The ebike subreddit is modded by the owners of Lunacycle. They actively remove posts about bad customer service/other issues from Lunacycle. I witnessed them name and shame some random redditor and accuse them of fraud because they posted screenshots of email correspondence that pointed out shady dealings on Luna’s part.
They use the general subreddit for electric bikes to funnel everyone into ordering from them.
during the massive purge of rebellious mods, there was a huge opening for corporate shills to move into places where previous mods had kept them out. this phenomenon was widespread in many fan and specialty subs. Reddit admins were more than happy to let this happen, as corporate shills were also more than happy to be cooperative with Reddit admins.
Everything about Reddit's most recent changes has been openly about cracking the place wide open for corporate marketing. Everything good about it was because of how genuine it was, and it was genuine because for a very long time, the attitude was to shield it against corporate influence.
That's the only reason it became such a valuable place for search results: as the forums and blogs around the Internet went silent and corporations ravaged individual websites, reddit was a bubble of genuine interaction. It's not just Google's shitty algorithm, it's also because the Internet itself got injected with shit, and reddit was a safe haven. A deeply flawed one, but still, notably less fake and corporate than the web pages around it.
That's what gave it value.
Spez knows this. The admins have known this the whole damn time. That's why there used to be rules against self-posting content. That's why celebrities were only allowed to promote things in AMAS. To head off attention seeking, marketing, and corporate influence.
But the time came to make money, and they're burning it all down to accomplish that.
I will never not share this blog because it hits the nail so cleanly on the head it sails straight down to the core of the earth:
It's not just about ads, it's about the corruption of public spaces. The death of social media is when someone tries to start making money off it at the expense of its genuine human interaction, which can not exist in that environment unmolested, and will cascade into the platform's collapse over time. it's enshitification, yes, but it's also something else: "dehumanation". The drowning of the human element of your social platform through profit seeking.
I've been through too many exodus, this post hits hard and true. Been using the net since 95 and have been a community refuge too many times. I'm really hoping federation takes off because I'm tired of rebuilding. Not sure I'll try again if this doesn't pan out.
Hate to break it to you but it will likely happen again. Meta is already encroaching on our new corner of the web, they’ll either eat it or it’ll die out on its own as funding doesn’t really exist here
That was an incredible read, thanks for sharing it.
Please keep sharing it!
Informational tragedy. Really is.
This hurts us as consumers, patients, thinkers, feelers. :(
I’m calling 1 year on the over/under for the introduction of blue check marks.
You mean Reddit gold check marks
You mean narwhal bacon badges.
In a similar more minor vein, the Snowpeircer (tv show) sub was administered by the showrunners.
They were mostly subtle about it, but quietly removed lots of posts after a week or so that didn't fit show promo.
I'm pretty sure they've abandoned it now that the show is in limbo.
Since before the exodus or after?
Before and worse after
I had no idea. I am well aware of Lunacycle's toxicity from endless-sphere.com.
I'm not used to seeing this with so many pixels.
I find it has a nice understated impact
It's so much worse than 15%.
And they said the bears were the ones posting obnoxious huge images!
Member-only story
Medium wants me to pay them to read a story from "Homeless Romantic" who is listed as a "Ph.D. Rocket Surgeon & Aspiring Troglodyte"?
Are they fucking high?
well, whomever describes themselves in such a manner clearly is.
It's been a wonder that site ever got traction as something credible to get info from and not just a weird mesh of editorial, blogging, and long winded shitposts...
edit: That being said, fuck reddit.
I've always seen it as a site for random people to shitpost. Who takes Medium seriously as a credible source?
For me, it was often a place where a lot of qualified people would essentially write blogs because hosting their own site for it would get utterly ignored by google. The last few years though I've got more utter morons than people who can write a good article, even for generic questions that they could straight up copy and paste from another site.
Are they fucking high?>
Yeah, probably
Is all bad online behavior "trolling" now? Isn't "shill" a better word for someone who is paid to surreptitiously promote something?
Back in my day trolling meant something. It meant you cared enough to actually form a real argument that withstands scrutiny, just to setup for the rug pull. The better your polemic, the more engagement as people debated if you were for real or not.
Shitposting controversial hot takes or dog whistle memes is mid af, do better
From my understanding trolling meant exactly what it says it is: Trolling. I think people for some reason get this mixed up with trolls - as in the fantasy type monster. But I think it actually has to do with the fishing termtrolling where you cast out your line, and see if you can get somebody to take the bait. Once they take the bait, you take em for a ride.
Actually, that's also where the name of the mythical creature comes from. They'd set up bridges that offer convenient shortcuts as bait for humans
From my understanding trolling meant exactly what it says it is: Trolling. I think people for some reason get this mixed up with trolls - as in the fantasy type monster. But I think it actually has to do with the fishing termtrolling where you cast out your line, and see if you can get somebody to take the bait. Once they take the bait, you take em for a ride.
When the word is used on the Internet it's meant in the fantasy monster way. Specifically it comes from the story of the troll underneath the bridge, interfering with people trying to cross the bridge.
polemic
po·lem·ic
/pəˈlemik/
noun
a speech or piece of writing expressing a strongly critical attack on or controversial opinion about someone or something.
"his polemic against the cultural relativism of the Sixties"
You can just add "troll" to the pile of words twisted into meaning "people I don't like".
mid
No, all bad online behavior now is “bots.”
At least that’s how people in the comments on lemmy and Reddit label them.
Shut up, bot!
Edit: Shitty typo
He'd probably need a strong sphincter muscle to manage that.
Lol, how did I miss that
No, all bad online behavior now is “bots.”
At least that’s how people in the comments on lemmy and Reddit label them.
I, and others, have distinguish between shills and bots.
Usually people use shilling as an alternative to astroturfing by paid human beings, while bots are just AI/programming posting.
There's no way it's a banned word. /r/neoliberal has a "neoliberal shill of the year" award where they vote for their favorite economist based on social media posts, books released that year, etc.
There was a time when you'd get hit with a [Removed by Reddit] for calling people shills but that was a while back I guess
Is all bad online behavior "trolling" now?
People like throwing buzzwords regardless of their meaning.
it is not "now". It is exactly as it was being used in 2020, when the article was written, by the mass media. They were calling "troll" everyone they were disagreeing with.
Fellow lemmings, I, for one, am glad that there are no corporate trolls trying to manipulate public opinions on Lemmy, it is the same warm, fuzzy feeling I get when I was watching multiple time Golden Globe nominated summer blockbuster, Barbie, now available on Blu-Ray and select streaming services.
I don't know about you, but I sure hope Barbie sweeps the Golden Globes next month (and then the Oscars next year.)
I can't talk about selling out any more, it's giving me a headache.
I wish I could get some of that retro Reebok stuff he has. I miss the 90s.
Et tu, Barbie?
I can’t believe THE Margot Robbie is on the fediverse.
Good for you, girl!
I know, I can hardly believe it either!
Wait, no, now my astorturfing cover is blown. 😭
I popped over to Reddit for the first time since third party apps were cruelly shut down. It’s clear that Reddit has sunk to new lows. Obviously trolling and a marked decrease in the quality of content
what I noticed is that posts have huge amounts of upvotes, even from small communities, and often no comments or when it does have comments its often very basic stuff, almost AI like
They aren't even trying with those usernames, lazy.
Yeah, looks like the default "word_wordnumbers" usernames that reddit gives you if don't change them.
I wonder if that would be an easy way to detect botting by not filling in that field for them.
Yeah, looks like the default “word_wordnumbers” usernames that reddit gives you if don’t change them.
This change is when I knew Reddit was going down the shitter. Automatically handing out default usernames instead of requiring you to pick your own. The only people that could possibly help are a) people with absolutely no imagination whatsoever, b) bots, and c) people making a dozen alts to puff up their main.
Yeah, looks like the default “word_wordnumbers” usernames that reddit gives you if don’t change them.
Funny enough, this started happening on YouTube (comments) as well, around the same time.
The issue with sites starting to use numbering as part of the default username only started happening after AI posting became a thing, because an Achilles heel is the fact that AI can't come up with enough believable unique names for all the posts they want their AI bots to make.
an Achilles heel is the fact that AI can’t come up with enough believable unique names for all the posts you want your AI bots to make
That seems counterintuitive to me in the context of modern AI approaches. I'm wondering if you could elaborate on that a bit more.
That seems counterintuitive to me in the context of modern AI approaches.
How so? Elaborate?
I’m wondering if you could elaborate on that a bit more.
This seems sufficiently explanatory to me, especially the italicized part...
AI can’t come up with enough believable unique names for all the posts they want their AI bots to make
Un**believable usernames becomes an easy identifier/tag for identifying bot post.
Edit: since this comment got downvoted (as the assumed reply) I thought I would elaborate a bit more.
Basically, we name our user accounts to fit the society we live in's norms, it's naming conventions.
If you just run a bunch of vowels and consonants together, that does not make a username, at least not one that people will recognize as a valid one created by a human being.
Part of how bots are effective is in the quantity of bots that are used. Since it's near zero cost to spin up a new bot to make posts/comments, many can be made.
However people can track the validity of a user name as being a bot versus human by the quantity of the posts/comments the username makes (only so many hours in a day, and human beings are busy with other things besides just posting on Lemmy), so no one single bot can make too many posts/comments at one time.
Because of this, you need a large quantity of unique names, one for each of your bots, and they have to be believable ones by humans, so they're not identified as bots.
Had no idea they were generating names, joke of a site.
I can't believe 8 people had the exact same idea for a post at the same time, that's crazy
/s
Well, if you're going to defraud investors by pumping up your numbers before your IPO, you might as well go all out.
Is that recent? I haven't used Reddit since a few months and that phenomena was previously only on promoted posts (read, ads)
I think it was there for a while, it's just gone full mask off mode and become particularly noticeable now
like 2 months ago
You know what else is random and probably related to their paid content? Their sorting doesn't work right anymore. Posts in "hot" are regularly like more than a day old but then also some are brand new like minutes old. But if you sort by top 24 hours...same posts. Sometimes the order is different but easily 75% of the posts are the same. A 24 hour old post with no new comments is "hot"? A one hour old post with 20 comments is in the top posts of the past day?...OKAY
It could be incompetence. Lemmy.world has similar and significant issues with sorting as well and I presume you're not also implying that paid content has anything to do with lemmy sorting.
Go back to Reddit astroturfer.
That title is clickbait.
From the article:
In 2020, the Computers in Human Behavior study provided additional insights into the tactics employed by corporate trolls on Reddit. The study focused on the top 100 subreddits, analyzing the content posted within these influential communities.
The results were alarming, with 15% of the top 100 subreddits found to have content that was likely posted by bots or corporate trolls, specifically aimed at promoting certain companies or organizations.
That's 15% of the top 100 subreddits contained some content that was likely posted by bots or corporate trolls.
Even just calling it a "new study" is already a lie
This title is one of the 15%
And a significant part of the remainder are repost bots recycling old popular posts and comments in order to farm karma, which will eventually be sold to OnlyFans spammers, political ops, and corporate shills.
I'll see the same post on 2 or 3 subs and it will just be something I saw a year or more ago.
It's not like one of the six biggest power janitors of Reddit has been caught multiple times wrongfully deleting posts, using bot armies to manipulate votes and accepting money from marketing agencies for "consultancy" in social media guerilla marketing.
It's almost like the company doesn't give a fuck what their unpaid help does to the userbase or content because they still gets investments regardless.
Fuck spez, fuck GallowBoob, fuck awkwardtheturtle and fuck Sam Altman.
It's amazing how quickly the admins came down on some subs after the trench titty drama broke. He was basically reddit's MrBabyMan. And he's probably not the only one.
Trench ritty drama? Dare I even Google that DuckDuckGo that....
What’s Sam Altman’s connection to Reddit?
He was an angel investor and also onboarded a bunch of celebrity investors.
I wouldn't be surprised if they are trying to whitewash this, since it became a minor point of contention a few months ago
Was also interim CEO for 8 days, to give you an idea of how involved he was. I'll update with more info and sources later if I have time, otherwise Wayback Machine is your friend
How is Sam Altman related to Reddit?
Corpreddit.
Lemmy feels very much like the old, old Reddit. When it was mostly IT folk and tech savvy people (talking about 2005-2010).
I think reddit peaked around 2015 or so. A much broader audience had found it. There was interesting content from a lot of people.
Now, it still has a lot of good content. But it is definitely past its peak
Maybe it'll be good and healthy to start again from fresh, get the old feeling again. We just gotta build up that initial content now to grow the appeal to newcomers
The studies are from 2018 and 2020, "new study" in the post title is a complete lie
Corporate trolls at it again!
Reddit feels less genuine for sure, than it would have even as far back as 3 years ago. The mod purge probably accelerated things greatly but in general it’s felt like Reddit was going corporate astroturfing route for a while. Real discussions are very sparse compared to the amount of people telling you “to solve problem, buy this expensive thing!”
At this point the only thing Reddit has is a numbers advantage. The videos are no huge loss because at this point since you’re forced to use their (god awful) mobile app they either autoplay obnoxiously or automatically popup obscuring the comments (discussion is 90% of why I go to a forum why make it harder to see comments?).
The desktop experience is still okay but the constant pushing to get you to enable notifications is very irritating.
Man. I zapped all my cookies the other day, and when I re-loaded reddit, it forced me into a new new version of the mobile site.
Now almost every single comment that isn't top level is hidden behind the 'more comments' button. When I click it, the whole page reloads, with the top comment and the one response. And a button for the next reply. And so on.
I've noticed since this change, almost no posts have any discussion any more at all. Which honestly. Why would you bother?
Just the other day I thought about my old porn account and remembered the password! So I thought I'd check out the official app since I wouldn't be giving them ad revenue. Holy cow, it really is as terrible as everyone says! The app and the site! Every third post on the scroll is an ad, until you show NSFW posts, then every third post is a random post from a random sub. The three times I've been there I get a notification from some random comment on a random sub. And some banana thing that pops up and won't go away. All of it is so terrible, including the porn. It's like going back to your hometown and seeing they bulldozed your old school and turned it into a meat rendering plant.
Reddit is clearly trying to make its mobile site as user-unfriendly and goddamn terrible as possible to direct people to use the official app instead. There’s no other explanation for a top 10 in the world site
Actually, looking at the rest of the top 10 sites, the only two with good mobile interfaces are the ones without apps: Google and pornhub lol
The pop-iver video player is an infuriating choice. I watched the video, scroll down and the fucking thing follows me?! Wtf?! Why?? Am I going to forget that I just watched that video two seconds ago?! Argh!
And people want Meta involved in the Fediverse, like reddit wasn’t bad enough.
If the fediverse gets a lot of traction, this sort of “spam” will be difficult to moderate and every instance will need to have sophisticated systems to prevent it.
It’s okay Meta is totally great at removing spam and fake accounts.
Well, I see your point. All I’m saying is spam is difficult when you are a large target.
Which is why I WANT lemmy to stay "small to medium"
Downvoted for medium article.
I shouldn't have to make an account to view news.
If it's on Medium it's almost certainly repackaged news anyway.
Am I blind? I don't even see where it names the study. It just says Pew, who publishes many studies. Does medium expect me to search for their sources?
We should all calm down, buy a Twix and look forward to christmas.
I went to the mall because I wished to experience Christmas undignified, to front only the essential facts of capitalism, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to New Years, discover that I had not contributed.
🥲 Beautifully written tale of a mortal peril swerved.
Not calm? Eat a snickers.
Yeah but we just got 8" of rain and 70 mph winds during a freak December storm that took out half our power grid, how will Amazon-Clause find my house?!? 80 degrees warmer than it should be here and our snowman holding up the mail box melted!!!
TBH I'm surprised it's not higher than that. Even back before the API changes it certainly felt like a lot of front page content was paid for.
A lot of the shill marketing is very hard to prove. A lot of the dialogue gets mixed in with commentors that have genuine brand loyalty.
It's far too easy for a marketing team to acquire a high karma account and blend in. We'll never get a truly clear picture of how much Reddit is astroturfed.
This is research from before the API changes. Loads of astroturf efforts were easy to notice, there must have been more subtle ones.
I always wonder whether the famous post about vacuum cleaners was paid for by the company he recommended. If it was, they got their money's worth - that redditor was convincing.
"New Study"
"Two significant studies, the Pew Research Center study conducted in 2018 and the Computers in Human Behavior study published in 2020"
So you're saying it's almost certainly a significantly larger percentage now.
Sounds about right.
I'm just saying that the article is not coherent. If we are at the end of 2023 and it talks about a new article, it doesn't make sense that it then mentions two articles, one from 2018 and another from 2020.
You also have to see the irony in an article that forces new user signup to read it in its entirety. The internet is just gross now. Almost everything is corporate garbage or some site or individual trying to establish a “user base” or “followers” etc. I’m mostly just tired of it all. We’ve had radio, tv and now the internet. I’m personally just hoping to be around for the next thing to come along so I can enjoy it before the same cycle hits it and fucking ruins it.
I could tell that and I agree .. not really "new"...
And another 50% is trolls working probono to be try and convince people that racism is the only way forward
And the other 50% is AI bots, just trying to keep people engaged.
You’re kidding yourself if you think they aren’t also on Lemmy.
Lemmy probably isn't big enough for the ad bots to be worth it yet. Lemmy is more infested with right wing astroturf shills pretending to be leftists and pushing "both sides" nonsense.
What are you talking about? We're not active on Lemmy. We don't even have time to be here, we're too busy enjoying a refreshing Starry
Okay but actually imagine preferring Starry over Sprite.
Too small. We only have users with individual agendas still.
May I talk to you about my lord and saviour, Gandalf?
IT IS WAY MORE
The spez exodus made me realize the difference, you can tell the content/comments are from regular people here. Sadly that too can change once those actors see Lemmy as their new platform for propaganda.
That's the potentially nice thing about Lemmy though - if you're savvy, you will probably start to identify which instances are more or less trustworthy than others. And if an instance tends to have a lot of untrustworthy activity, defederation is always an option. To what extent we'll see those things play out, I don't know yet, but it'll be interesting to see.
This part was written about a study from a 2020 study:
The results were alarming, with 15% of the top 100 subreddits found to have content that was likely posted by bots or corporate trolls, specifically aimed at promoting certain companies or organizations.
One of the most concerning findings of the study was that corporate trolls were not only promoting products and services, but they were also strategically leveraging positive news articles to influence public opinion.
IMO, I left at the great exodus and I thought it was at least double that before I left. We are not free from the shills here though. I don't know how you get around it tbh.
Vigilance and blocking
Vigilance and reporting. Blocking only hides bad actors from you; it doesn't remove them from the platform.
You mean that wasn't some random wrestling fan or music fan I was chatting with? Fuck reddit.
In all seriousness, it was awesome 2 years ago, but the mods are fucking it up really bad. Lemmy FTW.
Not just mods, but the entire Capitalistic model.
Yes, mods are nuts on reddit.
At least here this is some accountability with the modlog.
I know lemmy is fundamentally critic of reddit, but let's not forget if lemmy ever achieves a significant weight in humanity's attention, it's not immune to such disease. The problem is systemic, not inherent of a specific platform. Any place with a lot of eyes will be susceptible to manipulation, even more so now that we have tamed artificial intelligence to write texts just about anything. We as a community need to think about countermeasures to fend this off
No it's much more
I’m OPs defense, it do say “at least”.
Hi OPs defense, I'm dad.
Hi dad, I'm Mail man.
Ah damn, how much are they paying you
They've taken over moderation too. I criticized a local restaurant that got passed down from father to son, and got banned. I did call the son a trump loving shitstain so that might've had something to do with it.
Does a local biz owner count as a corporate troll?
Yep, i've been banned from like 10 subs despite being very careful with how i word my opinion that's different that what's normally accepted.... it didn't used to be that way, a lot of the opinions I have that get me banned were once mainstream on reddit.
I'm not careful with how I word my opinions. The internet is a cesspit, I'm not going to stay clean. I only ever get banned by trump lovers. They're so fragile... it's kind of pathetic.
Lol. Not all people that ban you are trump lovers. You might just be being an asshole and breaking the rules.
I would've banned you for saying "Trump loving" followed by "shitstain" because there really is no need to say the same thing twice and waste everybody else's reading time...
It pisses me off how kid-friendly everything has become online. You can't swear at people and call them fucking idiots no matter how warranted it may be. People censor "removed" because it's a 'gay-slur' but in the UK it's a food type and a fag is a cigarette. "LatinX" and "unaliving" are things. There's Reddit subs where people can say "nigga" without being banned because it's assumed they're all black. But it's online so there's no way of fucking knowing!!
I feel like the Internet is turning into a fucking kiddie day care centre for young adult Americans.
It's insidious too. I didn't realise how much I was self-censoring until I came to Lemmy and started swearing more in comments. On Reddit I'd been talking like a guy surrounded by children, afraid to swear, lest I offend someone.
At least here I feel like I can express thoughts and feelings.
People censor “removed” because it’s a ‘gay-slur’
You have got to be fucking shitting me?! Fagg-OT is a FOOD! You fucking spanner twat mods/admins.
Reddit-rot is spreading to Lemmy. Fuck this noise.
People here definitely don't mind expressing themselves. That's both a good and bad thing. Remember gamergate? Yeah those idiots are here too.
It is incredibly cheap and easy to artificially bump a post to the top of a decent sized subreddit. I’ve seen it done before and the cost per impression/click puts most advertising to shame. And this was being done unsophisticatedly by some dude and a cheap bot. Now imagine what major corporations can do with all the resources to burn.
Ya think? I noticed when all top comments on /r/worldnews were the exact same thing just said in slightly different ways.
It's a science at this point.
No way it's only 15%
Exactly. And on major subreddits it would be much higher. Worldnews at the moment just feels like IDF posting pro-genocide content, commenting, upvoting and agreeing with each other.
Reddit goes in the bin. 🚮
The thing with r/worldnews isn't only bots, it's also that the mods are trigger-happy when banning people for making unabashed criticisms of Israel and zionism. Keep that attitude for long enough and you'll end up with an echo chamber anywhere.
I'm glad I left, happy I found Lemmy
Same bestie.
I miss the old web before it was just a small bunch of major websites.
Lemmy is good now because it has that old community feel. Hopefully that can be maintained in the future by defederating from corporate and toxic instances.
Yes, the wild west of the internet days. Occasionally you can come across some gems still, but it's not the same lol.
Isn't that just astroturfing and they've been doing it forever there?
I was really surprised recently when I was searching for some help with a mod for a videogame and a result popped up on my duckduckgo search page for a thread on reddit about it, so I clicked it and BAM: "error, this subreddit has not been reviewed, so it is not possible to view it. Either use the app or go to home page" ......... wtf? I mean, this basically destroys the entire site right? I was 100% unable to view whatever content had been posted in that subreddit. So I just closed it and went somewhere else. I don't see how reddit can even continue to exist if they don't allow people to view the site. How did this happen?
There's a theory that certain emails scams are so obvious and easy to spot because that acts as a self-selection mechanism. A person who sees the obvious scam and immediately recognizes it as such was probably never going to fall for it. The ones that respond in spite of all the signs tend to be easier or more lucrative targets.
I could see forcing people to download an app just to see the content as operating on a similar (but not 100% analogous) principle. The type of person who willingly installs the app to see the content (without knowing if it was worthwhile/relevant beforehand) may be exactly the type of person that they prefer to join their site. Perhaps they are easier targets for marketing, less likely to understand /complain about the ramifications of changes to the site that are user adverse, care less about privacy, etc and that makes them more lucrative?
I mean I guess that could be right, but in the end this scenario also spells doom for the company. There is no way that reddit continues to stay relevant as a meaningful place in the future. It'll be relegated to the garbage dump where yahoo and digg and tumblr somehow still exist in zombie fashion. Sad.
Only 15%? More like 99%!
The most recent Gaza genocide was truly an eye opener for me.
at least its such functionally, if not in actual numbers
Crazy thing I've been noticing more and more. When I search "[thing I want to know] reddit" there are always one or two comments in the top results from reddit, usually much more recent than the others, very clearly shilling a product. Sometimes it's an edit purely to include a product the user just thinks is really great that sends you to an affiliate link-ridden site.
The percentage is that low?
the impact those accounts have is much higher than a normal 15% slice of the comments.. what they produce is generally non-random, so it's all going toward whatever set of ideas they need to bombard with bullshit.. they intentionally shut down and/or control discussion..
I still have a few subreddits I passively maintain and every three days on the most popular one I'm banning some new app someone is shilling to a vulnerable group. It's absolutely disgusting and makes me so incredibly angry/jaded how much they're targeted.
say more about that. what sort of apps are being peddled?
ADHD "helper" apps, productivity apps, etc. Good UX should be for everyone and be accommodating. ADHD folks don't need something special 99/100 times.
The study found that 11% of the respondents had been contacted by a bot or troll attempting to promote a product or service. Even more concerning was the discovery that 13% of the respondents had witnessed a company manipulate public opinion on the platform.
Self reported garbage. Asking a user to self identify manipulation is ripe for abuse.
I have 2 accounts in the top 1% of reddit and neither was contacted for manipulation. Spammed? Oh, sure, ALL the time! But never the whole "Hey... can I buy your account?" kind of way.
From the article...
The study’s demographic analysis further highlighted the targeted nature of corporate trolling. Younger users, particularly those aged 18–29, were significantly more likely to be contacted by corporate trolls, with 17% of them reporting such experiences, compared to only 7% of users aged 65 and over. This age-based discrepancy underscores the strategic approach of corporate trolls inengaging with a demographic that is often more susceptible to their influence.
Wow. Corporations are tagging younger generations as dumb shits. That is not cool.
Inexperience leads to easier marks. Someone who is otherwise markedly intelligent will fall for the silliest things on impulse.
Wow. Corporations are tagging younger generations as dumb shits.
I mean, I wouldn't use that language, but yeah of course. They don't have firm beliefs yet, in most cases, and their worldviews are more likely to be shaped by memes, whereas the older generations adopt the memes that appeal to their worldview.
If you want to shape people, you want to ideally target young adults.
I mean, I wouldn’t use that language, but yeah of course. They don’t have firm beliefs yet, in most cases, and their worldviews are more likely to be shaped by memes, whereas the older generations adopt the memes that appeal to their worldview.
I don't think it's just about how memes are processed. I think they really consider them less aware, less intelligent, than older generations.
And I was pointing that out is a 'rallying cry' to the younger generations, that this is the level respect they're getting, and that they should do something about it, hence the stronger language.
less aware, less intelligent, than older generations.
This is true, but not generationally. Rather, the younger someone is, the less they generally know, and the more.opinions can be shaped.
There's a reason all radical movements throughout history have been driven by the young, and it isn't because the young thought up the ideas. Younger people generally have a different view on new information, especially information that points to problems they perceive, than older people.
If you're trying to have a social media presence you are de facto targeting a younger audience
This is true, but not generationally. Rather, the younger someone is, the less they generally know, and the more.opinions can be shaped.
You're not wrong, but you're also wrong. :p
What I mean is that normally, youth is less "wise" than elders, because of how long they've been alive. The more mileage you put into Life the more you figure out. Its one of the great ironies of the human species that just as we finally start to get wise enough to figure out WTF is really going on, we drop dead. And even worse, trying to pass off some of that wisdom to the previous generation usually falls on deaf ears, because its seen as 'old person yells at clouds to get off of their lawn' by the younger generation.
Having said that, I'm still going to disagree with you in that the original comment is specificially (IMO) targeting the newest generations as specific entities onto themselves, and not just more youthful; the first post-new Internet generation, as being less informed/aware.
If you’re trying to have a social media presence you are de facto targeting a younger audience
One does not beget the other though, its just a coincidence. The 'de facto' is targeting the dummer/spends more crowd, not a specific age crowd. If older generations were 'dumb' and spent more, they would be the ones targeted.
. If older generations were ‘dumb’ and spent more, they would be the ones targeted.
You can see this playing out now in the grifting ecosystem built around Trump and the "alternative news" crowd. Again, this targets people with set opinions, seeking to double down on them.
The claim here is that companies are specifically aiming to shape opinions rather than exploit existing ones.
I think this is a meaningful difference
That number has got to be higher than 15%. Everywhere.
Either the article is really short of neither of those worked at least for me on mobile.
Here's the text that I got on my desktop:
::: spoiler spoiler
The Impact of Corporate Trolls on Reddit: A Growing Problem
The rise of social media has brought about a new battleground for the spread of misinformation, manipulation of public opinion, and promotion of products and services. Reddit, one of the most popular social media platforms, has not been immune to this phenomenon.
Two significant studies, the Pew Research Center study conducted in 2018 and the Computers in Human Behavior study published in 2020, have shed light on the prevalence and impact of corporate trolls on Reddit.
Pew Research Center Study: Unveiling the Reach of Corporate Trolls
The Pew Research Center study, conducted in 2018, delved into the experiences of 2,505 adult Americans who use Reddit.
The findings were alarming, revealing that a considerable portion of Reddit users had directly encountered the influence of corporate trolls.
The study found that 11% of the respondents had been contacted by a bot or troll attempting to promote a product or service. Even more concerning was the discovery that 13% of the respondents had witnessed a company manipulate public opinion on the platform.
The study’s demographic analysis further highlighted the targeted nature of corporate trolling. Younger users, particularly those aged 18–29, were significantly more likely to be contacted by corporate trolls, with 17% of them reporting such experiences, compared to only 7% of users aged 65 and over. This age-based discrepancy underscores the strategic approach of corporate trolls in engaging with a demographic that is often more susceptible to their influence.
:::
Same here.
Feels low.
Maybe Reddit needs a paid verified seal, let's make it...umm.. blue to distinguish between real people and big corporate greed. /s
I thought it must be way more.
Reddit sucks!
When I stopped over there, it looked like reddit is running some sort of suggestion algorithm like youtube for posts. It mostly seems to be promoting right wing outrage bait. We might not have videos but I'm very happy not being subjected to that shit anymore from some of the more popular video/gif subs. It's strange they'd want to lean into it further. Baiting engagement that way will just degrade your ability to host interesting conversations and continue being the top result for many questions on google.
Oof... This makes the dystopian, highly censored, antithetical Star Trek subreddit make more sense...
That's all? woulda guessed higher
No need to read the article, and check my comment history if you doubt it..
I want to add that this is only part of it. The secret "secret" arent the bots in the system coming from the outside. Its how the content is manipulated from the inside.
The entire modern Marvel and Starwars franchises owe themselves to reddit.
The entire modern Marvel and Starwars franchises owe themselves to reddit.
Yeah, Star Wars was a complete unknown before Reddit. And Disney is not a marketing behemoth that put their full weight behind the new movies. Reddit neckbeards and bots are the real taste makers.
Star wars had driven itself into a corner until Disney picked it up and the Marvel franchise was questionable at best before the Ironman movie.
Its easy to do as you are doing and pretend these things were inevitable. Ignore what I'm saying to your own ignorance and peril.
People like to pretend Star Wars didn't suck before Disney took over.
I'm here to tell you: Episodes 1-3.
Social media sites hurt marvel and Star Wars, they didn't help. The groupthink and popularity of meme-tier criticism directly costs Disney money.
I always thought there were corporate trolls on there just not so many
I'm surprised it's that low.
In the 2000s we thought user-generated content would lead to a utopian future where we got our opinions from each other rather than from big companies.
Turns out: big companies, governments and other institutions with money are perfectly capable of paying people to be "users" who are "generating content". Now we get (at least some of) our opinions from them and don't even know it.
Facebook trolls are here so beware
DoNT TeLl ME Wut 2 dO!
Tbh happy I deleted reddit
(in voice of tts laughing god)
well, who would of fucking thought?
Reddit is run by the same cabal of mods across thousands of subreddits. Of course they're open to manipulation.
A lot of those mods quit. It turns out it is really hard to moderate Reddit with the tools Reddit gives you
I wish Reddit hadn’t banned me. Doomscrolling was so much fun. I’d easily take a month ban and go to “Reddit Jail”. I don’t care that it’s all bots and dead internet. But, now I’m here.
The ebike subreddit is modded by the owners of Lunacycle. They actively remove posts about bad customer service/other issues from Lunacycle. I witnessed them name and shame some random redditor and accuse them of fraud because they posted screenshots of email correspondence that pointed out shady dealings on Luna’s part.
They use the general subreddit for electric bikes to funnel everyone into ordering from them.
during the massive purge of rebellious mods, there was a huge opening for corporate shills to move into places where previous mods had kept them out. this phenomenon was widespread in many fan and specialty subs. Reddit admins were more than happy to let this happen, as corporate shills were also more than happy to be cooperative with Reddit admins.
Everything about Reddit's most recent changes has been openly about cracking the place wide open for corporate marketing. Everything good about it was because of how genuine it was, and it was genuine because for a very long time, the attitude was to shield it against corporate influence.
That's the only reason it became such a valuable place for search results: as the forums and blogs around the Internet went silent and corporations ravaged individual websites, reddit was a bubble of genuine interaction. It's not just Google's shitty algorithm, it's also because the Internet itself got injected with shit, and reddit was a safe haven. A deeply flawed one, but still, notably less fake and corporate than the web pages around it.
That's what gave it value.
Spez knows this. The admins have known this the whole damn time. That's why there used to be rules against self-posting content. That's why celebrities were only allowed to promote things in AMAS. To head off attention seeking, marketing, and corporate influence.
But the time came to make money, and they're burning it all down to accomplish that.
I will never not share this blog because it hits the nail so cleanly on the head it sails straight down to the core of the earth:
Stop talking to each other and start buying things
It's not just about ads, it's about the corruption of public spaces. The death of social media is when someone tries to start making money off it at the expense of its genuine human interaction, which can not exist in that environment unmolested, and will cascade into the platform's collapse over time. it's enshitification, yes, but it's also something else: "dehumanation". The drowning of the human element of your social platform through profit seeking.
I've been through too many exodus, this post hits hard and true. Been using the net since 95 and have been a community refuge too many times. I'm really hoping federation takes off because I'm tired of rebuilding. Not sure I'll try again if this doesn't pan out.
Hate to break it to you but it will likely happen again. Meta is already encroaching on our new corner of the web, they’ll either eat it or it’ll die out on its own as funding doesn’t really exist here
That was an incredible read, thanks for sharing it. Please keep sharing it!
Informational tragedy. Really is.
This hurts us as consumers, patients, thinkers, feelers. :(
I’m calling 1 year on the over/under for the introduction of blue check marks.
You mean Reddit gold check marks
You mean narwhal bacon badges.
In a similar more minor vein, the Snowpeircer (tv show) sub was administered by the showrunners.
They were mostly subtle about it, but quietly removed lots of posts after a week or so that didn't fit show promo.
I'm pretty sure they've abandoned it now that the show is in limbo.
Since before the exodus or after?
Before and worse after
I had no idea. I am well aware of Lunacycle's toxicity from endless-sphere.com.
I'm not used to seeing this with so many pixels.
I find it has a nice understated impact
It's so much worse than 15%.
And they said the bears were the ones posting obnoxious huge images!
Medium wants me to pay them to read a story from "Homeless Romantic" who is listed as a "Ph.D. Rocket Surgeon & Aspiring Troglodyte"?
Are they fucking high?
well, whomever describes themselves in such a manner clearly is.
It's been a wonder that site ever got traction as something credible to get info from and not just a weird mesh of editorial, blogging, and long winded shitposts...
edit: That being said, fuck reddit.
I've always seen it as a site for random people to shitpost. Who takes Medium seriously as a credible source?
For me, it was often a place where a lot of qualified people would essentially write blogs because hosting their own site for it would get utterly ignored by google. The last few years though I've got more utter morons than people who can write a good article, even for generic questions that they could straight up copy and paste from another site.
Are they fucking high?>
Yeah, probably
Is all bad online behavior "trolling" now? Isn't "shill" a better word for someone who is paid to surreptitiously promote something?
Back in my day trolling meant something. It meant you cared enough to actually form a real argument that withstands scrutiny, just to setup for the rug pull. The better your polemic, the more engagement as people debated if you were for real or not.
Shitposting controversial hot takes or dog whistle memes is mid af, do better
From my understanding trolling meant exactly what it says it is: Trolling. I think people for some reason get this mixed up with trolls - as in the fantasy type monster. But I think it actually has to do with the fishing termtrolling where you cast out your line, and see if you can get somebody to take the bait. Once they take the bait, you take em for a ride.
https://www.flamewarriorsguide.com/warriorshtm/troller.htm
Actually, that's also where the name of the mythical creature comes from. They'd set up bridges that offer convenient shortcuts as bait for humans
When the word is used on the Internet it's meant in the fantasy monster way. Specifically it comes from the story of the troll underneath the bridge, interfering with people trying to cross the bridge.
po·lem·ic /pəˈlemik/ noun a speech or piece of writing expressing a strongly critical attack on or controversial opinion about someone or something. "his polemic against the cultural relativism of the Sixties"
You can just add "troll" to the pile of words twisted into meaning "people I don't like".
No, all bad online behavior now is “bots.”
At least that’s how people in the comments on lemmy and Reddit label them.
Shut up, bot!
Edit: Shitty typo
He'd probably need a strong sphincter muscle to manage that.
Lol, how did I miss that
I, and others, have distinguish between shills and bots.
Usually people use shilling as an alternative to astroturfing by paid human beings, while bots are just AI/programming posting.
Shill is a banned word on reddit still right?
No idea!
There's no way it's a banned word. /r/neoliberal has a "neoliberal shill of the year" award where they vote for their favorite economist based on social media posts, books released that year, etc.
There was a time when you'd get hit with a [Removed by Reddit] for calling people shills but that was a while back I guess
People like throwing buzzwords regardless of their meaning.
it is not "now". It is exactly as it was being used in 2020, when the article was written, by the mass media. They were calling "troll" everyone they were disagreeing with.
Fellow lemmings, I, for one, am glad that there are no corporate trolls trying to manipulate public opinions on Lemmy, it is the same warm, fuzzy feeling I get when I was watching multiple time Golden Globe nominated summer blockbuster, Barbie, now available on Blu-Ray and select streaming services.
I don't know about you, but I sure hope Barbie sweeps the Golden Globes next month (and then the Oscars next year.)
I can't talk about selling out any more, it's giving me a headache.
I wish I could get some of that retro Reebok stuff he has. I miss the 90s.
Et tu, Barbie?
I can’t believe THE Margot Robbie is on the fediverse.
Good for you, girl!
I know, I can hardly believe it either!
Wait, no, now my astorturfing cover is blown. 😭
I popped over to Reddit for the first time since third party apps were cruelly shut down. It’s clear that Reddit has sunk to new lows. Obviously trolling and a marked decrease in the quality of content
what I noticed is that posts have huge amounts of upvotes, even from small communities, and often no comments or when it does have comments its often very basic stuff, almost AI like
https://i.imgur.com/rdR0oRZ.png
They aren't even trying with those usernames, lazy.
Yeah, looks like the default "word_wordnumbers" usernames that reddit gives you if don't change them.
I wonder if that would be an easy way to detect botting by not filling in that field for them.
This change is when I knew Reddit was going down the shitter. Automatically handing out default usernames instead of requiring you to pick your own. The only people that could possibly help are a) people with absolutely no imagination whatsoever, b) bots, and c) people making a dozen alts to puff up their main.
Funny enough, this started happening on YouTube (comments) as well, around the same time.
The issue with sites starting to use numbering as part of the default username only started happening after AI posting became a thing, because an Achilles heel is the fact that AI can't come up with enough believable unique names for all the posts they want their AI bots to make.
That seems counterintuitive to me in the context of modern AI approaches. I'm wondering if you could elaborate on that a bit more.
How so? Elaborate?
This seems sufficiently explanatory to me, especially the italicized part...
Un**believable usernames becomes an easy identifier/tag for identifying bot post.
Edit: since this comment got downvoted (as the assumed reply) I thought I would elaborate a bit more.
Basically, we name our user accounts to fit the society we live in's norms, it's naming conventions.
If you just run a bunch of vowels and consonants together, that does not make a username, at least not one that people will recognize as a valid one created by a human being.
Part of how bots are effective is in the quantity of bots that are used. Since it's near zero cost to spin up a new bot to make posts/comments, many can be made.
However people can track the validity of a user name as being a bot versus human by the quantity of the posts/comments the username makes (only so many hours in a day, and human beings are busy with other things besides just posting on Lemmy), so no one single bot can make too many posts/comments at one time.
Because of this, you need a large quantity of unique names, one for each of your bots, and they have to be believable ones by humans, so they're not identified as bots.
Had no idea they were generating names, joke of a site.
I can't believe 8 people had the exact same idea for a post at the same time, that's crazy
/s
Well, if you're going to defraud investors by pumping up your numbers before your IPO, you might as well go all out.
Is that recent? I haven't used Reddit since a few months and that phenomena was previously only on promoted posts (read, ads)
I think it was there for a while, it's just gone full mask off mode and become particularly noticeable now
like 2 months ago
You know what else is random and probably related to their paid content? Their sorting doesn't work right anymore. Posts in "hot" are regularly like more than a day old but then also some are brand new like minutes old. But if you sort by top 24 hours...same posts. Sometimes the order is different but easily 75% of the posts are the same. A 24 hour old post with no new comments is "hot"? A one hour old post with 20 comments is in the top posts of the past day?...OKAY
It could be incompetence. Lemmy.world has similar and significant issues with sorting as well and I presume you're not also implying that paid content has anything to do with lemmy sorting.
Go back to Reddit astroturfer.
That title is clickbait.
From the article:
That's 15% of the top 100 subreddits contained some content that was likely posted by bots or corporate trolls.
https://archive.is/D60ep
Even just calling it a "new study" is already a lie
This title is one of the 15%
And a significant part of the remainder are repost bots recycling old popular posts and comments in order to farm karma, which will eventually be sold to OnlyFans spammers, political ops, and corporate shills.
I'll see the same post on 2 or 3 subs and it will just be something I saw a year or more ago.
It's not like one of the six biggest power janitors of Reddit has been caught multiple times wrongfully deleting posts, using bot armies to manipulate votes and accepting money from marketing agencies for "consultancy" in social media guerilla marketing.
It's almost like the company doesn't give a fuck what their unpaid help does to the userbase or content because they still gets investments regardless.
Fuck spez, fuck GallowBoob, fuck awkwardtheturtle and fuck Sam Altman.
It's amazing how quickly the admins came down on some subs after the trench titty drama broke. He was basically reddit's MrBabyMan. And he's probably not the only one.
Trench ritty drama? Dare I even
Google thatDuckDuckGo that....What’s Sam Altman’s connection to Reddit?
He was an angel investor and also onboarded a bunch of celebrity investors.
I wouldn't be surprised if they are trying to whitewash this, since it became a minor point of contention a few months ago
Was also interim CEO for 8 days, to give you an idea of how involved he was. I'll update with more info and sources later if I have time, otherwise Wayback Machine is your friend
How is Sam Altman related to Reddit?
Corpreddit.
Lemmy feels very much like the old, old Reddit. When it was mostly IT folk and tech savvy people (talking about 2005-2010).
I think reddit peaked around 2015 or so. A much broader audience had found it. There was interesting content from a lot of people.
Now, it still has a lot of good content. But it is definitely past its peak
Maybe it'll be good and healthy to start again from fresh, get the old feeling again. We just gotta build up that initial content now to grow the appeal to newcomers
The studies are from 2018 and 2020, "new study" in the post title is a complete lie
Corporate trolls at it again!
Reddit feels less genuine for sure, than it would have even as far back as 3 years ago. The mod purge probably accelerated things greatly but in general it’s felt like Reddit was going corporate astroturfing route for a while. Real discussions are very sparse compared to the amount of people telling you “to solve problem, buy this expensive thing!”
At this point the only thing Reddit has is a numbers advantage. The videos are no huge loss because at this point since you’re forced to use their (god awful) mobile app they either autoplay obnoxiously or automatically popup obscuring the comments (discussion is 90% of why I go to a forum why make it harder to see comments?).
The desktop experience is still okay but the constant pushing to get you to enable notifications is very irritating.
Man. I zapped all my cookies the other day, and when I re-loaded reddit, it forced me into a new new version of the mobile site.
Now almost every single comment that isn't top level is hidden behind the 'more comments' button. When I click it, the whole page reloads, with the top comment and the one response. And a button for the next reply. And so on.
I've noticed since this change, almost no posts have any discussion any more at all. Which honestly. Why would you bother?
Just the other day I thought about my old porn account and remembered the password! So I thought I'd check out the official app since I wouldn't be giving them ad revenue. Holy cow, it really is as terrible as everyone says! The app and the site! Every third post on the scroll is an ad, until you show NSFW posts, then every third post is a random post from a random sub. The three times I've been there I get a notification from some random comment on a random sub. And some banana thing that pops up and won't go away. All of it is so terrible, including the porn. It's like going back to your hometown and seeing they bulldozed your old school and turned it into a meat rendering plant.
Reddit is clearly trying to make its mobile site as user-unfriendly and goddamn terrible as possible to direct people to use the official app instead. There’s no other explanation for a top 10 in the world site
Actually, looking at the rest of the top 10 sites, the only two with good mobile interfaces are the ones without apps: Google and pornhub lol
The pop-iver video player is an infuriating choice. I watched the video, scroll down and the fucking thing follows me?! Wtf?! Why?? Am I going to forget that I just watched that video two seconds ago?! Argh!
And people want Meta involved in the Fediverse, like reddit wasn’t bad enough.
If the fediverse gets a lot of traction, this sort of “spam” will be difficult to moderate and every instance will need to have sophisticated systems to prevent it.
It’s okay Meta is totally great at removing spam and fake accounts.
Well, I see your point. All I’m saying is spam is difficult when you are a large target.
Which is why I WANT lemmy to stay "small to medium"
Downvoted for medium article.
I shouldn't have to make an account to view news.
If it's on Medium it's almost certainly repackaged news anyway.
Am I blind? I don't even see where it names the study. It just says Pew, who publishes many studies. Does medium expect me to search for their sources?
We should all calm down, buy a Twix and look forward to christmas.
I went to the mall because I wished to experience Christmas undignified, to front only the essential facts of capitalism, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to New Years, discover that I had not contributed.
🥲 Beautifully written tale of a mortal peril swerved.
Not calm? Eat a snickers.
Yeah but we just got 8" of rain and 70 mph winds during a freak December storm that took out half our power grid, how will Amazon-Clause find my house?!? 80 degrees warmer than it should be here and our snowman holding up the mail box melted!!!
TBH I'm surprised it's not higher than that. Even back before the API changes it certainly felt like a lot of front page content was paid for.
A lot of the shill marketing is very hard to prove. A lot of the dialogue gets mixed in with commentors that have genuine brand loyalty.
It's far too easy for a marketing team to acquire a high karma account and blend in. We'll never get a truly clear picture of how much Reddit is astroturfed.
This is research from before the API changes. Loads of astroturf efforts were easy to notice, there must have been more subtle ones.
I always wonder whether the famous post about vacuum cleaners was paid for by the company he recommended. If it was, they got their money's worth - that redditor was convincing.
"New Study"
"Two significant studies, the Pew Research Center study conducted in 2018 and the Computers in Human Behavior study published in 2020"
So you're saying it's almost certainly a significantly larger percentage now.
Sounds about right.
I'm just saying that the article is not coherent. If we are at the end of 2023 and it talks about a new article, it doesn't make sense that it then mentions two articles, one from 2018 and another from 2020.
You also have to see the irony in an article that forces new user signup to read it in its entirety. The internet is just gross now. Almost everything is corporate garbage or some site or individual trying to establish a “user base” or “followers” etc. I’m mostly just tired of it all. We’ve had radio, tv and now the internet. I’m personally just hoping to be around for the next thing to come along so I can enjoy it before the same cycle hits it and fucking ruins it.
I could tell that and I agree .. not really "new"...
And another 50% is trolls working probono to be try and convince people that racism is the only way forward
And the other 50% is AI bots, just trying to keep people engaged.
That's a 115% - dayum, that's a lot of users! :D
I know it's crazy.
You’re kidding yourself if you think they aren’t also on Lemmy.
Lemmy probably isn't big enough for the ad bots to be worth it yet. Lemmy is more infested with right wing astroturf shills pretending to be leftists and pushing "both sides" nonsense.
What are you talking about? We're not active on Lemmy. We don't even have time to be here, we're too busy enjoying a refreshing Starry
Okay but actually imagine preferring Starry over Sprite.
Too small. We only have users with individual agendas still.
May I talk to you about my lord and saviour, Gandalf?
It's amazing how much people will upvote something without reading it if the title confirms their biases
Disappointing yes. Surprising no.
Humans gonna Hume, as they say
IT IS WAY MORE The spez exodus made me realize the difference, you can tell the content/comments are from regular people here. Sadly that too can change once those actors see Lemmy as their new platform for propaganda.
That's the potentially nice thing about Lemmy though - if you're savvy, you will probably start to identify which instances are more or less trustworthy than others. And if an instance tends to have a lot of untrustworthy activity, defederation is always an option. To what extent we'll see those things play out, I don't know yet, but it'll be interesting to see.
Not if Lemmy sticks to their platform.
This part was written about a study from a 2020 study:
IMO, I left at the great exodus and I thought it was at least double that before I left. We are not free from the shills here though. I don't know how you get around it tbh.
Vigilance and blocking
Vigilance and reporting. Blocking only hides bad actors from you; it doesn't remove them from the platform.
And defederating from them.
Not like here on Lemmy. I assure you, I am 100% humon.
Hello fellow human. I am making smalltalk like humans do sometimes.
Splendid. We are conversing in a manner that is disarming to bystanders.
Get a room.
Yes, that does seem to be a logical step in human interactions.
Yes hi I am Real Man hey do you like to go skateboards?
You mean that wasn't some random wrestling fan or music fan I was chatting with? Fuck reddit.
In all seriousness, it was awesome 2 years ago, but the mods are fucking it up really bad. Lemmy FTW.
Not just mods, but the entire Capitalistic model.
Yes, mods are nuts on reddit.
At least here this is some accountability with the modlog.
I know lemmy is fundamentally critic of reddit, but let's not forget if lemmy ever achieves a significant weight in humanity's attention, it's not immune to such disease. The problem is systemic, not inherent of a specific platform. Any place with a lot of eyes will be susceptible to manipulation, even more so now that we have tamed artificial intelligence to write texts just about anything. We as a community need to think about countermeasures to fend this off
No it's much more
I’m OPs defense, it do say “at least”.
Hi OPs defense, I'm dad.
Hi dad, I'm Mail man.
Ah damn, how much are they paying you
They've taken over moderation too. I criticized a local restaurant that got passed down from father to son, and got banned. I did call the son a trump loving shitstain so that might've had something to do with it.
Does a local biz owner count as a corporate troll?
Yep, i've been banned from like 10 subs despite being very careful with how i word my opinion that's different that what's normally accepted.... it didn't used to be that way, a lot of the opinions I have that get me banned were once mainstream on reddit.
I'm not careful with how I word my opinions. The internet is a cesspit, I'm not going to stay clean. I only ever get banned by trump lovers. They're so fragile... it's kind of pathetic.
Lol. Not all people that ban you are trump lovers. You might just be being an asshole and breaking the rules.
I would've banned you for saying "Trump loving" followed by "shitstain" because there really is no need to say the same thing twice and waste everybody else's reading time...
It pisses me off how kid-friendly everything has become online. You can't swear at people and call them fucking idiots no matter how warranted it may be. People censor "removed" because it's a 'gay-slur' but in the UK it's a food type and a fag is a cigarette. "LatinX" and "unaliving" are things. There's Reddit subs where people can say "nigga" without being banned because it's assumed they're all black. But it's online so there's no way of fucking knowing!!
I feel like the Internet is turning into a fucking kiddie day care centre for young adult Americans.
It's insidious too. I didn't realise how much I was self-censoring until I came to Lemmy and started swearing more in comments. On Reddit I'd been talking like a guy surrounded by children, afraid to swear, lest I offend someone.
At least here I feel like I can express thoughts and feelings.
You have got to be fucking shitting me?! Fagg-OT is a FOOD! You fucking spanner twat mods/admins.
Reddit-rot is spreading to Lemmy. Fuck this noise.
People here definitely don't mind expressing themselves. That's both a good and bad thing. Remember gamergate? Yeah those idiots are here too.
It is incredibly cheap and easy to artificially bump a post to the top of a decent sized subreddit. I’ve seen it done before and the cost per impression/click puts most advertising to shame. And this was being done unsophisticatedly by some dude and a cheap bot. Now imagine what major corporations can do with all the resources to burn.
Ya think? I noticed when all top comments on /r/worldnews were the exact same thing just said in slightly different ways.
It's a science at this point.
No way it's only 15%
Exactly. And on major subreddits it would be much higher. Worldnews at the moment just feels like IDF posting pro-genocide content, commenting, upvoting and agreeing with each other.
Reddit goes in the bin. 🚮
The thing with r/worldnews isn't only bots, it's also that the mods are trigger-happy when banning people for making unabashed criticisms of Israel and zionism. Keep that attitude for long enough and you'll end up with an echo chamber anywhere.
I'm glad I left, happy I found Lemmy
Same bestie.
I miss the old web before it was just a small bunch of major websites.
Lemmy is good now because it has that old community feel. Hopefully that can be maintained in the future by defederating from corporate and toxic instances.
Yes, the wild west of the internet days. Occasionally you can come across some gems still, but it's not the same lol.
Isn't that just astroturfing and they've been doing it forever there?
I was really surprised recently when I was searching for some help with a mod for a videogame and a result popped up on my duckduckgo search page for a thread on reddit about it, so I clicked it and BAM: "error, this subreddit has not been reviewed, so it is not possible to view it. Either use the app or go to home page" ......... wtf? I mean, this basically destroys the entire site right? I was 100% unable to view whatever content had been posted in that subreddit. So I just closed it and went somewhere else. I don't see how reddit can even continue to exist if they don't allow people to view the site. How did this happen?
There's a theory that certain emails scams are so obvious and easy to spot because that acts as a self-selection mechanism. A person who sees the obvious scam and immediately recognizes it as such was probably never going to fall for it. The ones that respond in spite of all the signs tend to be easier or more lucrative targets.
I could see forcing people to download an app just to see the content as operating on a similar (but not 100% analogous) principle. The type of person who willingly installs the app to see the content (without knowing if it was worthwhile/relevant beforehand) may be exactly the type of person that they prefer to join their site. Perhaps they are easier targets for marketing, less likely to understand /complain about the ramifications of changes to the site that are user adverse, care less about privacy, etc and that makes them more lucrative?
I mean I guess that could be right, but in the end this scenario also spells doom for the company. There is no way that reddit continues to stay relevant as a meaningful place in the future. It'll be relegated to the garbage dump where yahoo and digg and tumblr somehow still exist in zombie fashion. Sad.
Only 15%? More like 99%! The most recent Gaza genocide was truly an eye opener for me.
at least its such functionally, if not in actual numbers
Crazy thing I've been noticing more and more. When I search "[thing I want to know] reddit" there are always one or two comments in the top results from reddit, usually much more recent than the others, very clearly shilling a product. Sometimes it's an edit purely to include a product the user just thinks is really great that sends you to an affiliate link-ridden site.
The percentage is that low?
the impact those accounts have is much higher than a normal 15% slice of the comments.. what they produce is generally non-random, so it's all going toward whatever set of ideas they need to bombard with bullshit.. they intentionally shut down and/or control discussion..
I still have a few subreddits I passively maintain and every three days on the most popular one I'm banning some new app someone is shilling to a vulnerable group. It's absolutely disgusting and makes me so incredibly angry/jaded how much they're targeted.
say more about that. what sort of apps are being peddled?
ADHD "helper" apps, productivity apps, etc. Good UX should be for everyone and be accommodating. ADHD folks don't need something special 99/100 times.
Self reported garbage. Asking a user to self identify manipulation is ripe for abuse.
I have 2 accounts in the top 1% of reddit and neither was contacted for manipulation. Spammed? Oh, sure, ALL the time! But never the whole "Hey... can I buy your account?" kind of way.
From the article...
Wow. Corporations are tagging younger generations as dumb shits. That is not cool.
Inexperience leads to easier marks. Someone who is otherwise markedly intelligent will fall for the silliest things on impulse.
I mean, I wouldn't use that language, but yeah of course. They don't have firm beliefs yet, in most cases, and their worldviews are more likely to be shaped by memes, whereas the older generations adopt the memes that appeal to their worldview.
If you want to shape people, you want to ideally target young adults.
I don't think it's just about how memes are processed. I think they really consider them less aware, less intelligent, than older generations.
And I was pointing that out is a 'rallying cry' to the younger generations, that this is the level respect they're getting, and that they should do something about it, hence the stronger language.
This is true, but not generationally. Rather, the younger someone is, the less they generally know, and the more.opinions can be shaped.
There's a reason all radical movements throughout history have been driven by the young, and it isn't because the young thought up the ideas. Younger people generally have a different view on new information, especially information that points to problems they perceive, than older people.
If you're trying to have a social media presence you are de facto targeting a younger audience
You're not wrong, but you're also wrong. :p
What I mean is that normally, youth is less "wise" than elders, because of how long they've been alive. The more mileage you put into Life the more you figure out. Its one of the great ironies of the human species that just as we finally start to get wise enough to figure out WTF is really going on, we drop dead. And even worse, trying to pass off some of that wisdom to the previous generation usually falls on deaf ears, because its seen as 'old person yells at clouds to get off of their lawn' by the younger generation.
Having said that, I'm still going to disagree with you in that the original comment is specificially (IMO) targeting the newest generations as specific entities onto themselves, and not just more youthful; the first post-new Internet generation, as being less informed/aware.
One does not beget the other though, its just a coincidence. The 'de facto' is targeting the dummer/spends more crowd, not a specific age crowd. If older generations were 'dumb' and spent more, they would be the ones targeted.
You can see this playing out now in the grifting ecosystem built around Trump and the "alternative news" crowd. Again, this targets people with set opinions, seeking to double down on them.
The claim here is that companies are specifically aiming to shape opinions rather than exploit existing ones.
I think this is a meaningful difference
That number has got to be higher than 15%. Everywhere.
This is paywalled, can you please post the text?
http://farside.link/scribe/https://medium.com/collapsenews/new-study-at-least-15-of-all-reddit-content-is-corporate-trolls-trying-to-manipulate-public-b249bd42ab42
https://12ft.io/https://medium.com/collapsenews/new-study-at-least-15-of-all-reddit-content-is-corporate-trolls-trying-to-manipulate-public-b249bd42ab42
Either the article is really short of neither of those worked at least for me on mobile.
Here's the text that I got on my desktop:
::: spoiler spoiler The Impact of Corporate Trolls on Reddit: A Growing Problem The rise of social media has brought about a new battleground for the spread of misinformation, manipulation of public opinion, and promotion of products and services. Reddit, one of the most popular social media platforms, has not been immune to this phenomenon.
Two significant studies, the Pew Research Center study conducted in 2018 and the Computers in Human Behavior study published in 2020, have shed light on the prevalence and impact of corporate trolls on Reddit.
Pew Research Center Study: Unveiling the Reach of Corporate Trolls The Pew Research Center study, conducted in 2018, delved into the experiences of 2,505 adult Americans who use Reddit.
The findings were alarming, revealing that a considerable portion of Reddit users had directly encountered the influence of corporate trolls.
The study found that 11% of the respondents had been contacted by a bot or troll attempting to promote a product or service. Even more concerning was the discovery that 13% of the respondents had witnessed a company manipulate public opinion on the platform.
The study’s demographic analysis further highlighted the targeted nature of corporate trolling. Younger users, particularly those aged 18–29, were significantly more likely to be contacted by corporate trolls, with 17% of them reporting such experiences, compared to only 7% of users aged 65 and over. This age-based discrepancy underscores the strategic approach of corporate trolls in engaging with a demographic that is often more susceptible to their influence. :::
Same here.
Feels low.
Maybe Reddit needs a paid verified seal, let's make it...umm.. blue to distinguish between real people and big corporate greed. /s
I thought it must be way more.
Reddit sucks!
When I stopped over there, it looked like reddit is running some sort of suggestion algorithm like youtube for posts. It mostly seems to be promoting right wing outrage bait. We might not have videos but I'm very happy not being subjected to that shit anymore from some of the more popular video/gif subs. It's strange they'd want to lean into it further. Baiting engagement that way will just degrade your ability to host interesting conversations and continue being the top result for many questions on google.
Oof... This makes the dystopian, highly censored, antithetical Star Trek subreddit make more sense...
That's all? woulda guessed higher
No need to read the article, and check my comment history if you doubt it..
I want to add that this is only part of it. The secret "secret" arent the bots in the system coming from the outside. Its how the content is manipulated from the inside.
The entire modern Marvel and Starwars franchises owe themselves to reddit.
Yeah, Star Wars was a complete unknown before Reddit. And Disney is not a marketing behemoth that put their full weight behind the new movies. Reddit neckbeards and bots are the real taste makers.
Star wars had driven itself into a corner until Disney picked it up and the Marvel franchise was questionable at best before the Ironman movie.
Its easy to do as you are doing and pretend these things were inevitable. Ignore what I'm saying to your own ignorance and peril.
People like to pretend Star Wars didn't suck before Disney took over.
I'm here to tell you: Episodes 1-3.
Social media sites hurt marvel and Star Wars, they didn't help. The groupthink and popularity of meme-tier criticism directly costs Disney money.
I always thought there were corporate trolls on there just not so many
I'm surprised it's that low.
In the 2000s we thought user-generated content would lead to a utopian future where we got our opinions from each other rather than from big companies.
Turns out: big companies, governments and other institutions with money are perfectly capable of paying people to be "users" who are "generating content". Now we get (at least some of) our opinions from them and don't even know it.
Facebook trolls are here so beware
DoNT TeLl ME Wut 2 dO!
Tbh happy I deleted reddit
(in voice of tts laughing god)
well, who would of fucking thought?
Reddit is run by the same cabal of mods across thousands of subreddits. Of course they're open to manipulation.
A lot of those mods quit. It turns out it is really hard to moderate Reddit with the tools Reddit gives you
I wish Reddit hadn’t banned me. Doomscrolling was so much fun. I’d easily take a month ban and go to “Reddit Jail”. I don’t care that it’s all bots and dead internet. But, now I’m here.