the scale is going to become many times worse.
The creator of the company, Alexander Belogubov, has also posted screenshots of other bot-controlled accounts responding all over Reddit. Begolubov has another startup called “Stealth Marketing” that also seeks to manipulate the platform by promising to “turn Reddit into a steady stream of customers for your startup.” Belogubov did not respond to requests for comment.
What an absolute piece of shit. Just a general trash person to even think of this concept.
His surname translates from russian as ‘white lips’. No wonder he is a ghoul.
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verb. gamed; gaming; games. transitive + intransitive. 1. : to manipulate, exploit, or cheat in (a system, a situation, etc.)
Oh, I would have thought Reddit themselves would offer such a service
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Reddit is past the point of no return. He might as well speed it up a little.
Like a built in brand dashboard where brands can monitor keywords for their brand and their competitors? And then deploy their sanctioned set of accounts to reply and make strategic product recommendations?
Sounds like something that must already exist. But it would have been killed or hampered by API changes… so now Spez has a chance to bring it in-house.
They will just call it brand image management. And claim that there are so many negative users online that this is the only way to fight misinformation about their brand.
Or something. It’s all so tiring.
He’s got to get them from somewhere. They certainly aren’t coming from his little piggy brain.
Please don’t insult the pigs, they’re smart and sensitive creatures
That would be an unmarked ad. I don’t think that’s legal in many places
Probably.
So, we complain to a regulatory body, they investigate, they tell a company to do better or, waaaay down the road, attempt to levy a fine. Which most companies happily pay, since the profits from he shady business practices tend to far outweigh the fines.
Legal or illegal really only means something when dealing with an actual person. Can’t put a corporation in jail, sadly.
Generative AI has really become a poison. It’ll be worse once the generative AI is trained on its own output.
Here’s my prediction. Over the next couple decades the internet is going to be so saturated with fake shit and fake people, it’ll become impossible to use effectively, like cable television. After this happens for a while, someone is going to create a fast private internet, like a whole new protocol, and it’s going to require ID verification (fortunately automated by AI) to use. Your name, age, and country and state are all public to everybody else and embedded into the protocol.
The new ‘humans only’ internet will be the new streaming and eventually it’ll take over the web (until they eventually figure out how to ruin that too). In the meantime, they’ll continue to exploit the infested hellscape internet because everybody’s grandma and grampa are still on it.
I would rather wade with bots than exist on a fully doxxed Internet.
Yup. I have my own prediction - that humanity will finally understand the wisdom of PGP web of trust, and using that for friend-to-friend networks over Internet. After all, you can exchange public keys via scanning QR codes, it’s very intuitive now.
That would be cool. No bots. Unfortunately, corps, govs and other such mythical demons really want to be able to automate influencing public opinion. So this won’t happen until the potential of the Web for such influence is sucked dry. That is, until nobody in their right mind would use it.
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That sounds very reasonable as a prediction. I could see it being a pretty interesting black mirror episode. I would love it to stay as fiction though.
You’re two years late.
Maybe not for the reputable ones, that’s 2026, but these sheisters have been digging out the bottom of the swimming pool for years.
New models already train on synthetic data. It’s already a solved solution.
Is it really a solution, though, or is it just GIGO?
For example, GPT-4 is about as biased as the medical literature it was trained on, not less biased than its training input, and thereby more inaccurate than humans:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(23)00225-X/fulltext
All the latest models are trained on synthetic data generated on got4. Even the newer versions of gpt4. Openai realized it too late and had to edit their license after Claude was launched. Human generated data could only get us so far, recent phi 3 models which managed to perform very very well for their respective size (3b parameters) can only achieve this feat because of synthetic data generated by AI.
I didn’t read the paper you mentioned, but recent LLM have progressed a lot in not just benchmarks but also when evaluated by real humans.
Doesn’t mean that the fediverse is immune.
News stories and narratives are still fought over by actors on all sides and sometimes by entities that might be bots. And there are a lot of auto-generating content bots that post stuff or repost old content from other sites like Reddit.
Especially since being immune to censorship is kind of the point of the fediverse.
If you’re even a tiny bit smart about it, you can start hundreds of sock puppet instances and flood other instances with bullshit.
Can’t some instances make some sort of agreement and have a whitelist of instances to not block? People would need to register to add their instances to the list, and some common measures would be applied to restrict someone from registering several instances at once, and banning people who misuse the system.
That wouldn’t solve the problem, but perhaps would make things more manageable.
You can’t block people. Who would you know, who registered the domain?
What you’re proposing is pretty similar to the current state of email. It’s almost impossible to set up your own small mail server and have it communicate the “mailiverse” since everyone will just assume you’re spam. And that lead to a situation where 99% of people are with one of the huge mail providers.
you’re right, the matter is more complicated than I thought…
It’s extremely complicated and I don’t really see a solution.
You’d need gigantic resources and trust in those resources to vet accounts, comments, instances. Or very in depth verification processes, which in turn would limit privacy.
What I actually found interesting was bluesky’s invite system. Each user got a limited number of invite links and if a certain amount of your invitees were banned, you’d be banned/flagged to. That creates a web of trust, but of course also makes anonymous accounts impossible.
I try to avoid talking about how indefensibly terrible Lemmy’s anti-spam and anti-brigading measures are for fear of someone doing something with the information. I imagine the only thing keeping subtle disinfo and spam from completely overtaking Lemmy is how small its reach would be. Doing the same thing to Reddit is a hundred times more effective, and systemically accepted. Reddit’s admins like engagement.
Put in those tickets. It’s a community effort y’know.
It’s an arms race and Lemmy is only a small player right now so no one really pays attention to our little corner. But as soon as we get past a certain threshold, we’ll be dealing with the same problems as well.
I feel the same about a lot of Fediverse apps right now. They’re kinda just coasting on the fact that they’re not big enough for most spammers to care about. But they need to put in solid defenses and moderation tools before that happens
Another reason to block federation with Threads.
Meta has the most resources to combat spam and abuse.
And the least demonstrated desire to do so.
Meta will likely actually moderate against spambots because they want you to fucking pay them for that service. The problem is, they aren’t too interested in moderating hate speech.
So, you’re suggesting that it is better that they are profiting from helping state actors and hate groups?
Edit: No, they are not suggesting that. I misunderstood their meaning.
I don’t think I made a value statement whatsoever. I think calling it a problem and hate speech would’ve been enough of a clue as to how I felt about it, however.
It’s actually why I support most instances defederating from them
I called this shit out like a year ago. It’s the end of any viable online searching having much truth to it. All we’ll have left is youtube videos from project farm to trust.
It kinda seems like the end of the Google era. What will we search Google for when the results are all crap? This is the death gasps of the internet I/we grew up with.
Remember when you could type a vague plot of a film you’d heard about into Google and it’d be the first result?
Nah doesn’t work anymore
Saw a trailer for a french film so I searched “french film 2024 boys live in woods seven years”
Google - 2024 BEST FRENCH FILMS/TOP TEN FRENCH FILMS YOU MUST SEE THIS YEAR/ALL TIME BEST FRENCH MOVIES
Absolute fucking gash
I’ve not been too impressed with Kagi search, but at least the top result there was “Frères 2024”
Remember when you could type a vague plot of a film you’d heard about into Google and it’d be the first result?
I honestly don’t remember this at all. I remember priding myself on my “google-fu” and how to search it to get what i, or other people, needed. Which usually required understanding the precise language that you would need to use, not something vague. But over the years it’s gotten harder and harder, and now I get frustrated with how hard it has become to find something useful. I’ve had to go back to finding places I trust for information and looking through them.
Although, ironically, I can do what you’re talking about with ai now.
I honestly don’t remember this at all.
It was absolutely a thing and one of the reasons Google became wildly popular at first
When?
TUESDAY
I’m feeling myself old and I’m 28.
Cause in my early childhood in 2003-2007 we would resort to search engines only when we couldn’t find something by better (but more manual and social) means.
Because - mwahahaha - most of the results were machine-generated crap.
So I actually feel very uplift due to people promising the Web to get back to norm in this sense.
Maybe web rings of the 90s were not such a bad idea! Let’s bring 'em back!
They would poison that shit as well unfortunately. The concept is great though.
Eh, how’d you do that?
Do what? Webrings?
How do you poison them.
Create sites that look like legit websites, then slowly ramp-up the bullshit. Same tactic as always.
Gemini webrings are the future?
I ran into this issue while researching standing desks recently. There are very few places on the internet where you can find verifiably human-written comparisons between standing desk brands. Comments on Reddit all seem to be written by bots or people affiliated with the brands. Luckily I managed to find a YouTube reviewer who did some real comparisons.
That’s like adding caustic soda to bleach. Just made the poison stronger
“i remember when reply guy was a term used for someone notorious for replying to things in a specific manner”
“take your meds grandpa, it’s getting late”
When googling something, append -site:reddit.com
AI Is Poison
ing Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With ‘Parasite SEO’FTFY
Ai is a tool. It can be used for good and it can be used for poison. Just because you see it being used for poison more often doesn’t mean you should be against ai. Maybe lay the blame on the people using it for poison
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This market; expected to replace the same market that just used bots to achieve the same thing
I appreciate the mostly benign neglect we had for awhile. Now that they’re paying attention it’s just all bad. Or would be, if I was there. HA.
Logitech decided to include some AI shit in Logi Options+, I uninstalled that crap ASAP.
