It'll happen in the Fediverse too.
People downvote me when I say it. That's all cope. We're not wrong; if and when this goes mainstream, it'll attract the same bad actors just as heavily.
Of course, there are surely already a few here testing the waters.
I think there are some differences that make the fediverse more resilient to this. For example, the absence of cumulative account karma keeps out the reddit style karma farming. The ability to ban whole instances also makes it easier to kick out bad actors. Instance admins could also implement their own rules like switching to an invite based system to reduce bot spam. Also it seems to me that reddit is actively encouraging this kind behaviour to inflate their user statistics and there is no incentive to tolerate this kind of spam for a fediverse server admin.
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karma is meaningless to seo outside of account restrictions. the people doing this as a job aren't doing it for imaginary internet points
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it doesn't matter what individual instances do as long as the largest ones have open signups
Yet you didn't respond to the point that makes the difference:
reddit is actively encouraging this kind behaviour to inflate their user statistics and there is no incentive to tolerate this kind of spam for a fediverse server admin
We are all rats. When this ship sinks, we will float to the next, or (decide to) drop off.
All things considered, how much would actually be lost?
The alternative being.............
This comment made me realise that the internet could have been born, lived, and died, within my lifetime.
Like phone calls, and texting, bad actors ruin everything that they touch.
Even snail mail.
It infuriates me to no end almost everyday I get new plasticized paper ads in my snail mail. Like yeah keep destroying the planet in hopes of selling more junk to destroy the planet with. And my city made it mandatory ! They are not allowed to skip a house.
Idk their new album sounds pretty good
Good actors too, it's the nature of capitalism.
Who is the 'good' actor in this 'capitalism' thing?
It's more of a technical concept within the lore than an actual character.
There are cooperatives and I haven't seen any of them so such spamming. The fediverse is an example of it too.
I consider internet dead at this point. I hang out on the outer edge in niche low population servers like the fediverse that the worst humans mostly ignore because spamming here isn't profitable and manipulating politics doesn't gain much for their efforts at the moment.
Thank you for the strange compliment.
Squeak
The benefit of the fediverse is that it's trivially "forkable". If lemmy.world and other big instances get overwhelmed with bullshit, I fully expect that many smaller chill/focused instances will defederate and keep on doing their own things, chatting only with each other - no need to jump any ships. Perhaps there would also be some in-between, instances which are federated with both worlds, and where you can get a combination of tons of niche information/entertainment but with bots, and a small amount of genuine human interaction. I hope if that ever happens, lemmy-the-software gets sorting algorithms to deal with these situations.
I mean there's nothing preventing them for doing the same thing here. But if we could get a more even split of users between instances it would arguably be harder for them to pull the same thing because a) the admins can intervene and ban those accounts because the admins are not corporate slaves, unless they are in which case b) other instances can just ban the instance that is letting corporations go wild. We've already seen that level of "moderation" with Lemmygrad being ostracized from the wider Lemmy/Piefed ecosystem. It wouldn't work with a disproportionate instances because defederating lemmy.world would be a massive hit on users feeds and the higher user count would make it harder to moderate against these actions.
It's going to require more work from mods and admins, but I imagine we'll fare better than Reddit. After-all Reddit has an incentive to support this kind of behavior.
There's no algorithm to be played in the fediverse. The reward is too low for all the work of making a post visible, and it won't carry to the next post, essentially starting all over again.
There’s no algorithm to be played in the fediverse.
There presumably is. Some metric decides visibility on the feeds. That algorithm not being based on corporate profitability doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
In fact, it doesn't matter if there's no internal incentive. If it's being indexed and shows in searches it will have all the incentive needed to maximise SEO for profit.
Google will never rank fediverse posts high. Said otherwise, the external incentives are not there either.
The Hot ordering is itself an algorithm.
I agree the Fediverse is not in a good spot for something like this.
I actually think this is where the identity system of atproto will be more impactful here as it allows a better verification system. I've been thinking lately you should be able to use hardware attestation + biometric attestation on apps to filter these emulated users out.
And when that happens, we move instances.
I wonder if we could make only the sign-up page of Lemmy and Piefed public to the internet, and the rest only accessible through login and verification of being actually bloody human? Could use anti-scraping measures...
If the idea of a healthy Fediverse requires people moving instances whenever one finds themselves close to bottom-feeders and opportunistic parasites, we already lost.
I see your point, though for me it's not so much the requirement of moving inasmuch it's the ease of doing so.
With traditional social media, you'd need to move entirely to another social media platform while you might not even be able to enjoy similar content. With lemmy&piefed, you can do that.
A never-ending maze would mean the scrapers just hammer our servers forever. Better to lead them into a honeypot and automatically ban their IP. Like PieFed does.
What about a maze that adds a few hundred ms to the response time with each request, so the load gets less the longer it's trapped?
I haven't tried to make something like that. I think it'd be hard to do that without also exhausting our resources too.
Ah, that makes sense
There are a lot of strategies. afaik a tar pit tries to waste the attacker's resources by delaying our responses to their traffic? A honey pot tries to funnel bot traffic towards a place which only bots would go to. Once they go there you know they're a bot and they can be banned.
So just find scrapers and bot farm owners IRL and burn down their houses, easy
How would that layer distinguish AI from non-AI?
That’s the job of the web server, not of the application that runs on it.
There is already software you can get that feeds a never-ending maze of text to AI scrapers, some of which is AI generated and/or designed to poison LLM training. The problem is that these still use up a ton of bandwidth.
Fortunately AI is taking care of that on its own https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07566-y
Yes PieFed has a setting for that. It makes scrapers give up pretty fast but ruins the experience for people without an account so I only use it on really bad days.
Lemmy also has an admin setting like that. Additionally there will be private, federated communities available in version 1.0.
That's how it's been on my mbin instance (fedia.io) for a while now.
the rest only accessible through login and verification
Yes. If you can't fight the death of the www, embrace it! Help making it happen!
/s
I don't need one of those stupid ID verifications. Something else should be that instead, but what, I do not know. Whatever helps counter AI scraping and preserves anonymity.
Not if you use NORD VPN ™, fellow human. NORD VPN ™ guarantees filtering of astroturfing comments made by LLMs! Thats right - NORD VPN ™ does the following:
- Filters out comments made by LLMs
- Does not sell your data
- Filters out comments made by LLMs
I'm looking for a network and/or internet with strong authentication which is open for unique human users only. Sure, bots could still use someone's credentials but at least their scale & impact would be limited.
If you've any suggestion on how to implement that, then it's a million-dollar idea.
The "I'm a human" test that only takes a few seconds and then lets you do what you like for an hour was always vulnerable to 'auth farms'. Pay some poor bastards in the third world a pittance to pass the test a thousand times an hour, let the bots run wild. And the bots have gained the ability to pass the tests themselves, at least by boiling the oceans in some datacentre while the VC money holds out.
Finding the people running the bots, fitting them with some very heavy boots and then seeing if they can swim in the deep ocean is probably needlessly cruel, but I'd be up for tarring and feathering a few. Once the videos got out, the rest might think harder about their life choices...
Most of this work is done via emulators if you have a hardware attestation process built in, it will stop most of it. Obviously you still have a problem with phone farms but those are much more expensive than emulators and there's a physical capacity to them.
strong authentication which is open for unique human users only
Unless you completely ditch anonymity, this can only turn into a state captured propoganda platform. Whoever controls access/auth will have the keys to the content.
For it to happen in the Fediverse AI would have to be training on the Fediverse.
That's what this post is about. Using reddit to plant comments that AI trains on, and subsequently getting AI to spit out your answer to questions it's asked.
As such this can happen anywhere where AI is being trained. The issue is with how AI is training, not with how websites it trains on are being operated.
There isn't really any reason to think the Fediverse won't be used for AI training, if it isn't already. Everything is in the open here, it's easy enough to scrape all the data.
It's one of the reasons I think public voting is a terrible idea. It's a wet dream for hyper-targeted engagement farming. Even to the point it creates a bit of a nightmare scenario for spear phishing and malware injection. The stated "transparency" benefits just seem incredibly trivial compared to the risk, especially when actual malicious actors will simply spam bots and alts, while actual users must navigate this weirdly huge threat surface for basically no good reason.
Only thing stopping it now is that's it's not popular enough to be worth doing.
I know fediverse. Weds users and visibility but with all happening I wish it was disable to every crawler/bot
Most people [...] write [...] comments [...] and hope AI picks them up
Really quite sad if there's even one person out there doing that.
This is also as much of a grift as any SEO that claims to have cracked the code of getting to the top of results. Even if they have figured something reproducible, it will get fixed. If someone can manipulate a search engine to provide results different to what it would otherwise do, that's a bug they will fix
That "most people" part kinda reminds me of this: https://xkcd.com/2501/
Will they though, search engine results lately seem very much like a decisive victory for the SEO slop
only if u use google. Try Qwant.
Or Kagi
Or DDG.
DDG is bing and definitely has the same problems.
If someone can manipulate a search engine to provide results different to what it would otherwise do, that’s a bug they will fix
But there are more people manipulating the results, than people fixing the bugs.
But not in novel ways. Lots of exploiters using the same bug. Fix it once and they're all fixed.
God, I just hate the way these people fucking talk. Everything is a bulleted list and sentence fragments.
100% written by an LLM. They always use this tone and it’s infuriating.
People who abuse GenAI no longer can tell when the shit they post look like GenAI. They only talk to AI so it looks normal to them.
That's one of the signs of LLM output, take any idea and have it flesh it out into short article. It'll bullet point the crap out of it
Yeah, but even when it's not an LLM, they type like this now
Monkey see, monkey do...
LLMs learned it by watching these idiots.
It comes from marketing copy. Same with the emdash. My company has a style guide for marketing material and it calls out using bulleted lists and em dashes exactly how AI does it.
Like the world's worst haiku.
SEO is a grift.
Lemmy just BLEW AWAY the LinkedIn Writing Style.
A few simple witty posts have utterly upended how we communicate on the internet.
Normal Users:
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Post replies
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Up and Downvote
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Embarassingly minimizing the display when your boss approaches the desk.
And maybe that works for normal online interactions.
Sure, it's fine if you're an entry level Lemmy user
But you'll never change the culture of the internet.
So we came up with
Something that's
Even better than
What we used
To post like
Before
We first started using
This online
digital service
For posting our
Thoughts to
Other
Pe
ople
It's called memes.
memory lane man
Decent chance that post was written by AI as well. Or it was a marketing copywriter. Either way it wasn't written by a normal human.
Anyone that works in marketing needs to be flogged in the streets for their crimes.
I get the feeling you and Bill Hicks would have gotten along: https://youtu.be/9h9wStdPkQY
Nahhhh. When ads are clever or funny its fine. This lower effort bullshit need to die
Nah. manipulating people into buying things they don't need is a trash career. It's not a productive or necessary job. It hurts more than it can ever help.
MOST jobs aren't productive or necessary. Just depends on how its used. Gotta have some nuance
Wtf it literally never crossed my might to use a forum like this. So fucking dumb. It's like everyone is scrambling for a couple percent points over the next
Its likely this is designed with a plan to push advertising or self-promotion.
Eg: step one is done - figure out how to both find threads early & get your content picked up as a good answer regularly and consistently. Step 2 - start inserting 'first hand' recommendations or even just mentions of products and services.
I've already seen webpages with the most esoteric or niche product/service recommendations (like some random Indian consultancy with 2 people listed in it, and no other significant web footprint) pop up in first page web results. Its another AI deathblow to the utility of search engines.
People have been doing it for years. At one point, it amounted to a sizable percentage of Reddit’s posts and comments. Just seo spam to their own profile, a few subreddits, and sleep your 600+ accounts for 3 days.
I knew most of it was spam. I just figured it was propaganda from various governments
Line must go up, always & forever.
The turbo-hell part is that the spam comments aren't even being written for humans to see. The intention is that ChatGPT picks up the spam and incorporates it into its training.
I worked at a company that sold to doctors and the marketing team was spending most of their effort on this kind of thing. They said that nowadays when doctors want to know "what should I buy to solve X?" or "which is better A or B?" they ask ChatGPT and take its answer as factual. They said that they were very successful in generating blog articles for OpenAI to train on so that our product would be the preferred answer.
My god. Somehow I hadn't thought of doctors using LLMs to make decisions like that. But of course at least some do.
You never want to know how the sausage is made.
Oof. Haven't met a lot of doctors huh? Check out some of their subreddits
Considering that LLM content that makes it into training content makes the trained LLMs worse... is this adversarial?
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.
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.
but how will we discover the compromised servers when the company running it did not announce it loudly?
and even then the bigger problem could be the advertiser users. lots of moderation capacity would be needed, or some kind of flagging automatism, but as we seen with Piefed people are hating even just milder such things.
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.
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.
It's all "traffic", "new users", and "engagement". I'm sure Spez is over the moon telling his handlers about all the growth.
More than a decade and a half later and pretentious SEO fanatics still fucking make my eyes roll.
Never forget that the morally correct thing to do if you happen to meet one of these people it to punch them in the mouth.
They make me think of kids who hide food they don't want to eat in stupid places and get all surprised when they realize it makes wherever they were hiding it into a biohazard.
Or anyone who thinks they are getting a free benefit from using something a certain way and completely ignoring that each use ruins it a bit more.
Reddit: born full of fake users (sockpuppets), died full of fake users (bots)
Sad beep boop
I have no idea what any of that means, and I'm happy with that.
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
I am wrong on the internet
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.
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.
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.
What a self report. This guy is complicit in turning the age of information into the age of propaganda.
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
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
building a business solely on manipulation
See also: all of advertising and marketing
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.
you should see subreddits devoted to various incurable medical problems. the ones that don't clamp down on supplements and snake oil are horrific and I know for a fact lots of innocent people get caught up in it
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
Even worse: They are hoping that LLMs in training don't realize that it's an ad
Plot twist: They did not build shit, the text is generated by AI, and whatever they do is still done by third country workers.
Polluter.
here is to hoping that lemmy never grows
This doesn't explain why Reddit has decided that I need multiple Hindi sub referrals every day.
Years and years of data regarding me, zero Hindi, zero Indian, zero interest, AND YET here's another suggested Hindi sub! Fantastic work.
But the Jesus ads sealed the deal, adios Redditto
apologies for my off topic ramble, but I feel better.
This is so funny because I'm Indian and I've never come across a Hindi sub on Reddit.
I'm not even exaggerating, EVERY DAY in my feed repeatedly, not even in English, absolutely zero discernible reason. No Chinese. No Brazilian. No German. It's not even random.
Also, Jesus ads. "He gets us". Why Jesus ads in English AND Hindi Indian subs? It's almost spiteful
😭
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.
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?
In any case, fuck spez.
Compared to the organic content here it is unbearable on reddit now.
Reddit feels like Quora at this point with all the affiliate links and promotions
You mean more shit? Because it was already shit.
"These days"? Reddit has been hot garbage since before the 3rd party API bullshit
This person is late to the game. Reddit has been like this for years.
Yikes
I haven’t been in there since the api exodus. I imagine it’s terrible
🤮
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.
Reddit has been agressively banning data dumps of the Epstein files.
the internet needs to be burnt to the ground and built back up for humans to humans. I hate this timeline were are living in
Its scum behavior but its smart. If you can get your product into a reddit thread that gives a ton of free high quality advertising. Its why the site turned to site so fast once normal people found out about it. Suddenly you had products being shilled in every community and threads created solely for the purpose of posting a reply that said to buy a product. AI is just a cherry ontop of the already souless reddit behaviour and quite frankly its what they deserve.
If AI floods every single comment section, to the point the humaness of social media has been completely removed (which it is reaching that imo), how would it effect our consumption of it?
Looking at instagram, my feed is mostly meaningless garbage (which might be my fault to an extent), but what it has meant I simply don't find any reason to go onto it at all. Would this happen on mass if/when AI is so prevalent (lets say a 9:1 bot commenter to human commenter ratio), that we simply have no interest in it anymore?
Either that or folks will happily shovel the slop into their eyeballs and lose all critical thinking ability. It's a toss-up.
lose all critical thinking ability
Are we already at this point?
US is full of companies that publicly claim to manipulate reddit threads as PR protection. They all do it exactly like you'd expect - people with dozens of phones going through threads writing shit. Even if users are banned and their phone fingerprinted they just dump the phones for new ones.
Reddit knows could actually sue them and very likely to win but that would be a lot of attention at them.
The best part of this is - if commercial PR companies can afford to run this then what China, Russia and such are doing must have absolutely bonkers. There's very little internet actually left organic.
In line of SEO, it makes me think, with how the fediverse works, it could end up being a search engine of its own. Including, I may add, for external contents as tracking bots are made. Quite an interesting realization.
people have been doing this the sweaty way for a decade
Didn't it start right as Helen Pao left?
That entire fucking add was just lazily written by an AI.
"Developer" can't be bothered to add "don't to use emoji or bullet points in prompts and dont add a summary and def don't add a second summary at the end?
reddit banned me, so i upvoted this post
I dont believe these people are real