Will Manidis is the CEO of AI-driven healthcare startup ScienceIO
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Way too many…
I was born before the Internet. The Internet is always lumped into the “entertainment” part of my brain. A lot of people that have grown up knowing only the Internet think the Internet is much more “real”. It’s a problem.
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I would recommend switching categories one and two. Sometimes our thoughts are fucked.
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You know what, that’s entirely fair.
Vision is processed in our brains
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If it’s well-written enough to be entertaining, it doesn’t even matter whether it’s real or not. Something like it almost certainly happened to someone at some point.
Typical AITA post:
“I want to do what I want with my own life. AITA?”
Everybody Sucks Here
ESH
I’m thinking of pulling the plug on Reddit (at least for a while). My tipping point has become how the “drone” story is becoming popular. At first it was intriguing and mysterious (the airport shutdowns and reports of large vehicles at low levels was fascinating), but I’m getting the vibe it’s a misinformation campaign to distract the US from how we are about to be changed.
I was actually permabanned in the “News” sub for an innocuous comment. All it was is that I noted the federal authorities are likely correct for saying most of the reports of “UFOs” are likely airplanes and manmade drones, and to play devil’s advocate I mentioned there were likely legitimate reports of UAPs, but since the majority were probably mistaken planes the Federal agencies’ reactions were technically truthful.
It’s “reality television” on a discussion forum to karma farm and help push other kinds of misinformation.
Look at that, the detection heuristics all laid out nice and neatly. The only issue is that Reddit doesn’t want to detect bots because they are likely using them. Reddit at one point was using a form of bot protection but it wasn’t for posts; instead, it was for ad fraud.
Oh boy, identity mechanics to curb out the last vestiges of privacy.
They’re pretty much declaring a war on VPNs also
Yep. More than half the time I can’t access Reddit through Proton VPN.
I can. But i have an account.
Also doesn’t fix the problem at all, I can still just use AI to post to my main account
I wonder where people in the future will get their information from. What trustworthy sources of information are there? If the internet is overrun with bots, then you can’t really trust anything you read there, as it could all be propaganda. What else to do, though, to get your news?
That’s the killer app right there: the complete inability for the common person to distinguish between true and false. That’s what they’re going for.
let me scan your eyeballs. it’s the only way
Yeah, a real problem solver would probably be to remove the incentive for someone to do this.
It would probably be far less likely for someone to do that on lemmy, as there is no karma and you dont get paid for upvotes or something. (Still there are incentives, like creating credibility, celebrity accounts, maybe influence public opinion, self-pleasure from seeing upvotes to “your” posts/comments etc., but they arent such potent incetives as directly monetary incetives.)
Wait what. I had been on reddit for years and I had never been aware of this. You get paid for upvotes?
And I thought “karma” was just another word for “upvotes”.
Well since around a year ago they decided to give some direct monetary incentive to farm upvotes and gold, as people weren’t already doing this to sell accounts.
I dunno, part of me is ok with it. It’s clear to me how bad things are going to get. So having certain platforms or spaces with some level of public identity validation seems like it might be ok…
Well, it’s a great method to find people to target for political speech.
Especially when it’s about gathering real information. When everything you read is written by an anonymous author, you’d have no chance to know whether it’s true or wrong, except if it’s a paper on theoretical maths of course.
Lemmy is not safe either.
there isnt so much incentive. No advertisement. Upvote counters behave weirdly in the fediverse (from what i can see).
No advertisement
You don’t think that commercial products can’t get good (or bad) coverage in a place like this? In any discussion of hardware, software (including, for example, video games), cars, books, movies, television, etc., there’s plenty of profit motive behind getting people interested in things.
There are already popular and unpopular things here. Some of those things are pretty far removed from a direct profit motive (Linux, Star Trek memes, beans). But some are directly related to commercial products being sold now (current video games and the hardware to run them, specific types of devices from routers to CPUs to televisions to bicycles or even cars and trucks, movies, books, etc.).
Not to mention the political motivations to influence on politics, economics, foreign affairs, etc. There’s lots of money behind trying to convince people of things.
As soon as a thread pops up in a search engine it’s fair game for the bots to find it, and for that platform to be targeted by humans who unleash bots onto that platform. Lemmy/Mastodon aren’t too obscure to notice.
There are no virtual points to earn on Lemmy. So hopefully it will resist the enshitification for while.
I still dont see why people care about reddit karma. Its just a number?
Same reason why people play cookie clicker, watch the useless number go up.
Also, some subs are downright hostile to people with low karma.
Gotta love those dopamine fixes, huh?
I actually got auto-added to some bullshit sub that was “for people with so much karma.” I don’t remember what the number was, because it was such a useless sub that no one engaged with.
Some subreddits require a minimum karma score for posting. And it gets less likely to get shadow banned the more karma you have.
Ohhh right. I remember subs had that bullshit. I didnt know about the shadowban thing though.
I politely disagree.
Why
In the age of A/B testing and automated engagement, I have to wonder who is really getting played? The people reading the synthetically generated bullshit or the people who think they’re “getting engagement” on a website full of bots and other automated forms of engagement cultivation.
How much of the content creator experience is itself gamed by the website to trick creators into thinking they’re more talented, popular, and well-received than a human audience would allow and should therefore keep churning out new shit for consumption?
It’s ultimately about ad money. They haven’t cared it’s humans or bots either. They keep paying out either way. This predates long before the LLM era. It’s bizarre.
It’s pretty much a case of the POSIWID. The system is meant to be genuine human engagement. What the system does is artificial at every step. Turns out its purpose is to fabricate things for bots to engage with. And this is all propped up by people who for some reason pay to keep the system running.
This reminds me of the ad supported games that advertise other ad supported games. I think I’ve even seen an ad supported game run an ad for itself.
I wonder if at some point people will walk away from these platforms and the platform and its owners won’t even be able to tell.
This is the whole reason that I discovered and came to Lemmy. Reddit is literally 90% bots, from the posts, to the filtering, to the censoring, to outright banning. It’s a mess.
Or getting this shit after you comment somewhere:
“Excuse me but could you please send a direct message to our admins to verify your account before placing a comment? Everyone has to do it.”
I replied “go fuck yourself” and they banned me instantly and I never even submitted anything lmao.
Shiri’s Scissor was supposed to be a cautionary tale…
Tbh, I see how this can be really good for people. We can never again believe that what apples are saying online is really representative of the general population. It never has been, but now we have a really solid reason to dispel the belief that doesn’t require much explanation.
That said, we’ll need to combat this with more right knit communities where people can better identify themselves as human. Captcha doesn’t do that, but the Goth girls on VF so long ago had it figured out. We gotta do proper “salutes”.
But I mean, AI is the asshole, so maybe that’s why they went to the front page?
Why not? r/AmlTheAsshole is about entertainment, not truth. It would be an indictment of AI if it couldn’t replicate a short, funny story.
Does Lemmy have any features that resist this kind of astroturfing?
No one would consider bots talking to one another a real conversation, but is there anything regular users can do?
To be fair it was bots that voted them to the front page.
Maybe they’re using the subreddit to try to train morality into the model?
