AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO'
AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO'
The only reason reddit was valuable was because it was from real people who weren't paid off. Well that's ruined now.
Yeah, I've noticed that a bit lately anyways. Maybe I'm looking up stuff that has less of a community on Reddit, and thus has less discussion, but I have absolutely noticed some comments have a single product name-drop with little clarity for why they liked the product. It starts to feel like they're just ads (generated or otherwise) meant to trick you into thinking Reddit users are liking the product.
AI is going to just make it worse, and cause Reddit to not be a good goto for actual reviews and discussion on pros/cons.
There's an excellent chance that even some of the "authentic" discussions you see are word-for-word reposts of old posts and comments, created by bots to build up karma in order to be sold to spammers and influence peddlers down the line.
Exactly. Usually there's a conversation or a quick consensus on one or two things. But I've been seeing lots of single answers or just ads
I wanted to figure out what game hosting sites were good and Google pointed me to reddit...every thread was full of boilerplate ads for different sites. The comments were the most obvious, marketing-approved sentences I've ever seen
Doesn't mean that the fediverse is immune.
News stories and narratives are still fought over by actors on all sides and sometimes by entities that might be bots. And there are a lot of auto-generating content bots that post stuff or repost old content from other sites like Reddit.
Especially since being immune to censorship is kind of the point of the fediverse.
If you're even a tiny bit smart about it, you can start hundreds of sock puppet instances and flood other instances with bullshit.
I try to avoid talking about how indefensibly terrible Lemmy’s anti-spam and anti-brigading measures are for fear of someone doing something with the information. I imagine the only thing keeping subtle disinfo and spam from completely overtaking Lemmy is how small its reach would be. Doing the same thing to Reddit is a hundred times more effective, and systemically accepted. Reddit’s admins like engagement.
Can't some instances make some sort of agreement and have a whitelist of instances to not block? People would need to register to add their instances to the list, and some common measures would be applied to restrict someone from registering several instances at once, and banning people who misuse the system.
That wouldn't solve the problem, but perhaps would make things more manageable.
I called this shit out like a year ago. It's the end of any viable online searching having much truth to it. All we'll have left is youtube videos from project farm to trust.
It kinda seems like the end of the Google era. What will we search Google for when the results are all crap? This is the death gasps of the internet I/we grew up with.
Remember when you could type a vague plot of a film you'd heard about into Google and it'd be the first result?
Nah doesn't work anymore
Saw a trailer for a french film so I searched "french film 2024 boys live in woods seven years"
Google - 2024 BEST FRENCH FILMS/TOP TEN FRENCH FILMS YOU MUST SEE THIS YEAR/ALL TIME BEST FRENCH MOVIES
Absolute fucking gash
I've not been too impressed with Kagi search, but at least the top result there was "Frères 2024"
Maybe web rings of the 90s were not such a bad idea! Let's bring 'em back!
I'm feeling myself old and I'm 28.
Cause in my early childhood in 2003-2007 we would resort to search engines only when we couldn't find something by better (but more manual and social) means.
Because - mwahahaha - most of the results were machine-generated crap.
So I actually feel very uplift due to people promising the Web to get back to norm in this sense.
I ran into this issue while researching standing desks recently. There are very few places on the internet where you can find verifiably human-written comparisons between standing desk brands. Comments on Reddit all seem to be written by bots or people affiliated with the brands. Luckily I managed to find a YouTube reviewer who did some real comparisons.
Generative AI has really become a poison. It'll be worse once the generative AI is trained on its own output.
Here's my prediction. Over the next couple decades the internet is going to be so saturated with fake shit and fake people, it'll become impossible to use effectively, like cable television. After this happens for a while, someone is going to create a fast private internet, like a whole new protocol, and it's going to require ID verification (fortunately automated by AI) to use. Your name, age, and country and state are all public to everybody else and embedded into the protocol.
The new 'humans only' internet will be the new streaming and eventually it'll take over the web (until they eventually figure out how to ruin that too). In the meantime, they'll continue to exploit the infested hellscape internet because everybody's grandma and grampa are still on it.
You’re two years late.
Maybe not for the reputable ones, that’s 2026, but these sheisters have been digging out the bottom of the swimming pool for years.
You don't get to blame AI for this. Reddit was already overrun by corporate and US gov trolls long before AI.
“New poison has been added to arsenic. Should you stop drinking it? Subscribe to find out.”
OMG 😂, so good! Your comment I mean, not arsenic.
The problem is the magnitude, but yeah, even before 2020 Google was becoming shit and being overrun by shitty blogspam trying to sell you stuff with articles clearly written by machines. The only difference is that it was easier to spot and harder to do. But they did it anyway
These things became shit around 2009. Or immediately after becoming sufficiently popular to press out LiveJournal and other such (the original Web 2.0, or maybe Web 1.9 one should call them) platforms.
What does this have to do with search engines - well, when they existed alongside web directories and other alternative, more social and manual ways of finding information, you'd just go to that if search engines would become too direct in promotion and hiding what they don't want you to see. You'd be able to compare one to another and feel that Google works bad in this case. You wouldn't be influenced in the end result.
Now when what Google gives you became the criterion for what you're supposed to associate with such a request, and same for social media, then it was decided.
It's gross, but also inevitable. If there's an untapped niche to make money from, somebody's going to try it -- plus if they want to waste their money on generating accounts only to have them be banned, then so be it.
Makes me kinda thankful that this community is smaller and less likely to be targeted by this sort of crap.
What's funny is I think it would be profitable for maybe, like, a year, before everyone starts doing it and then even normal people stop trusting reddit comments.
It's like pissing in a pool to sell people soap. What's the plan once people stop using the pool?
Well, that was the last bit of usefulness I used to get out of google. I've been on yahoo for a while now
Yahoo is still alive?
To a new social media platform where you have to send in a DNA sample to create an account.
That creates a market for morticians and midwifes creating preauthenticated accounts to sell to bot farms
The usefulness of Captchas is being destroyed by “AI” too. And ironically they were used to train certain types of Machine Learning.
So the human shills that already destroyed good faith in forums and online communities over time are now being fully outsourced to AI. Amazon itself a prime source of enshittification. From fake reviews to everyone with a webpage having affiliate links trying to sell you some shit or other. Including news outlets. Turned everyone into a salesperson.
Amazon itself a prime source of enshittification
“I only do this because I have no other options,” he says. “Other people who go slower just end up getting fired.” I let Christian leave, and hail some more drivers. They all confirm that this is, largely speaking, how their life looks. I hear about how female drivers often develop urinary tract infections from holding it in for too long. Then a dispatch manager I bump into by chance confirms that the “disgusting” bottles of urine outside of fulfilment centres are from Amazon drivers. “We have a point system where, if you pee in a bottle and leave it in the car, you get a point for that,” they tell me. I ask: How many bottles until they’re in trouble? “Ten bottles.”
I just consider any comment after Jun 2023 to be compromised. Anyone who stayed after that date either doesn't have a clue, or is sponsored content.
The creator of the company, Alexander Belogubov, has also posted screenshots of other bot-controlled accounts responding all over Reddit. Begolubov has another startup called “Stealth Marketing” that also seeks to manipulate the platform by promising to “turn Reddit into a steady stream of customers for your startup.” Belogubov did not respond to requests for comment.
What an absolute piece of shit. Just a general trash person to even think of this concept.
Logitech decided to include some AI shit in Logi Options+, I uninstalled that crap ASAP.
That’s just for small players. Big corps probably been doing it for years.
This is a direct consequence of Google targeting Reddit posts in its search results. Hopefully forum groups like Lemmy don't go get buried under a mountain of garbage as well. As long as advertisers are able to destroy public forums and communities with ads, with ad based revenue sites like Google directing who to target. We will always be creating something great while constantly trying to keep advertisers from turning it into a pile of crap.
The history of TV, in reverse. And then forward again.
At first, it was an impossibly expensive medium rules by a cartel of agencies and advertisers. Eventually, HBO comes along and shows you don't have to just make a bunch of lowest common denominator drivel.
Netflix eventually shows that the internet can be a way cheaper model than cable. Finally, money shows up in the streaming model, remaking advertiser friendly cable in the internet age. All in about 2.5 decades.
yeah, the internet is doomed to be unusable if AI just keeps getting more insidious like this
yet more companies tie themselves to online platforns, websites, and other models of operation depending on being always connected.
maybe the world needs a reboot, just get rid of it all and start from scratch
maybe the world needs a reboot, just get rid of it all and start from scratch
That would destroy all the old good vintage stuff and leave us with machines that immediately fill the vacant space with pure trash.
"i remember when reply guy was a term used for someone notorious for replying to things in a specific manner"
"take your meds grandpa, it's getting late"
Correction - AI is poisoning everything when it is not regulated and moderated.
Reddit has been poisoning itself for a while, what's the difference? Just AI borrowing from the shithead behavior?
Lol, you think regulation and moderation aren't poison themselves.
Lol, you think allowing people and businesses to do whatever the fuck they want is a good thing.
The regulations we implement are written by the Sam Bankman Frieds and Elon Musks who can capture the regulatory agencies. The moderation is itself increasingly automated, for the purpose of inflating perceived quality and quantity of interactions on the website.
Get back to a low-population IIRC or Discord server, a small social media channel, or a... idfk... Lemmy instance? Suddenly regulation and moderation by, of, and for the user base starts looking much nicer.
If only people moved to an open and federated platform. I mean I don't have to say that I hate reddit since I'm here but still whenever I Google a problem reddit answers are one of the most useful places. Especially about something local.
This isn't a problem that can be solved with a technical solution that isn't itself extremely dystopian in nature.
This is a problem that requires legislation and criminal liability, or genuine punitive civil liability that pierces the corporate legal shields.
Don't hold your breath for a serious solution to present itself.
I still haven’t seen a use of AI that doesn’t serve state or corporate interests first, before the general public. AI medical diagnostics comes the closest, but that’s being leveraged to justify further staffing reductions, not an additional check.
The AI-captcha wars are on, and no matter who wins we lose.
AI is helping me learn and program C++. It's built into my IDE. Much more efficient than searching stackoverflow. Whenever it comes up with something I've never seen before, I learn what that thing does and mentally store it away for future use. As time goes on, I'm relying on it less and less. But right now it's amazing. It's like having a tutor right there with you who you can ask questions anytime, 24/7.
I hope a point comes where my kid can just talk to a computer, tell it the specifics of the program he wants to create, and have the computer just program the entire thing. That's the future we are headed towards. Ordinary folks being able to create software.
I’ll agree there’s huge potential for ‘assistant’ roles (exactly like you’re using) to give a concise summary for quick understanding. But LLMs aren’t knowledgeable like an accredited professor or tutor is, understanding the context and nuance of the topic. LLMs are very good at scraping together data and presenting the shallowest of information, but their limits get exposed quickly when you try to go into a topic.
For instance, I was working a project that required very long term storage (+10 years) with intermittent exposure to open air, and was concerned about oxidation and rust. ChatGPT was very adamant that desiccant alone was sufficient (wrong) and that VCI packs would last (also wrong). It did a great job of repackaging corporate ad-copy and industrial white papers written by humans, but not of providing an objective answer to a semi complex question.
I don't understand how Lemmy/Mastodon will handle similar problems. Spammers crafting fake accounts to give AI generated comments for promotions
The only thing we reasonably have is security through obscurity. We are something bigger than a forum but smaller than Reddit, in terms of active user size. If such a thing were to happen here, mods could handle it more easily probably (like when we had the spammer of the Japanese text back then), but if it were to happen on a larger scale than what we have it would be harder to deal with.
I think the real danger here is subtlety. What happens when somebody asks for recommendations on a printer, or complains about their printer being bad, and all of a sudden some long established account recommends a product they've been happy with for years. And it turns out it's just an AI bot shilling for brother.
mods could handle it more easily probably
I kind of feel like the opposite, for a lot of instances, 'mods' are just a few guys who check in sporadically whereas larger companies can mobilize full teams in times of crisis, it might take them a bit of time to spin things up, but there are existing processes to handle it.
I think spam might be what kills this.
There's one advantage on the fediverse. We don't have the corporations like reddit manipulating our feeds, censoring what they dislike, and promoting shit. This alone makes using the fediverse worth for me.
When it comes to problems involving the users themselves, things aren't that different, and we don't have much to do.
How exactly are they poisoning a pool of toxic waste?
Pissing into an ocean of piss.
Now it's not only toxic, it's also acidic and instead of killing you, it'll also melt you.
This shit isnt new, companies have been exploiting reddit to push products as if they're real people for years. The "put reddit after your search to fix it!!!" thing was a massive boon for these shady advertisers who no doubt benefitted from random people assuming product placements were genuine.
Yeah this isn't new.
Ever wonder why you are such a fan of shitty played out franchises?
Ai is a tool. It can be used for good and it can be used for poison. Just because you see it being used for poison more often doesn't mean you should be against ai. Maybe lay the blame on the people using it for poison
Oh, I would have thought Reddit themselves would offer such a service
He's got to get them from somewhere. They certainly aren't coming from his little piggy brain.
Like a built in brand dashboard where brands can monitor keywords for their brand and their competitors? And then deploy their sanctioned set of accounts to reply and make strategic product recommendations?
Sounds like something that must already exist. But it would have been killed or hampered by API changes… so now Spez has a chance to bring it in-house.
They will just call it brand image management. And claim that there are so many negative users online that this is the only way to fight misinformation about their brand.
Or something. It’s all so tiring.
That would be an unmarked ad. I don't think that's legal in many places
Probably.
So, we complain to a regulatory body, they investigate, they tell a company to do better or, waaaay down the road, attempt to levy a fine. Which most companies happily pay, since the profits from he shady business practices tend to far outweigh the fines.
Legal or illegal really only means something when dealing with an actual person. Can’t put a corporation in jail, sadly.