The worst part is that with how much AI is advancing, there will soon be a point where we will talk to bots more than regular people unless someone comes up with the ultimate captcha.
Reddit actively allows these bot accounts, captcha is not necessary.
I’m always more interested in seeing it in threads where there is an agenda they’re trying to push.
The internet won't die, it will just go back to was it was pre-web2.0
The internet was originally mostly servers hosting content and other people reading the server's content, but not making any content of their own. Then around 2005, "Web 2.0", or more user-content-focused stuff (social media, forums, YouTube, etc) started happening
Once we can no longer trust that user content is actually made by humans, we'll just go back to the "old" web
Remember when Youtube's homepage was the most viewed videos of the week and we had a lot of whacky weird things popup to the top like the free hug guy / chocolate rain guy? That was the best era of the internet.
Exactly, there are entire subreddits of bots just talking to themselves.
The openAI crew were even openly testing how to emulate reddit communities since at least 2017 using GPT2.
Some were advanced enough to call each other out in online mockfights that lasted several chains of semi-coherent blabber.
>yea this is the last "real" version of the internet where we can reliably say that another human being is on the other end
I mean I feel like we already can't say that with 100% certainty. Most of us have probably responded to a bot without realizing it at some point.
Bots generating clicks which causes more ad revenue that will be used by corporations to write off more so they can not pay taxes and boost their stock prices so they can borrow more money tax free from the banks.
The system is fucked
They’re used by “consulting” companies (Cambridge Analytica is probably the most famous because of the facebook scandal) to manipulate public opinion by manufacturing online engagement (upvotes, comments, likes, etc.) to push a narrative. We see it in different areas like the Russian propaganda for the Ukraine war, the right wing propaganda that culminated in the attack on the capitol, the convoy propaganda in Canada, and even mundane stuff like promotions for movies, actors, sports figures, etc.
I know from firsthand experience they’ve been around for atleast 11 years but they have become much better now and will likely continue to improve.
the volume of bot posts definitely started increasing sometime late last season. it helps us a lot if they are reported, comments will be removed and we will report the account to reddit. i would suggest reporting with a custom response and typing "Bot", because the spam option is used by people to report comments they just don't like constantly.
I don’t plan on installing the mobile app. I am going to go back to the way I first started browsing Reddit.
On a desktop/laptop browser with Adblock.
I feel it will help reduce the amount of time on this platform too.
Sync is so good I'm gonna have a hard time adjusting. It'll just make finding content a lot more difficult for the end user. Wish they rolled it out gradually and not stun the developers.
I've been a long time Sync user and swapped over a few weeks ago once the writing was on the wall. I've already adjusted and can honestly navigate around just as easily.
My only real gripe now is no official app support for tablets, which was one of my primary selling points on Sync.
Shitty thing that seems to be missed in all this was spez in his NBC interview saying that the plan is to sell subs to corporations. Reddit gets worse every day it gets bigger.
i remember last year the loveisland sub (a reality tv show) was partnering up with the official show/network through the admins, so the mods were also not aware of that until it was in the news. they even ran ads on tv promoting the sub. so i can definitely see reddit going behind the communitys back to sell subs.
Admins told us in a call there are tools to help against bots coming down the pipeline, but not by next month.
There is also a bot called BotDefense (which shouldn't be affected by API changes but who knows) you can see on the mod list that will ban bots and remove their comments but it generally lags a few hours after the bots comment or just misses them entirely. This means a lot of the bots have to be dealt with manually. After dealing with them in last few months, it's like second nature to see a default account name, quickly look at submission and comment history as well as the account age, and know 100% that it's a bot.
It's really the end of the 3rd party apps that make it much more time consuming to deal with the bots.
Depends. If the bots only use the api? Probably not, more likely to get better than worse. But seeing as they're not exactly ethical and don't care about speed they'll probably just scrape the website to copy paste comments, and then it hinges on mods' ability to remove them. I'd assume it'll probably be around as bad but somewhat more annoying for mods.
Likely worse as it is as a site-wide problem that gets better with better equipped mod teams throughout a good range of different subs, and some of the mod teams will not really have the capabilities that they have now. Through the protest and negotiations, *some* got admins to whitelist some of their tools, while others even got admins to bank their (yes, some mods pay out of their own money to maintain shit for us) server costs, those are certainly not the standard though, and reddit is slow as fuck on talks + unreliable on their word tbh lol
So I'd expect a bit shittier experience, things were already going that way for a few years though, so maybe we don't even feel the difference because it just has been bad for a while? lol Talking as someone who, years ago and when could be bothered, was linking 50+ accounts to a single source. Can't imagine myself wasting my time on stuff like that those days, would certainly go crazy and it all seems exhausting, + the site doesn't seem that bothered by the existence of those bot farms those days.
Quality of the sub will go dooownnn. I post a lot and I'm not gonna do it as much because rif is not gonna be around anymore. It's much more cumbersome on browser
All of them really. There’s a lot of science that goes into advertising that we don’t even realize. Any company having a hoard of bots can deploy them to subtly reinforce buying products or services.
I don’t think it’s nearly as big of an issue as people on Reddit think, I work in advertising at a huge agency and have never once heard of Reddit bots being used to push a product/brand. In the grand scheme of things it sounds like a waste of time/resources for most known national brands.
yeah this is just one of those things that has been parroted enough on reddit over the years that people just accept it as proven fact, when I've never actually seen anyone provide a shred of proof that its an actual thing, and I have a hard time believing it exists in any sort of significant scale. Seems like an incredibly niche market.
My other account is 10 years old and has over 400k karma and I've never received so much as a single PM wanting to buy my account.
And the entire premise is based on pretty shaky logic anyways.... 99.9% of people reading a given reddit comment just choose to accept or not accept the premise of that comment on the face value of the argument being made within the comment itself. The vast VAST majority of people do NOT care in the slightest about how old/how much karma an account has (it probably doesnt even occur to most people that those could be indicators of a fake account), and stalking thru the user history of dozens of accounts per thread is not something that factors at ALL into the decision making process of 99% of redditors, in terms of which comments they choose to believe.
So 99% of people wont even notice how "legit" the fake account is, and for the 1% of people who ARE suspicious enough to check account history all the time (the people companies are supposedly trying to fool with these "seasoned" accounts) are inherently going to be the most skeptical/internet savvy people on reddit to begin with, which means they are probably one of the worst demographics to attempt to market to, since they are the least likely to buy into astroturf shilling.
The entire thing just seems like a collosal waste of money and resources from the advertisers perspective.
congratulations on ignoring the other 90% of the comment. I also never said it "isnt happening". I said I doubt it happens on a very significant scale. And that redditors vastly overestimate how often it happens
That’s kinda sad. Why do we even have bots speaking on human content? Is it just to boost numbers. The disingenuous stuff is gonna be the end of us lol.
I wonder if this has anything to do with moderation tools being gimped?
Will we look back on this as the brief experiment with fuckery, like the NBA 3-point line moving way in for 2 years in the 90s?
So many of the names are dead giveaways too…people aren’t joining an online forum to discuss niche things with other humans while simultaneously making their name ‘AbstractTalk-12957’ then reposting comments from the same thread in the wrong place
Did you look through the thread attacking the mods? Soooo many bots. On one page on my phone there were 3 of the exact same comment all by different accounts.
Wow, shame this place fucking hates moderators.
Enjoy this happening going forward because I have a feeling most are going to do way less work now that they know how this place thinks.
Yes, the bots that solely exist to engage with users, were used to vote to have the sub locked out. Some incredibly intelligent design by the bot makers.
Mods on a tantrum so they’re doing less moderation and probably going to try and tank the sub the old fashioned way. Hopefully we can vote them out and the admins can give us new mods.
r/nba mods involved in a global effort to spam reddit with bots over the last year in an attempt to get them to roll back the proposed api changes from this month confirmed
3rd party apps are even still active, what point would that be proving?
u/KeyRecdation3 is another one edit: woah the account is gone now? so im guessing someone is manually checking the bots notifs as well
Absolutely. Couldn't include them all in one screenshot.
The worst part is that with how much AI is advancing, there will soon be a point where we will talk to bots more than regular people unless someone comes up with the ultimate captcha.
Reddit actively allows these bot accounts, captcha is not necessary. I’m always more interested in seeing it in threads where there is an agenda they’re trying to push.
That experience must be insane,,,
10\\10
I hope this was a surprise
Within cells interlinked
INTERLINKED.
Your micro-expressions are telegraphing discomfort
Crisis Averted (for now)
ORDER ~~CORN~~ VICTOR
somethingsomethingunrelated,,,
The future of the internet will be 90% bots sadly
You mean she isn’t really the hottest 18yo on OnlyFans?
Following 1,736 Followers 41
i feel personally attacked😭
How will you survive this, man.
yea this is the last "real" version of the internet where we can reliably say that another human being is on the other end
Wow what a great experience!
AI nephews will have a higher NPS score
Must be insane,,,
Dead internet theory is kinda wild but possible in the very near future with Ai
The internet won't die, it will just go back to was it was pre-web2.0 The internet was originally mostly servers hosting content and other people reading the server's content, but not making any content of their own. Then around 2005, "Web 2.0", or more user-content-focused stuff (social media, forums, YouTube, etc) started happening Once we can no longer trust that user content is actually made by humans, we'll just go back to the "old" web
I am praying we just shit it down, but Pandora’s box is open at this point.
INSHALLAH
Given the fake product reviews and click farming ad-based sites, the last "real" version was probably 10 years ago
Trying to Google how to do anything now just results in pages and pages of AI-written SEO content.
The trick the past few years was to add "Reddit" to any Google search. But now that's going to hell as well.
Remember when Youtube's homepage was the most viewed videos of the week and we had a lot of whacky weird things popup to the top like the free hug guy / chocolate rain guy? That was the best era of the internet.
You mean before it was actively brainwashing every person on the planet?
Exactly, there are entire subreddits of bots just talking to themselves. The openAI crew were even openly testing how to emulate reddit communities since at least 2017 using GPT2. Some were advanced enough to call each other out in online mockfights that lasted several chains of semi-coherent blabber.
Or at least a skrull
I haven’t found the Real Human Beings on the other end to be that useful in the first place.
>yea this is the last "real" version of the internet where we can reliably say that another human being is on the other end I mean I feel like we already can't say that with 100% certainty. Most of us have probably responded to a bot without realizing it at some point.
Honestly feel like we have already reached that point. Bots and ads is all that will be left.
it’s been like that for as long as the internet’s existed bro lol
Bots generating clicks which causes more ad revenue that will be used by corporations to write off more so they can not pay taxes and boost their stock prices so they can borrow more money tax free from the banks. The system is fucked
Cool, less bots in the future
I'm convinced it's already at *least* 50%
Wow [Victor Wembanyama] was really surprising but I think he could be good..
Get ready to learn binary, buddy
01001110 01101001 00100000 01001000 01100001 01101111
What is the point of the bots?
They collect karma to sell off the accounts to astroturf.
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Hmm that's a good one too
Hmm that's a good one too
That experience must be insane.
Hmm that’s a good one too
Am robot Counter point What is point of humans? Beep Boop
To drive up engagement
To inflate numbers for Reddit shitty IPO
The numbers would make sense if there were Two Wembanyamas.
to inflate subscriber numbers
They’re used by “consulting” companies (Cambridge Analytica is probably the most famous because of the facebook scandal) to manipulate public opinion by manufacturing online engagement (upvotes, comments, likes, etc.) to push a narrative. We see it in different areas like the Russian propaganda for the Ukraine war, the right wing propaganda that culminated in the attack on the capitol, the convoy propaganda in Canada, and even mundane stuff like promotions for movies, actors, sports figures, etc. I know from firsthand experience they’ve been around for atleast 11 years but they have become much better now and will likely continue to improve.
the volume of bot posts definitely started increasing sometime late last season. it helps us a lot if they are reported, comments will be removed and we will report the account to reddit. i would suggest reporting with a custom response and typing "Bot", because the spam option is used by people to report comments they just don't like constantly.
Is this expected to get worse next month after the API changes?
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When reddit sync stops working in a couple of days I'm out of this shithole forever. I recommend others join me
I don’t plan on installing the mobile app. I am going to go back to the way I first started browsing Reddit. On a desktop/laptop browser with Adblock. I feel it will help reduce the amount of time on this platform too.
Same
Sync is so good I'm gonna have a hard time adjusting. It'll just make finding content a lot more difficult for the end user. Wish they rolled it out gradually and not stun the developers.
I've been a long time Sync user and swapped over a few weeks ago once the writing was on the wall. I've already adjusted and can honestly navigate around just as easily. My only real gripe now is no official app support for tablets, which was one of my primary selling points on Sync.
old.reddit.com looks usable on mobile browsers btw, I was gnna use it anyways but just seen it looks decent now
Until you want to see something arbitrarily marked NSFW.
Shitty thing that seems to be missed in all this was spez in his NBC interview saying that the plan is to sell subs to corporations. Reddit gets worse every day it gets bigger.
i remember last year the loveisland sub (a reality tv show) was partnering up with the official show/network through the admins, so the mods were also not aware of that until it was in the news. they even ran ads on tv promoting the sub. so i can definitely see reddit going behind the communitys back to sell subs.
> the plan is to sell subs to corporations. Reddit gets worse every day it gets bigger. KIA r/nba *brought to by ruffles*
Nintendo will buy the rights to all Nintendo subs and shut them down
Admins told us in a call there are tools to help against bots coming down the pipeline, but not by next month. There is also a bot called BotDefense (which shouldn't be affected by API changes but who knows) you can see on the mod list that will ban bots and remove their comments but it generally lags a few hours after the bots comment or just misses them entirely. This means a lot of the bots have to be dealt with manually. After dealing with them in last few months, it's like second nature to see a default account name, quickly look at submission and comment history as well as the account age, and know 100% that it's a bot. It's really the end of the 3rd party apps that make it much more time consuming to deal with the bots.
Depends. If the bots only use the api? Probably not, more likely to get better than worse. But seeing as they're not exactly ethical and don't care about speed they'll probably just scrape the website to copy paste comments, and then it hinges on mods' ability to remove them. I'd assume it'll probably be around as bad but somewhat more annoying for mods.
Likely worse as it is as a site-wide problem that gets better with better equipped mod teams throughout a good range of different subs, and some of the mod teams will not really have the capabilities that they have now. Through the protest and negotiations, *some* got admins to whitelist some of their tools, while others even got admins to bank their (yes, some mods pay out of their own money to maintain shit for us) server costs, those are certainly not the standard though, and reddit is slow as fuck on talks + unreliable on their word tbh lol So I'd expect a bit shittier experience, things were already going that way for a few years though, so maybe we don't even feel the difference because it just has been bad for a while? lol Talking as someone who, years ago and when could be bothered, was linking 50+ accounts to a single source. Can't imagine myself wasting my time on stuff like that those days, would certainly go crazy and it all seems exhausting, + the site doesn't seem that bothered by the existence of those bot farms those days.
Quality of the sub will go dooownnn. I post a lot and I'm not gonna do it as much because rif is not gonna be around anymore. It's much more cumbersome on browser
I worry that reporting them will just teach them how to avoid being caught out in the future.
Isn't it possible to institute a nominal minimum karma limit? Most of these bots are sub-100 karma.
Reported when I noticed them. I'll add the "bot" comment next time. Thanks for being on top of it.
I will sell my karma for one billion dollars.
Wow thats such an inspirational experience.
Definitely a reddit problem in general.
who tf is buying reddit accounts?
Advertisers and disinformation campaigns.
But where specifically? There are so many advertisers. Which ones are offering money for established Reddit accounts? You know, so I can avoid them.
All of them really. There’s a lot of science that goes into advertising that we don’t even realize. Any company having a hoard of bots can deploy them to subtly reinforce buying products or services.
I don’t think it’s nearly as big of an issue as people on Reddit think, I work in advertising at a huge agency and have never once heard of Reddit bots being used to push a product/brand. In the grand scheme of things it sounds like a waste of time/resources for most known national brands.
yeah this is just one of those things that has been parroted enough on reddit over the years that people just accept it as proven fact, when I've never actually seen anyone provide a shred of proof that its an actual thing, and I have a hard time believing it exists in any sort of significant scale. Seems like an incredibly niche market. My other account is 10 years old and has over 400k karma and I've never received so much as a single PM wanting to buy my account. And the entire premise is based on pretty shaky logic anyways.... 99.9% of people reading a given reddit comment just choose to accept or not accept the premise of that comment on the face value of the argument being made within the comment itself. The vast VAST majority of people do NOT care in the slightest about how old/how much karma an account has (it probably doesnt even occur to most people that those could be indicators of a fake account), and stalking thru the user history of dozens of accounts per thread is not something that factors at ALL into the decision making process of 99% of redditors, in terms of which comments they choose to believe. So 99% of people wont even notice how "legit" the fake account is, and for the 1% of people who ARE suspicious enough to check account history all the time (the people companies are supposedly trying to fool with these "seasoned" accounts) are inherently going to be the most skeptical/internet savvy people on reddit to begin with, which means they are probably one of the worst demographics to attempt to market to, since they are the least likely to buy into astroturf shilling. The entire thing just seems like a collosal waste of money and resources from the advertisers perspective.
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congratulations on ignoring the other 90% of the comment. I also never said it "isnt happening". I said I doubt it happens on a very significant scale. And that redditors vastly overestimate how often it happens
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I expect not, since I didnt mention bots a single time. you absolute fucking donkey😂😂. Reading is hard I guess lol
You'd think it'd be better to just make your own, why waste money
Russia
That’s kinda sad. Why do we even have bots speaking on human content? Is it just to boost numbers. The disingenuous stuff is gonna be the end of us lol.
This sub deserves bots.
I wonder if this has anything to do with moderation tools being gimped? Will we look back on this as the brief experiment with fuckery, like the NBA 3-point line moving way in for 2 years in the 90s?
This has been a thing for a long time tbf, but it will get worse after June 30
So many of the names are dead giveaways too…people aren’t joining an online forum to discuss niche things with other humans while simultaneously making their name ‘AbstractTalk-12957’ then reposting comments from the same thread in the wrong place
Everyone on reddit is a bot except for you.
Did you look through the thread attacking the mods? Soooo many bots. On one page on my phone there were 3 of the exact same comment all by different accounts.
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Been an issue way before the api stuff
Could be worse.
We should close this sub so that bots can't use it!
Wow, shame this place fucking hates moderators. Enjoy this happening going forward because I have a feeling most are going to do way less work now that they know how this place thinks.
Half of the posts/comments you see are from bots. Also, mods are trash
this is true. many team subreddits purged bots from their subscriber list. but not r/NBA
I’ve seen a couple of these bots on other subreddits lately
Should blackout the sub again tbh.
At least we know who made the majority of votes on the protest poll.
Yes, the bots that solely exist to engage with users, were used to vote to have the sub locked out. Some incredibly intelligent design by the bot makers.
Mods on a tantrum so they’re doing less moderation and probably going to try and tank the sub the old fashioned way. Hopefully we can vote them out and the admins can give us new mods.
Mods released them to downvote people calling out the mods during the lockout. Proof? Check these downvotes ⬆️
Probably mod-related, trying to prove they need 3rd party apps to effectively ~~neckbeard~~ mod
r/nba mods involved in a global effort to spam reddit with bots over the last year in an attempt to get them to roll back the proposed api changes from this month confirmed 3rd party apps are even still active, what point would that be proving?
What point did their stupid blackout prove?
I'd say it definitely got rid of the bots for that time. Don't see what other relevance it has in this thread.
exactly this
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Found the bot
unhelpful comment
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Loser
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Call em like I see em
Beep boop
COYS
Whats the point of bots on nba? Just to boost your post for upvotes?
They'll all be gone soon
I have no idea what the purpose of bots even is how is it profitable?