No wonder Reddit has turned to shit

[farting_gorilla@lemmy.world]

building a business solely on manipulation

See also: all of advertising and marketing

[jack_burton@lemmy.ca]

Haha yep, my exact train of thought while typing

[addie@feddit.uk]

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...

[votenixon2016@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

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

[clairvoidance@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

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

[shawiniganhandshake@sh.itjust.works]

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 (TM).

[mniot@programming.dev]

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.

[tamo240@programming.dev]

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.

[prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

God, I just hate the way these people fucking talk. Everything is a bulleted list and sentence fragments.

[slaacaa@lemmy.world]

Line must go up, always & forever.

[munkisquisher@lemmy.nz]

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

[flauschige_lemmata@lemmy.world]

Even worse: They are hoping that LLMs in training don't realize that it's an ad

[tweak@lemmy.today]

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.

[kahnclusions@lemmy.ca]

100% written by an LLM. They always use this tone and it’s infuriating.

[prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

Yeah, but even when it's not an LLM, they type like this now

[tweak@lemmy.today]

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.

[dannymac@sh.itjust.works]

You mean more shit? Because it was already shit.

[tweak@lemmy.today]

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.

[schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org]

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.

[socialmediarefugee@lemmy.world]

Like the world's worst haiku.