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Companies Are Using Reddit to Manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search
(www.404media.co)
"Manipulate"
I'm sure that sentence will make sense to some people.
That's why I rely on Lemmy for my information about . . . um . . about . . .
Well. Owls. I guess.
And dull things.
💪
We know a lot about crows, too.
No shit. All online conversations on social media shouldn't be treated as reliable information. Not all data is of the same quality. I thought this was obvious, apparently it isn't.
That actually makes me wonder if these things have any correlation besides "more inferences = more true". You'd hope they have things like: if on wikipedia=big mega true, if on some random dude's blog=maybe kinda true, if on the onion=not true.
My guess is they use the vote counts to classify the reliability of the data. They might even have vote identities to classify the data based on audience. That actually seems pretty likely, now that I think of it. It would be an important part of making them effective propaganda tools, which I believe is one of the end goals.
And how sarcastic replies with high vote ratios like telling someone to add glue to their pizza so pepperoni doesn't slide around get through.
Yeah, upvotes aren't strongly correlated with accuracy. Could be informative. Or informative but false. Or just a joke. Or a troll that voters enjoyed. Or a plain old aggressive comment against someone they don't like. Or positioned such that an unusual number of people accidentally tap upvote. Or brigaded from another more popular sub. Or the votes were botted or bought. Or randomly upvoted to camouflage a bot always upvoting its owner's account. Or its visibility is better than an even better comment and thus got more total votes.
That's why I think reddit is a shit source if you want an accurate bot, but might be pretty good if you want a propaganda tool because each of those things can play a role in effective propaganda.
There's always been a short distance between SEO and manufactured opinion.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
I wanted to post my photo in a dress on lemmy's r/femboy alternative. Searched: one of the instance blocked, second one have 8 months gap between posts (basically dead). There whooping 2.5 users on lemmy, who are interested in femboys and I'm one of them.
While most people agree with you on paper - no one wanna switch, cause there no real alternative. Similar with google, youtube, windows, nvidia and all other IT monopolistic crap.
Make that tree.fiddy! 🫶
Agree i got banned on reddit and have create new account every once in a while then had to fight shadow ban , I wouldn't think twice before switching but most communities that I follow specially local once are basically non existent only the super popular or some niches with technically sound user base were able to shift rest all stayed at reddit
I was a terminal redditors for over a decade and that last year or two I was getting site-wide bans at an accelerating rate. I'm off there to avoid a permaban and I'll only post there if I need a question answered no other way.
I've been on Lemmy for 19 days so far and feel like it scratches whatever pseudo-social itch Reddit scratched before; even though the communities aren't as niche, the community and moderation isn't so consistently obnoxious.
So I’ve been thinking about this: where would we post massive amounts of miss information with the sole purpose of miss leading AI?
Just dump it on Reddit, it’s that simple? Or would an instance on the feddiverse also work?
Quora is being recommended in some circles:
https://www.quora.com/How-are-there-so-many-scammers-and-intrusive-ads-on-here-lately/answer/Franklin-Veaux
Well, the manipulation via Reddit is through paid Reddit ads.
The fediverse will run into this problem: Reddit is charging AI companies for access and all other big networks are increasingly making it hard to index them in search engines or to scrape them. The fediverse is different. We will see it getting more visible in search and therefore also in AI results, because it is accessible. Which means that people will come here and try to game the system.
As long as it’s free, like the rest of the internet, I kind of want AI to work.
How could we kill commercial AI and keep Free AI?
I don’t think ai will ever be neutral/benevolent. It’s too easy for fascists and the like to try and manipulate matters through it.
I personally would rather see it go away or at the very least take a backseat.
It is too power hungry to be both free and good. You can make it less power hungry by making it worse, or you can keep it good but then it costs a lot. Also, "good" is a stretch.
Reddit has been trying to block crawlers, including the internet archive, so they can sell their data to commercial AI companies.
Except for legal liability, the other solution is good-enough models too cheap to run locally to justify paying hosting. Like prepackaged stand-alone AI on-site servers which are cheaper after electric costs than subscriptions.
I got the new fitbit air, it came with 3 months of “AI coach”. To give it a try, I asked it how it detected my stationary bike ride, with only a sensor on my wrist.
It gave me a confident answer about vibrations, pulse, etc. I checked the linked source - it was a years old reddit conversastion about another fitbit watch, where comments were guessing about the automatic detection of workout types.
I turned off the AI feature.
The tragedy of this is the tragedy of our age and that is if people and companies of people put as much effort into being good as they did into trying to appear good then they would actually be good.
The few times I asked something to gemini it gave some bs response like "one Reddit user claimed... "
Hey atleast it's transparent
As Reddit is mostly idiots and slop now, it's a tainted source of training data.
All I do on reddit is post my "performance art", have fun menacing dorks and on extremely rare occasions offer helpful advice
If I'm providing usable data, then either their algorithm has failed miserably, or I have
this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2026
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