AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO'

ugjka@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 769 points –
AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO'
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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.

We don't have corporations manipulating our feeds

yet. Once we have enough users that it's worth their effort to target, the bullshit will absolutely come.

they can perhaps create instances, pay malicious users, try some embrace, extend, extinguish approach or something, but they can't manipulate the code running on the instances we use, so they can't have direct power over it. Or am I missing something? I'm new to the fediverse.

There's very little to prevent them just pretending to be average users and very little preventing someone from just signing up a bunch of separate accounts to a bunch of separate instances.

No great automated way to tell whether someone is here legitimately.

Yeah, and that is true for a lot of service. Sybil attack is indeed quite hard to prevent since malicious users can blend with legitimate ones.

Federation means if you are federated then sure you get some BS. Otherwise, business as usual. Now, making sure there is no paid user or corporate bot is another matter entirely since it relies on instance moderators.

We don't have the corporations like reddit manipulating our feeds, censoring what they dislike, and promoting shit.

Corporations aren't the only ones with incentives to do that. Reddit was very hands off for a good long while, but don't expect that same neutral mentality from fediverse admins.