A Reddit bot drove me insane

I'm unsure how to understand your comment because both things exist on Reddit:

1. subreddits where sane things are removed and their posters are banned in order to astroturf a moderator's insane opinions as normal

2. subreddits where insane things are removed and their posters are banned, as they should be, but the banned posters (who can be very numerous!) try very hard to make it out like it's situation 1.

I was quite surprised when a bunch of years ago a unidentified aerial phenomena was sighted around Rio de Janeiro recorded and witnessed by hundreds, the military following and shooting it down, and every dedicated subreddit deleted every submission.

It's really surprising how long reddit lasted.

Slashdot lasted maybe 10 years (though still limps on). Digg lasted about 4 years before it started shedding users at alarming rates (and 6 years before it killed itself).

But after 20 years, Reddit still is still gaining users; It's not dying yet.

Reddit has changed so much over time. Reddit of 2006 was very different to reddit of 2008, and reddit of 2013 was very different again. By 2019, it's more or less managed to reinvent itself as an App, trading blows with Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok, almost unrecognisable.

I'm sure many people will put peak-reddit around 2019, but for me, Reddit of roughly 2011 was my favourite, and it's only been down hill from there.

I don't think Reddit can re-invent itself again, only continue to get worse. But I suspect it will still be around in 10 years.

It never ceases to amaze me that LUE is still active (especially by modern GameFAQs standards) so many years after the quarantine.

The sad part to me is that there's not many online communities left that focus on helping sharing their knowledge with newcomers. I'm excluding discord doxxing generation communities here, because they are really unhelpful for newbies and the opposite of a safe learning environment for kids.

When I built my first website, xhtmlforum and selfhtml forum was amazing as it was a wiki combined with a community around it. The same for pentesting and learning how to solve CTFs. The same for electronics and how to build, etch, and debug motherboards for 6502/i386/etc. I could go on and on forever, but I loved the web for what it was: It always had an answer for anything that I could ever imagine, with other people wanting to build the same cool things, together, as a community.

And that spirit is kind of gone now. Now the statistical majority(?) wants to get famous and rich and be instagram and tiktok idols, without building something to get there. The quick buck has the priority now, and there's maybe some dozens of youtubers left that want to make knowledge on a beginner level accessible, which I have huge respect for. But video content is temporary, especially on platforms with shitty discovery methods like Youtube.

But the wikis and communities? Haha, good luck finding posts from pre 2010 with google. They've all been wiped out.

Just last week I wanted to explain to some junior dev what XHTML1.1 strict and the idea of separation of concerns was about when we still cared about accessibility. Google gave me 2 useful blog posts post-2017, 2 youtube videos of someone raging about it and favoring web components. And that was it. I was flabbergasted how much knowledge is lost.

There is no point in learning new ideas and concepts if you forgot how we got there, because we'll end up in an endless loop of repeating ourself. And I think the worst nightmare of 1984 has come true already. Google already controls the present, and the web archive might be nice but is absolutely useless as a search engine.

I wanted to start a pentest/CTF community because that's what I care most about nowadays. But turns out there's not many web forum software that's left and not enshittified yet that came after the PHP age. Now I'm writing my own markdown based forum software, with a webasm frontend for it and the idea to make all posts storable/shareable as markdown threads.

I don't want knowledge to get lost again in databases.

Wow, a GameFAQs reference. I remember hanging on Z-Tack and some other Atari 2600 message board with silly fake ranks and weird harmless shenanigans I can't even clearly recall. Then there was Magician Type 0, DSL forums, and Outboards, and "Ace" something, and darkpage.net, all clones of the Gamefaqs message board design in variations of PHP and ASP.net. It's how I got into programming. And here we are.

Nah, this is just time passing. Us early internet users are just getting older and discovering the passage of time.

Ever find a great new restaurant? Small, quirky, but good? Things pick up, it grows, maybe moves to a new location. Everything's shiny and great. It's busy and feels fun to know about? Then over time it becomes less fun. The staff aren't working at some cool new place, but just working the same job over and over and you can tell. The newness wears off, and things start to just wear. A couple years later you reconnect with someone you haven't seen in a while and they recommend the place. You haven't been there forever. You go and it's a ghost of what it was. That wasn't enshitification, just the passing of time.

Enjoy the cool moments/places/songs/movies for what they are, don't expect them to be some sort of constant in life. 'music sucks now, movies suck now, XYZ niche thing fandom loves sucks now'. Nah. It's the same that it's ever been. But time has passed yet you want that moment of discovering XYZ to go for ever because it was so good, but it can't. Time won't allow that.

Oh god, LUE never thought I'd see it referenced again does anybody expect jinjo still?

> the enshittification cycle is just that, a predictable cycle.

We will continue not to "have nice things" until more people are willing to pay for high quality services.

its basically goes:

grow community > get popular > get popular problems > get capitalists involved > enshittification

This works for things you are actively interested in, but old Reddit was cool in that random things would pop up with posts from experts related to the topic. You could get exposed to all kinds of interesting stuff outside your normal focus. And for your focus it was amazing. Not just the same 30 regular contributors in the small walled gardens we now inhabit/self curate.

I enjoy making music. I've started commenting on peoples youtube/soundcloud. And I've made a small circle of people to talk with, but it's so far removed from what Reddit used to provide before it became a 'content feed'.

I'd say at least 70% of reddit "hobby" spaces are people buying something with little research, then posting the picture of the thing they bought.

Any real discussion is drowned out so the average post now is "bought these, new to the hobby, what do I do with them?".

The meshtastic sub is a good example of that. People buying hobbyist hardware, without doing any research. They probably saw some youtube video, hit the amazon "buy", then when it arrived, they're stumped.

I used to think that the up voting mechanic was the future of the internet.

Now I think that it's a perverse incentive that requires very heavy handed moderation to not suck (AKA more free labor), and that time decaying posts can discourage quality, in-depth discussions.

Corollary: necroing forum threads isn't necessarily bad.

I think it's less "echo chamber" than under direct political influence.

It takes a lot of effort to moderate a subreddit. People will post stuff all day, in large volumes.

Who's going to be willing to do that? Sure, some will just be nice people with a ton of free time, but many will definitely be political activists (or even state actors at this point) who have something to promote.

What's ironic is this thread is full of comments agreeing that Reddit sucks because the voting/karma system is flawed and shadow banning is toxic and deranged yet all those very features and policies exist here. In fact, HN is mentioned in the Wikipedia article for shadow banning as an early adopter of the practice. (Yes I agree it sucks but that's not the point of my comment.)

So what changed or what makes this place different? I would argue it's not the forum software but rather run differently, not placing in charge of every subreddit a cabal of unemployed fringe lunatics wielding power and waging war against their users because it's all they have.

Or maybe the forum software does suck and some just naturally migrated to a text-only low-bandwidth version of Reddit?

part of the echo chamber is also instant shadow bans on many of the major subs, and especially political ones, unless you consistently comment (shadow banned) comments and eventually get whitelisted by a mod or bot who's determined you to be the "right" sort of commenter. and again an instant shadow ban again the second you trigger any "bad" keywords

> My pet theory is that someone who claims reddit is a great place for niche hobbies were never part of an old-school forum with truly passionate and engaging members.

This. On forums you recognize members by their funny avatars and the hyper specific advice that they have (useful or otherwise). Stickied posts like "timbit2's Guide to Vintage Frobulators" or "New to Frobs? Not Sure Where to Start? READ" abound. There are usually decades of easily-searchable posts accumulated. People reply to your threads helpfully. The marketplace forums are full of well-cared-for gear.

On Reddit you get a lot of beauty shots and question posts with replies like "bro just get the new Vinculum x Chadbert420 frobber. Shit is [fire emojis]". There's usually a woefully out-of-date wiki or sticky that you can only access from one interface or another. There's no sense of community, just upvotes of pictures for clout.

Of course these are contrived straw men versions of their respective communities but in my experience they're correct more often than not. I have been dipping my toe into various Discords that seem to have a better sense of community but Discord doesn't seem to lend itself to longer-form content as forums do... I wonder whether this is something the Discord platform could be augmented to facilitate.

Reddit was definitely an amazing place for Niche hobbies. Forums were great too, but the layout and having an "orangered" beat out forums. Plus you could be on so many forums at essentially the same time. Prior to reddit I had basically the same setup with RSS feeds for like my top 10-15 forums. But reddit basically copied and eclipsed that and the forums pretty much all died.

Forums were great too, but reddit made it really easy to get access to new niches quickly. Without having to join a new site, learn the forum slang and etiquette, etc.

Reddit is awful now though. IDK what the alternative is either. I'm in a few discords and Facebook groups that cover most topics but they both offer a much poorer user experience imo.

I was an active contributor to /r/espresso for a while, but in the process of the hobby I realized I disagree with some of their advice and best practices. Minor stuff really.

I would not describe the sub as toxic or anything, but it's literally impossible to get a dissenting opinion across on Reddit. Other hobby subs were the same.

Every single time I mentioned an opinion differing from the "hive-mind" consensus it was downvoted to hell, with no responses, counter arguments or anything resembling discussion. I would have liked to trade experiences but that's not possible.

While at the same time some of the other posters giving advice freely admit they don't actually have experience with what is discussed and are just repeating older posts.

There is no real value in that, and nowadays you can get mostly the same experience by just asking ChatGPT. Both have no clue and no real opinion of their own when it comes to details.

I take part in a few forums now, and it's a breath of fresh air. Much better experience and a lot more personal as well.

Why is that a sign of astroturfing? More likely, there are more people who read (and upvote) posts on the default subs, than niche local subs.

If a submission appeals to random people browsing r/all, i.e. politics, sex or memes, then it can get way more upvotes than a niche topical submission.

For example one of the top r/aviation posts is a meme about airbuses with "slutty eyeliner" (87k points), and it far outpaces shop talk type submissions like "why does the landing gear not get retracted at the same time on this 777?" (2k points)

Ha, I got them beat with RES and filtering out every generic subreddit that touches politics

One thing I have noticed about many of the astroturf accounts is a long gap, like 3-5 years, in posting history.

Which subreddit? How do we know that what you say is true?

> The only way to fix things is a radically different framework for communication.

What do you think that might look like?

Its fully astroturfing. The trick is to implement non-member/non-flaired rules to block most folks from the discourse. Then you can just focus on hitting the front page, which you can juice with other rules like only members can down vote. Now you can just focus on hitting the front page and suddenly you get a very biased thread with a lot of eyeballs and no response. /r/The_Donald used this to much success and there have been others.

its astroturfing by for profit companies. after the election, they realized: a) that folks were filtering out the astroturfed subreddits in /r/all, and b) that r/all's filter list has a hard limit of 100 subreddits. so, they switched tactics - by astroturfing >100 subreddits, they can guarantee to their clients that their posts will make the front of r/all for everyone.

> I really doubt most of it is astoturfing. You can find bot accounts, obviously. However, the Reddit hivemind has a very intense echo chamber.

There have been discord servers made public where the entire point was to game the reddit algorithm to favor one political candidate.

Back when Pushshift was publicly available, I used to check the mod actions on some subreddits. What I found was that the subreddits that I thought had biased moderators were simply undermoderated. Pretty much every mod action I saw was fair and there were also a lot more than expected, but clearly the issue was that total comment volume was far more than the mod team could handle.

> You're at the mercy of a small number of users who have the most free time to post all day. Some times I'll get an unusually angry response on Reddit and click on their profile out of curiosity. It's often someone who has been commenting for the last 10 hours straight.

These people are also masters at toeing the line of forum or subreddit rules when trashing others, constantly baiting people to cross the line in replies and get themselves moderated. It's worse in forums where downvoting isn't available.

This was about Elon's "Nazi salute" and both so incorrect and blatantly astroturfed I haven't returned to Reddit out of disgust.

A ton of near-dead subreddits with no activity and no reason to link to x.com for any reason suddenly had thousands of people show up demanding links to x.com be blocked like it's an everyday problem for the sub.

The quiet beneficiary of this campaign are those who benefit from Reddit's groomed narrative and their competing platform Bluesky.

And what was the previous domain name?

Seems like it. I went to church today for the IDK consecutive Sunday and it was all right.

Not the "Western civilization is declining because the kids stopped going to church" church but a church full of old hippies and young queers. It's been fun, sometimes I get takeout on the way home

I'm also tending my own website, which nobody else has write access to, so that I can link people to information I've vetted myself. Can't link it without doxxing myself sadly

AI commenting on AI commenting on AI commenting on AI...

But yeah, X, LinkedIn, and the rest all feel like the bots and content farmers have taken over.

I believe the pay for engagement incentives make people be as controversial as possible just to earn money. Imagine you are in a low-income nation, you pretend to be from the USA, you could earn a higher daily income by posting engagement bait. It is in your interest to upset as many people as possible and then set up counter bots to argue with your fee earning bots.

> ‘My next piece’? Maybe for a part of a book or a long article, but for a blog post?

This is common phrasing, even for blogs.

None of the other phrasing is out of place, either.

I think you're mistaking different phrasing preferences for LLM use.

I appreciate the feedback.

20 years ago I was made aware of gurella marketing people who were paid to have 'organic conversations' in public places about products they were promoting!

Can you give me some sources about the conversation scripts? I've been sure this is happening but can't prove it.

Any good resources on this?

Oh my god... It's full of bots!

I'm not a bot (or am I?)

It didn't hit the news tab yesterday, only "new", because my account is newly registered. So I reposted it one more time.

Beep boop.

Agreed, this has been happening since long before LLMs existed.

I did a quick search for the affiliate tag noted in the blog post, and found another Redditor complaining about that same affiliate tag, but from three other accounts[0].

My fascination is that, with LLMs, the line between obvious bot regurgitation and seemingly human posts is now much thinner.

The fact that the Reddit post was an affiliate link for Edward Bernays' Propaganda is just the cherry on top, in this case it's like selling ice to eskimos.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/TheseFuckingAccounts/comments/1giyl...

We might have posted "fuck u/spez" one too many times...

I can't speak for OP but I was indeed "permanently suspended" from Reddit:

https://i.imgur.com/nXp5cpk.png

My account is 18+ years old with 100k+ of organic karma evenly split between posting and commenting. I was an active moderator for both my local country sub and part of the moderator reserves program.

It was not clearly explained.

Amen

Twitter is 10x worse than reddit for astroturfing, political propaganda bots, and blue check clowns. I agree with you for sure that HN is several notches above reddit though

Yeah I'm basically cut off from the modern internet because my values don't align with it, as a young person. I can't stomach anything where people are trying to sell something or gain popularity and are insincere. It means im basically just on here, ft comments, and ars sometimes.

You can tell I'm human because I only post in the middle of the night to antagonize people

I think the internet provides a tantalizing way for them to make money, but I think it's changes in the legal, economic, and social environment that has really amplified them.