hey everyone. if you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout today, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy! Thanks!

  • Lockely@pawb.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    31
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    The site is being astroturfed by bots as well. So many FirstWordSecondWordBunchaNumbers comments that are all exactly the same trying to pin this on the mods.

    Reddit has been caught astroturfing their site before, multiple times. It’s just not been reported on because it usually doesn’t happen in English, or happened when the site was small and young.

    There are entire alternate language versions of big subreddits filled with nothing but reposts of popular old posts run through a translator. Comments section and all.

    SubredditSimulator was fun as an experiment but it’s clear they’ll artificially prop their engagement and I really hope advertisers catch on. If you’re a journalist in tech reading this, you’ve got a hell of a story to break about a top ten website fluffing up its stats for an illicit IPO grab.

    • mkwarman@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      What do you mean by mentioning SubredditSimulator here? Wasn’t that a GPT experiment made by a random user or was there something more nefarious at play that I completely missed?

      • Lockely@pawb.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        SubredditSimulator was a fun experiment by a random user with increasingly improving realism, training ChatGPT on real comments.

        It also showed Reddit you can fake engagement and community interaction with bots, which are now astroturfing the fuck out of the site.

        • deephurting@beehaw.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          There’s another sub with GPT in the title, r/subGPT or something. The subreddit simulator always amused me, it was blatantly artificial - the content on this new one made me queasy, it was precisely the kind of one note jibber jabber we’d skim past constantly.