Marketers and their bots have been using reddit to hype up brands. No wonder Reddit feels like shit these days.
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I have no idea what any of that means, and I’m happy with that.
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
Shitification.
It means shitification.
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
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 ™.
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?
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
It’ll happen in the Fediverse too.
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…
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.
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.
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
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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…
Squeak
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.
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…
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.
Lemmy also has an admin setting like that. Additionally there will be private, federated communities available in version 1.0.
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.
That’s how it’s been on my mbin instance (fedia.io) for a while now.
That’s discord model.
Fediverse needs to have a layer which traps AI in a never-ending maze.
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.
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.
So just find scrapers and bot farm owners IRL and burn down their houses, easy
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
A never-ending maze would mean the scrapers just hammer our servers forever.
Is that how tarpitting works? I didn’t know.
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.
Sadly that only works for scrapers, content engaging bots are immune to it.
How would that layer distinguish AI from non-AI?
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.
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
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.
That “most people” part kinda reminds me of this: https://xkcd.com/2501/
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.
Compared to the organic content here it is unbearable on reddit now.
Yikes
SEO is a grift.
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
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
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.
It’s all “traffic”, “new users”, and “engagement”. I’m sure Spez is over the moon telling his handlers about all the growth.
Reddit: born full of fake users (sockpuppets), died full of fake users (bots)
Sad beep boop
Polluter.
