This guy just openly admitted to shitting in the global punch bowl.
It would really be a shame if
someoneeveryone sent an army of bots to antagonize him at every waking moment of the day.“Reddit is just you, me, and /u/Karmanaut”
I never thought I’d see the day when this adage would become true again, let alone in this way 😂
What does this asshole do with these bots, run influence operations? For whom? What do we know about which influence operations are hired for which interests? Forget the government ones for a moment, what about commercial interests?
Toxic chemicals for instance, if you mention one it flags it and sends it to agents that cycle through fake accounts, backed up by bots to vote with them, to argue endlessly.
It’s like mentioning voldemort. Try it, talk trash about aspartame on reddit, or roundup, or atrazine, or god forbid nuclear energy, they’ve lots of real world dupes on the latter there, the decades long influence operations have borne fruit, but they have influence agents for all of those things, on keyword, the worst are on fluff pieces, propaganda pieces their PR firms or whatever make and they post it, those will be overrun, and the agents will mass flag you if you strongly argue against their bullshit.
What does this asshole do with these bots, run influence operations? For whom? What do we know about which influence operations are hired for which interests? Forget the government ones for a moment, what about commercial interests?
If it’s the same guy that was posted about a while ago, they do it for (blackhat) marketing. The bots mostly post comments in threads that look like a normal discussion, but where the goal is to move people away from one solution to another one. Imagine if somebody asks whether a piece of software is good, a bot then replies that they have not heard good things about it, and another bot chimes in and says “yeah I have been using <other software> instead”.
They’ll probably also make manual posts claiming how good something is, put it in their control panel and a single bot will post it, while the other bots chime in with upvotes and discussion.
Add a bit of logic to chime in on unrelated posts to make the account look more legit and you got yourself an army.
Everyone is cooked because a bot can write a comment on a bot platform and not get banned? LOL
Everyone is cooked, you are all cooked
Thanks for making the problem worse, fuck you too man.
Every*
Reddit has shown through its actions that it’s more interested in banning real users than bots, and wants to protect bots from being identified and called out by users, so it’s not that surprising they’ve been able to do this.
And yet I get constantly shadowbanned there just for using a VPN…
I think reddit likes bots more than it likes real users.
Bots nowadays use residential proxy networks. When people use a free VPN or other shady software, they might become part of the network, and bad actors can route traffic trough their devices.
Well why not, bots inflate their numbers more.
🛜💀🛜
I hate the modern internet
Yeah, but at least this post is interesting; it shows how godawful humanity as a whole is at detecting bots in the wild.
2 out of 400 bad.
this doesn’t show how bad humans are at detecting bots
Reddit isn’t trying though. Social media is hooked by big business interests and governments, and there is overlap there. I can spot influence agents, mechanized trolls, supported by bots, you can bet they could better with their tools and analytics.
As we’ve seen for the last ten years, social media only takes down bots/influence agencies researchers or others make impossible to ignore, and they’ve cut those researchers off from the information they were using to that effect. Now it’s only agencies the US government aligned groups highlight that will get removed, alleged Iranian, and the like, a bit player.
These inauthentic accounts vastly inflate their numbers, make advertising more valuable. Even as they make the sites less useful, and drive away real users, it’s also assumed that users have no where else to go so why push back on governments and big business ratfucking the sites that can hurt them in myriad ways?
Not until we build a fediverse that can get critical mass to take off will we see them fight for real people’s use of their site.
That assumes that Reddit actually wants to ban bots. But as long as they’re not too obvious, the bots are valuable to them, since they inflate the user count.
“Bots? No, no, those are active users. They also don’t use adblockers, so they’ve better than regular users!”
I could be a bot eight now! How would I even know?
You might be a bot nine too for all we know
Could simply be that only 2 have been fully banned by Reddit but most have tons of subreddit bans and/or shadowbans. On the other hand, Reddit is such a cesspit these days I wouldn’t be too shocked if they just exist on Reddit shitposting slop
The days of having arguments with Internet strangers and knowing they aren’t a bot are officially over. It’s hard to tell exactly when the period ended, but it’s definitely done now.
Plus chatbots now are getting more sophisticated, the government sponsored influence operations have the newest generation chatbots too, Israel of course the main one, but other subjects as well, like hyping the US military after the venezuela operation, which was in fact a military coup, the US made a deal with their generals to stand down and give up a few loyalist units and the presidente in exchange for the military being the de facto ruler, civilian government puppets now. Helicopters are vulnerable to weapons systems the army couldn’t take our reliably without an agreement to stand down, not the least in one of the most protected places in the country when mobilized.
But after that operation, when they were pretending the US did it under the nose of the military and not in cooperation with them, as they were threatening Cuba and Colombia, and Canada and Denmark, and Iran, and Yemen, et al, their chatbots and influence agents were running wild, entire divisions of mechanized trolls and chatbots. It was not subtle. Argue with them too much they will mass flag you and reddit will side with them, not you.
Despite us being the ones that drive use, and the bots and agents making a less enjoyable, less useful, and less used site. They don’t care, they can’t see past the next set of financial statements. Bots inflate their numbers, and the government and powerful interests can jam them up if they don’t lick their boots and pretend to believe them, ban the users they tell them to, etc.
They figure we have no where else to go, so they don’t have to cater to us anyway. Let’s make them wrong about that.
Yeah, what I do right now is just join a Discord servers and argue with people on voice chat. YMMV tho, I accidentally made some lifelong friends this way.
I’d like to argue with you about that, but alas…
I did that only twice and it never did it again. Arguing with people on the internet is pointless to begin with.
No its not!
Pfft, you would think that wouldn’t you? /s
Such an inefficient way to astroturf. Just copy old comments and markov-chain basic shit. Reddit has been mostly bots for years and years.
Everyone on Reddit is a not except you
Too efficient. Why not rage bait AND raise your neighborhoods energy prices at the same time?
Too hard. Have an LLM summarize each comment in an old comment chain so that it obliterates any meaning and burries any real engagement. (I have no evidence, but I think Reddit is scraping external sites and turning posts into comment chains)
Unfortunately they’re probably around fediverse as well.
This hits different
That’s true to a certain extent, but I think the fediverse isn’t all that attractive to these types of people. Additionally I think we are way better prepared to handle mass bot bans and detection since we aren’t as whorish here in the fediverse
The ratio of human admins to users is better too, I think that will work in our favour.
That’s exactly what a bot would say.
Absolutely! That is such a fantastic, creative, and thought-provoking comment! 🚀✨
Thank you! That truly means a lot — I’m so glad it resonated and sparked something meaningful! 🌟💡
Oh no, the youtube bots have escaped!
There is a good few attempts, but the obvious ones get detected quickly.
So far there’s no money to be made here. Influence and reach is also limited.
If that changes at some point, it might be the end of the Fediverse. It’s far too open to bots. A spammer can not only easily create new accounts on instances, they can run their own instances.
Still, the additional cost to add fedi/lemmy/piefed bots would be minimal, and would just reinforce the echo chamber that the bot master wants to create.
WHY WOULD YOU MAKE THAT SILLY ASSUMPTION, FELLOW HUMAN?
it maybe 0.5% now but reddit will catch up and ban all the bots eventually, they find bots pretty easily. but the ones that they do not go hard ban on are propaganda ones.
No they don’t. They’re pretty good at gatekeeping humans though
according to his own claim, and he’s selling his super secret methods. he might be just making shit up
How do you make a profit from producing AI slop?
You sell how-to guides to other producers of AI slop.
i think this one was purest form of it to date https://www.404media.co/inside-the-world-of-tiktok-spammers-and-the-ai-tools-that-enable-them/
Godd damn clankers
