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The ebike subreddit is modded by the owners of Lunacycle. They actively remove posts about bad customer service/other issues from Lunacycle. I witnessed them name and shame some random redditor and accuse them of fraud because they posted screenshots of email correspondence that pointed out shady dealings on Luna’s part.
They use the general subreddit for electric bikes to funnel everyone into ordering from them.
during the massive purge of rebellious mods, there was a huge opening for corporate shills to move into places where previous mods had kept them out. this phenomenon was widespread in many fan and specialty subs. Reddit admins were more than happy to let this happen, as corporate shills were also more than happy to be cooperative with Reddit admins.
Everything about Reddit’s most recent changes has been openly about cracking the place wide open for corporate marketing. Everything good about it was because of how genuine it was, and it was genuine because for a very long time, the attitude was to shield it against corporate influence.
That’s the only reason it became such a valuable place for search results: as the forums and blogs around the Internet went silent and corporations ravaged individual websites, reddit was a bubble of genuine interaction. It’s not just Google’s shitty algorithm, it’s also because the Internet itself got injected with shit, and reddit was a safe haven. A deeply flawed one, but still, notably less fake and corporate than the web pages around it.
That’s what gave it value.
Spez knows this. The admins have known this the whole damn time. That’s why there used to be rules against self-posting content. That’s why celebrities were only allowed to promote things in AMAS. To head off attention seeking, marketing, and corporate influence.
But the time came to make money, and they’re burning it all down to accomplish that.
I will never not share this blog because it hits the nail so cleanly on the head it sails straight down to the core of the earth:
Stop talking to each other and start buying things
It’s not just about ads, it’s about the corruption of public spaces. The death of social media is when someone tries to start making money off it at the expense of its genuine human interaction, which can not exist in that environment unmolested, and will cascade into the platform’s collapse over time. it’s enshitification, yes, but it’s also something else: “dehumanation”. The drowning of the human element of your social platform through profit seeking.
Informational tragedy. Really is.
This hurts us as consumers, patients, thinkers, feelers. :(
That was an incredible read, thanks for sharing it. Please keep sharing it!
I’m calling 1 year on the over/under for the introduction of blue check marks.
You mean Reddit gold check marks
You mean narwhal bacon badges.
In a similar more minor vein, the Snowpeircer (tv show) sub was administered by the showrunners.
They were mostly subtle about it, but quietly removed lots of posts after a week or so that didn’t fit show promo.
I’m pretty sure they’ve abandoned it now that the show is in limbo.Since before the exodus or after?
Before and worse after
I had no idea. I am well aware of Lunacycle’s toxicity from endless-sphere.com.
I’m not used to seeing this with so many pixels.
I find it has a nice understated impact
It’s so much worse than 15%.
And they said the bears were the ones posting obnoxious huge images!
Member-only story
Medium wants me to pay them to read a story from “Homeless Romantic” who is listed as a “Ph.D. Rocket Surgeon & Aspiring Troglodyte”?
Are they fucking high?
well, whomever describes themselves in such a manner clearly is.
It’s been a wonder that site ever got traction as something credible to get info from and not just a weird mesh of editorial, blogging, and long winded shitposts…
edit: That being said, fuck reddit.
I’ve always seen it as a site for random people to shitpost. Who takes Medium seriously as a credible source?
For me, it was often a place where a lot of qualified people would essentially write blogs because hosting their own site for it would get utterly ignored by google. The last few years though I’ve got more utter morons than people who can write a good article, even for generic questions that they could straight up copy and paste from another site.
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Is all bad online behavior “trolling” now? Isn’t “shill” a better word for someone who is paid to surreptitiously promote something?
Back in my day trolling meant something. It meant you cared enough to actually form a real argument that withstands scrutiny, just to setup for the rug pull. The better your polemic, the more engagement as people debated if you were for real or not.
Shitposting controversial hot takes or dog whistle memes is mid af, do better
From my understanding trolling meant exactly what it says it is: Trolling. I think people for some reason get this mixed up with trolls - as in the fantasy type monster. But I think it actually has to do with the fishing termtrolling where you cast out your line, and see if you can get somebody to take the bait. Once they take the bait, you take em for a ride.
Actually, that’s also where the name of the mythical creature comes from. They’d set up bridges that offer convenient shortcuts as bait for humans
From my understanding trolling meant exactly what it says it is: Trolling. I think people for some reason get this mixed up with trolls - as in the fantasy type monster. But I think it actually has to do with the fishing termtrolling where you cast out your line, and see if you can get somebody to take the bait. Once they take the bait, you take em for a ride.
When the word is used on the Internet it’s meant in the fantasy monster way. Specifically it comes from the story of the troll underneath the bridge, interfering with people trying to cross the bridge.
polemic
po·lem·ic /pəˈlemik/ noun a speech or piece of writing expressing a strongly critical attack on or controversial opinion about someone or something. “his polemic against the cultural relativism of the Sixties”
You can just add “troll” to the pile of words twisted into meaning “people I don’t like”.
mid
No, all bad online behavior now is “bots.”
At least that’s how people in the comments on lemmy and Reddit label them.
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It seems to correlate with the rise in general awareness of LLMs like ChatGPT. It seems like just the threat/possibility of ChatGPT being used has already distorted discourse online.
I always saw it as someone who only repeats talking points verbatim is essentially a robot. If I can’t tell if you are a human posting, or an automated response is there a meaningful difference?
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Shut up, bot!
Edit: Shitty typo
He’d probably need a strong sphincter muscle to manage that.
Lol, how did I miss that
No, all bad online behavior now is “bots.”
At least that’s how people in the comments on lemmy and Reddit label them.
I, and others, have distinguish between shills and bots.
Usually people use shilling as an alternative to astroturfing by paid human beings, while bots are just AI/programming posting.
Shill is a banned word on reddit still right?
No idea!
There’s no way it’s a banned word. /r/neoliberal has a “neoliberal shill of the year” award where they vote for their favorite economist based on social media posts, books released that year, etc.
There was a time when you’d get hit with a [Removed by Reddit] for calling people shills but that was a while back I guess
Is all bad online behavior “trolling” now?
People like throwing buzzwords regardless of their meaning.
it is not “now”. It is exactly as it was being used in 2020, when the article was written, by the mass media. They were calling “troll” everyone they were disagreeing with.
Fellow lemmings, I, for one, am glad that there are no corporate trolls trying to manipulate public opinions on Lemmy, it is the same warm, fuzzy feeling I get when I was watching multiple time Golden Globe nominated summer blockbuster, Barbie, now available on Blu-Ray and select streaming services.
I don’t know about you, but I sure hope Barbie sweeps the Golden Globes next month (and then the Oscars next year.)
I can’t talk about selling out any more, it’s giving me a headache.
I wish I could get some of that retro Reebok stuff he has. I miss the 90s.
Et tu, Barbie?
I can’t believe THE Margot Robbie is on the fediverse.
Good for you, girl!
I know, I can hardly believe it either!
Wait, no, now my astorturfing cover is blown. 😭
I popped over to Reddit for the first time since third party apps were cruelly shut down. It’s clear that Reddit has sunk to new lows. Obviously trolling and a marked decrease in the quality of content
what I noticed is that posts have huge amounts of upvotes, even from small communities, and often no comments or when it does have comments its often very basic stuff, almost AI like
They aren’t even trying with those usernames, lazy.
Yeah, looks like the default “word_wordnumbers” usernames that reddit gives you if don’t change them.
I wonder if that would be an easy way to detect botting by not filling in that field for them.
Yeah, looks like the default “word_wordnumbers” usernames that reddit gives you if don’t change them.
This change is when I knew Reddit was going down the shitter. Automatically handing out default usernames instead of requiring you to pick your own. The only people that could possibly help are a) people with absolutely no imagination whatsoever, b) bots, and c) people making a dozen alts to puff up their main.
Had no idea they were generating names, joke of a site.
Yeah, looks like the default “word_wordnumbers” usernames that reddit gives you if don’t change them.
Funny enough, this started happening on YouTube (comments) as well, around the same time.
The issue with sites starting to use numbering as part of the default username only started happening after AI posting became a thing, because an Achilles heel is the fact that AI can’t come up with enough believable unique names for all the posts they want their AI bots to make.
an Achilles heel is the fact that AI can’t come up with enough believable unique names for all the posts you want your AI bots to make
That seems counterintuitive to me in the context of modern AI approaches. I’m wondering if you could elaborate on that a bit more.
That seems counterintuitive to me in the context of modern AI approaches.
How so? Elaborate?
I’m wondering if you could elaborate on that a bit more.
This seems sufficiently explanatory to me, especially the italicized part…
AI can’t come up with enough believable unique names for all the posts they want their AI bots to make
Unbelievable usernames becomes an easy identifier/tag for identifying bot post.
Edit: since this comment got downvoted (as the assumed reply) I thought I would elaborate a bit more.
Basically, we name our user accounts to fit the society we live in’s norms, it’s naming conventions.
If you just run a bunch of vowels and consonants together, that does not make a username, at least not one that people will recognize as a valid one created by a human being.
Part of how bots are effective is in the quantity of bots that are used. Since it’s near zero cost to spin up a new bot to make posts/comments, many can be made.
However people can track the validity of a user name as being a bot versus human by the quantity of the posts/comments the username makes (only so many hours in a day, and human beings are busy with other things besides just posting on Lemmy), so no one single bot can make too many posts/comments at one time.
Because of this, you need a large quantity of unique names, one for each of your bots, and they have to be believable ones by humans, so they’re not identified as bots.
I can’t believe 8 people had the exact same idea for a post at the same time, that’s crazy
/s
Well, if you’re going to defraud investors by pumping up your numbers before your IPO, you might as well go all out.
Is that recent? I haven’t used Reddit since a few months and that phenomena was previously only on promoted posts (read, ads)
I think it was there for a while, it’s just gone full mask off mode and become particularly noticeable now
like 2 months ago
You know what else is random and probably related to their paid content? Their sorting doesn’t work right anymore. Posts in “hot” are regularly like more than a day old but then also some are brand new like minutes old. But if you sort by top 24 hours…same posts. Sometimes the order is different but easily 75% of the posts are the same. A 24 hour old post with no new comments is “hot”? A one hour old post with 20 comments is in the top posts of the past day?..OKAY
It could be incompetence. Lemmy.world has similar and significant issues with sorting as well and I presume you’re not also implying that paid content has anything to do with lemmy sorting.
Go back to Reddit astroturfer.
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FYI there is also scribe qnd 12ft.io for medium links
The study found some (likely) bot/corporate troll content in 15% of the top 100 subreddits.
Now I’m surprised it’s that low. Feels like a big part of /r/all is bot posts, with the top comments being from bots too
That title is clickbait.
From the article:
In 2020, the Computers in Human Behavior study provided additional insights into the tactics employed by corporate trolls on Reddit. The study focused on the top 100 subreddits, analyzing the content posted within these influential communities. The results were alarming, with 15% of the top 100 subreddits found to have content that was likely posted by bots or corporate trolls, specifically aimed at promoting certain companies or organizations.
That’s 15% of the top 100 subreddits contained some content that was likely posted by bots or corporate trolls.
Even just calling it a “new study” is already a lie
This title is one of the 15%
And a significant part of the remainder are repost bots recycling old popular posts and comments in order to farm karma, which will eventually be sold to OnlyFans spammers, political ops, and corporate shills.
I’ll see the same post on 2 or 3 subs and it will just be something I saw a year or more ago.
It’s not like one of the six biggest power janitors of Reddit has been caught multiple times wrongfully deleting posts, using bot armies to manipulate votes and accepting money from marketing agencies for “consultancy” in social media guerilla marketing.
It’s almost like the company doesn’t give a fuck what their unpaid help does to the userbase or content because they still gets investments regardless.
Fuck spez, fuck GallowBoob, fuck awkwardtheturtle and fuck Sam Altman.
It’s amazing how quickly the admins came down on some subs after the trench titty drama broke. He was basically reddit’s MrBabyMan. And he’s probably not the only one.
Trench ritty drama? Dare I even
Google thatDuckDuckGo that…
What’s Sam Altman’s connection to Reddit?
He was an angel investor and also onboarded a bunch of celebrity investors.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they are trying to whitewash this, since it became a minor point of contention a few months ago
Was also interim CEO for 8 days, to give you an idea of how involved he was. I’ll update with more info and sources later if I have time, otherwise Wayback Machine is your friend
How is Sam Altman related to Reddit?
Corpreddit.
Lemmy feels very much like the old, old Reddit. When it was mostly IT folk and tech savvy people (talking about 2005-2010).
I think reddit peaked around 2015 or so. A much broader audience had found it. There was interesting content from a lot of people.
Now, it still has a lot of good content. But it is definitely past its peak
Maybe it’ll be good and healthy to start again from fresh, get the old feeling again. We just gotta build up that initial content now to grow the appeal to newcomers
The studies are from 2018 and 2020, “new study” in the post title is a complete lie
Corporate trolls at it again!
Reddit feels less genuine for sure, than it would have even as far back as 3 years ago. The mod purge probably accelerated things greatly but in general it’s felt like Reddit was going corporate astroturfing route for a while. Real discussions are very sparse compared to the amount of people telling you “to solve problem, buy this expensive thing!”
At this point the only thing Reddit has is a numbers advantage. The videos are no huge loss because at this point since you’re forced to use their (god awful) mobile app they either autoplay obnoxiously or automatically popup obscuring the comments (discussion is 90% of why I go to a forum why make it harder to see comments?).
The desktop experience is still okay but the constant pushing to get you to enable notifications is very irritating.
Man. I zapped all my cookies the other day, and when I re-loaded reddit, it forced me into a new new version of the mobile site.
Now almost every single comment that isn’t top level is hidden behind the ‘more comments’ button. When I click it, the whole page reloads, with the top comment and the one response. And a button for the next reply. And so on.
I’ve noticed since this change, almost no posts have any discussion any more at all. Which honestly. Why would you bother?
Reddit is clearly trying to make its mobile site as user-unfriendly and goddamn terrible as possible to direct people to use the official app instead. There’s no other explanation for a top 10 in the world site
Actually, looking at the rest of the top 10 sites, the only two with good mobile interfaces are the ones without apps: Google and pornhub lol
Just the other day I thought about my old porn account and remembered the password! So I thought I’d check out the official app since I wouldn’t be giving them ad revenue. Holy cow, it really is as terrible as everyone says! The app and the site! Every third post on the scroll is an ad, until you show NSFW posts, then every third post is a random post from a random sub. The three times I’ve been there I get a notification from some random comment on a random sub. And some banana thing that pops up and won’t go away. All of it is so terrible, including the porn. It’s like going back to your hometown and seeing they bulldozed your old school and turned it into a meat rendering plant.
The pop-iver video player is an infuriating choice. I watched the video, scroll down and the fucking thing follows me?! Wtf?! Why?? Am I going to forget that I just watched that video two seconds ago?! Argh!
And people want Meta involved in the Fediverse, like reddit wasn’t bad enough.
If the fediverse gets a lot of traction, this sort of “spam” will be difficult to moderate and every instance will need to have sophisticated systems to prevent it.
It’s okay Meta is totally great at removing spam and fake accounts.
Well, I see your point. All I’m saying is spam is difficult when you are a large target.
Which is why I WANT lemmy to stay “small to medium”
Downvoted for medium article.
I shouldn’t have to make an account to view news.
If it’s on Medium it’s almost certainly repackaged news anyway.
Am I blind? I don’t even see where it names the study. It just says Pew, who publishes many studies. Does medium expect me to search for their sources?
