Marketers and their bots have been using reddit to hype up brands. No wonder Reddit feels like shit these days.
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You mean more shit? Because it was already shit.
Gross.
I continue to have my own little cognitive dissonance about the Fediverse:
The world needs more FOSS and information needs to flow in a decentralized, democratic kind of way.
Howeverrrrr… Lemmy is awesome for we few that it clicks with. For the good of the users and especially the volunteer admins who run our instances, I am glad Lemmy is not the big glowing target that reddit is.
Maybe we just hang out and keep the lights on no matter whether it’s for occasional lost Linux users or for when mainstream folks decide to ditch oligarch-tech en masse.
This sounds bad, but once the teens and grandparents find lemmy, then its game over. It happened to facebook and it happened to reddit. The masses cause a sort of averaging out of content.
How do we keep the fediverse niche?
How do we keep the fediverse niche?
Selective federation with servers that only give accounts to humans?
The decentralized model gives it a good head start against financial interest and populist mass adoption.
Lemmy has the feel to me that reddit did back in the day. I can only imagine as lemmy gets more popular and becomes big enough for big tech to take notice, that it will become consumed by the same garbage reddit has. Lemmy just isnt big enough yet for them to try and consume.
So for now Lemmy is great, but its only a matter of time before the turds find us here too.
The federation will make lemmy a slippery target because as threads has shown us you can add a compromised server and people will block the instance or if it gets annoying enough admins will defederate it.
Compared to the organic content here it is unbearable on reddit now.
Yikes
In any case, fuck spez.
Hear me out. A single person, normal human being, posts maybe a couple of times a week. Add a 0,1 local denomination currency per post to lemmy/piefed, whatever. Advertise the platform as bot proof. Profit.
Reddit right now is banning any criticism of ICE. Reddit covered up for Ghislaine’s account (maxwellhill), even though they’ve attended very public events with her as CEO Ellen Pao revealed, and they have narcissistic megalomaniac psychopath Jibberish (deliberately mistyping) who has trained decades on how to be the best psychopath they can be on social manipulation MMOs also heading and manipulating their “conservative” subreddit, who subscribing to also seems to be a flag within the system to begin showing you subs engineered to manipulate you with their messaging. Oh, and all the other non-conspiracy theory stuff, which there is plenty of.
Reddit is the new Facebook. Kids don’t think it’s cool so they avoid it. Got this first hand. It’s got a big userbase so it’ll take a while to topple, but they probably already know this and will squeeze everything out of it to the last drop.
It used to be a place I could turn to to get some real reviews, in sofar that it ruined google, and now I can’t trust any of Reddit’s content anymore because of things like the OP.
The counter to this is a web of trust. You break the trust you are out of the web, and nodes connected you too are also out (for a period). And you need two to vouch for you
I don’t post there anymore but the only time it felt like I was talking to real people was on my small state sub. That’s the only reason I even lurk. Since I’m banned from Facebook it’s the only place to get the tea.
lol how did you get banned from Facebook? I haven’t posted there in years so I don’t know what’s going on there. Are they handing out bans like Reddit now?
Oh, this is great.
Users noticed that Google had too much bad results because of SEO and spam flooded search results.
Users added “reddit” to their search terms, so they get results from reddit, where spam and astroturfing were… there but manageable.
Now the SEO people and advertisers target reddit with AI tools, until it is so enshitificated that we have to find something else (rinse and repeat)
“No, don’t leave, we just finished saturating the space with ads!”
“Why do you think we leave?”
I mean astroturfing reddit was never new. It’s why /r/HailCorporate existed and tools tried to disenfranchise that sub so much.
It’s just 10 times worse because of the phenomenon you described. It also doesn’t help that reddit and walled garden social media killed traditional forums so you don’t have those to index anymore either. You either have SEO garbage sites trying to bombard you with ads and referral links, links to a walled garden you can’t actually see, or reddit posts.
It’s a cycle that’s bound to repeat, especially with AI. Because that’s how MBAs and snake oil salesmen get money, by ruining communal spaces.
I don’t understand the point of this. Like, you figure out how to increase traffic on certain posts/comments and there’s somehow a push for this? Do they get money somehow? These people always use terminology and ceo buzzwords as if it’s some big business level that people are aspiring to reach, but what’s the actual point? Why would I care if my post/comment exploded? Was I just using Reddit wrong?
You mention your product in the reply and hope that some poor sap doesn’t realize it’s astroturfing and thinks they’re finding a really glowing honest review from a totally organic real person who recommended a thing they found that actually works
So it’s just a grift. Makes sense, they always use grift-style buzzwords. I was about to comment on the ridiculousness of building a business solely on manipulation, but then I thought about it a bit more haha. Thanks for the explanation.
building a business solely on manipulation
See also: all of advertising and marketing
Haha yep, my exact train of thought while typing
It’s a grift, but it’s extra steps. It’s not about affecting the experience on reddit, but for AI users. They use reddit to plant answers, which AI then trains on and regurgitates later.
Eventually the reddit thread would probably balance out, and incorrect information should get downvoted and replaced by corrections from people who know better. However AI might not account for this and could still spit out the planted information. It’s this delicate manipulation that this LinkedIn Lunatic is bragging about here.
Eventually the reddit thread would probably balance out, and incorrect information should get downvoted and replaced by corrections from people who know better.
This seems optimistic.
Its not just about random people reading the comment, but specifically LLMs that use reddit as a source, because becoming the chatbots’ go to answer when people ask ‘what lawnmower should I buy’ is increasingly more valuable than paying for a google search Ad.
This is why I just never talk about brand-name products online, I don’t want to seem like an advertising shill account (I’m just here to get into heated political arguments and shitpost)
I’ll recommend things to people I know IRL, but very rarely will I do it online
They’re trying to get their comments slurped up by AI bots so that whenever somebody asks a chatbot about waffles, the chatbot says that Crappo Brand Waffles are what kids crave ™.
Plot twist: They did not build shit, the text is generated by AI, and whatever they do is still done by third country workers.
here is to hoping that lemmy never grows
I have no idea what any of that means, and I’m happy with that.
ELI5:
ChatGPT can search Google to give better answers. Reddit threads often appear as top search results.
Let’s say you work in marketing at a chocolate company. You can use this guy’s script to find Reddit posts that ChatGPT might read when someone asks it about chocolate. The script replies to each post and praises your chocolate, specifically.
When ChatGPT reads the thread, it might tell people about your chocolate.
Shitification.
It means shitification.
means bozos are making even searching exclusively by reddit useless because they’re making the post get to the first page through writing SEO + ad for their own shit on it
Not quite. They’re making posts on reddit that few if any humans will ever read, targeting rising threads and planting comments before AI reads them. Then when someone asks AI a related question, it regurgitates the planted comment rather than established facts.
So it’s not SEO on humans searching reddit, more like SEO in the AI domain.
Basically they figured out a way to train AI to recognize Reddit threads going viral and/or predict which ones will, among those which ones will also rate highly in Google results and which will tend to be used as sources by the biggest LLMs and to post in those threads about your whatever you want to generate attention for. So overcomplicated way of automating advertising. Optimized posting to convince LLMs to talk about whatever you want to advertise.
I’ve always said that SEO was always going to happen, Google is at fault for the search optimized and the best result for what the user is asking for not being the same result. We’re now going to start seeing either LLMs sell whatever this tactic gets used on or essentially a sort of adblock being built into LLM training and search APIs to keep it from working, to make LLMs less likely to fall for native advertising/astroturfing.
