I feel like there is a pending wave of AI bots incoming (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 year ago by CoffeeBlood91@lemmy.ca to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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Everything on here is awesome right now, it feels like an online forum from the 2000s, everyone is friendly, optimistic, it feels like the start to something big.

Well, as we all know, AI has gotten very smart to the point captcha's are useless, and it can engage in social forums disguised as a human.

With Reddit turning into propaganda central anda greedy CEO that has the motive to sell Reddit data to AI farms, I worry that the AI will be able to be prompted to target websites such as the websites in the fediverse.

Right now it sounds like paranoia, but I think we are closer to this reality than we may know.

Reddit has gotten nuked, so we built a new community, everyone is pleasantly surprised by the change of vibe around here, the over all friendlyness, and the nostalgia of old forums.

Could this be the calm before the storm?

How will the fediverse protect its self from these hypothetical bot armies?

Do you think Reddit/big companies will make attacks on the fediverse?

Do you think clickbait posts will start popping up in pursuit of ad revenue?

What are your thoughts and insights on this new "internet 2.0"?

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[-] beanz@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm just trying to summarise to be concise, this part is what I was getting at

look at how little it took for the protest to wane, some subs are still protesting or migrating, but the majority reopened and they’re going on like nothing happened.

I disagree that "the majority reopened", of a total proportion of subs that blacked out I think the majority are either blacked out or have not resumed operations as normal. This is different from a majority proportion of all subs, which is a much larger, and the majority of which also never participated in any blackout. Since the majority of traffic on reddit goes to a minority of subs, it's not clear which metric you're looking at or whether it's meaningful in context.

Since reddit algorithms to some extent relied upon that consistent operating principle of posts in popular subs being boosted, initially the result of the blackout was extreme - the website could not functionally aggregate posts on most users frontpages with so many subs on private mode. But that is not a problem directly caused by the blackout, it's caused by reliance on consistent data. So all reddit needed to do in that case was adjust the algo to significantly improve the average user experience during peak blackout. Instead of users seeing a bunch of posts about private subs they can't interact with, they just get fed posts from subs that didn't black out, so users could engage with reddit while an active ongoing protest was happening on the platform and might not even notice.

So I guess my point is that someone's impression of how the frontpage looked at t+24hrs, or t+48hrs, or today, as an indication of how reddit's going right now, is inaccurate because of the inherently subjective nature of the information visible from just browsing the platform.

[-] ulu_mulu@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I disagree that “the majority reopened”

https://reddark.untone.uk/ lists all the subs that took part in the protest (it lists only those who officially pledged to the protest), go look at how the situation is now, majority of subs are colored white, it means they reopened as normal, tho some of them are protesting in a different way (hilarious even).

my point is that someone’s impression of how the frontpage looked at t+24hrs, or t+48hrs, or today, as an indication of how reddit’s going right now, is inaccurate

Oh that I agree with, the frontpage is nowhere near a good indication of how the situation on reddit is, admins have been working really hard to hide what's going on.

But that IMO brings the point to people who care or do not, I mean, all those who really care are abandoning ship, those who don't (the majority IMO) are basing their experience on what's shown on the frontpage, because they don't care about going deeper than that, those users don't even notice a protest is going on.

[-] beanz@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

My personal compulsion to browse reddit certainly isn't to think actively about the content I'm being fed, that's kind of the whole point - here's all the links you want spoonfed to you so you don't need to seek them out. The algorithmic approach to content delivery is the core product, and it became popular because it is good method of consumption. But when content quality goes down on average, eventually you end up with a Facebook situation - those are the users that actually don't care.

Thanks for the link, on the face of this I'm not sure if this really goes for or against my idea about the available metrics at hand not really being sufficient to make accurate/meaningful observations about the data. It certainly does feel to me like there's an undeniably significant protest occuring on the platform now, even within the confines of established rules on reopened subs. And also datapoints not considered, such as subs which have been reopened by direct admin action, or under threat of it.

[-] ulu_mulu@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

I don't like to be "spoonfed" content either, but I believe people like you and me are a tiny minority of the entire reddit userbase.

Someone in another thread said the blackout, in which a significant amount of subs participated, lowered global reddit traffic by only 7%, that's not insignificant but not that much either.

The blackout has been extremely useful, in my opinion, to make a lot of people aware of the real situation and about the existence of valid alternatives, but from the point of view of putting a dent in reddit global usage, it didn't do much.

you end up with a Facebook situation

I deleted facebook from my life more than a decade ago and I couldn't be happier about that, but there are still close to 3 billions of people actively using it every month, that's a hell lot of people that doesn't care, reddit is no different IMO.

[-] beanz@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Reddit's rise to prominence is in part a result of emphasis on facilitating the discourse Facebook used to be a place for. Facebook as a venue for discourse has gradually ended over the past decade or so, for the majority that still use it it is now just a centralised email server for sending event invitations.

No one has global Reddit traffic data except for Reddit - market estimation methods can't really account for a deviation from the norm on such a short timeframe. Regardless, it's the users that matter that are gone, we agree on that. The same ones that made Reddit the safehaven for Digg users to begin with.

I don't think Reddit is going the way of the Dodo, it's Reddit as a platform for discourse I'm on my soapbox about. Probably the largest exchange of ideas in human history happened on it. But the writing is now on the wall, to continue posting you first need to overcome the internal conflict of putting stock in a platform whose killer use case was predicated on user goodwill now burned. That itself is enough of an obstacle to make folks disengage, skewing the userbase, post quality declines, and then it's just another cesspool. All of this takes time though

[-] ulu_mulu@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I used facebook when it came out because it was a novelty (I'd say revolution but that's probably a too strong word for it) and everyone was curious about it, but I honestly never saw it as a platform to facilitate discourse, to me it always looked like a showcase box pushing on the self-centered nature of most human beings.

Reddit was the perfect discussion platform to me and I loved it to pieces, I agree when you say it holds the largest exchange of ideas, someone compared it to the Library of Alexandria, it's fitting IMO, both in the amount of knowledge it contains and the end it's meeting unfortunately.

Disengaging from it can indeed be a conflict, easy on one side because I believe most people don't tolerate being treated like s*hit as they did - especially considering that reddit without users is worth nothing - a bit difficult from the other side because it's objectively difficult to recreate the amount of useful content it has, but I believe we're on the right track here.