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A16z-backed Doublespeed hacked, revealing what its AI-generated accounts promote
- pinewurst 9mo agohttps://archive.ph/20uwc https://archive.ph/20uwc
- fny 9mo agoThe Internet is dead. Long live the Internet.
- queuebert 9mo agoLet's be honest. It's been mostly downhill since AOL.
- kps 9mo agoToday is Wednesday the 11796th of September 1993.
- Multicomp 9mo agoEternal September came up in conversation today about how users don't do effort posts any longer, they just want to leave funny comments below reaction videos and then swipe to the next one. Anyone got any good effort post oases I can lurk and help out in?
- greenavocado 9mo agoAt least Gemini (protocol) users are basically immune to this because of the obscurity of the system
- Morromist 9mo agoDiscord is still good as long as its a small server.
- dredmorbius 9mo agoSmall communities. Usenet ~1990 was ~1m people with access, most at either universities or tech-oriented companies or government labs. Amongst more general discussion platforms, HN, Metafilter, possibly Tildes.net. Anything large is by definition popular and common, both terms with freighted meanings. The more so if they're advertising-driven.
- kps 9mo agoI think discussion duration is a big factor. For sites like HN, there is little point in high-effort replies, since no one will be around to see them.
- tolerance 9mo agoLooks like this is a report on how the company just…handles its business: https://doublespeed.ai/ https://doublespeed.ai/
- UncleMeat 9mo agoHoly crap. They really are leaning into "evil supervillain" advertising copy.
- ryanjshaw 9mo agoHow does one profit from this farm of AI content on TikTok?
- ronsor 9mo agoAdvertising and shilling, just like normal influencers?
- nickthegreek 9mo agoImmorally. Probably moves like affiliate/referral linking, client paid campaigns, cpa lead generating arbitrate at scale, product seeding.
- jasonwatkinspdx 9mo agoYou sell fake engagement to content creators. According to Cambridge's data, $100 gets you around 2k fake but verified tiktok accounts: https://cotsi.org/platforms?view=map&platform=lf https://cotsi.org/platforms?view=map&platform=lf Viewbotting is a pretty big issue on all the streaming platforms. Twitch changed their technical measures recently and a bunch of big streamers concurrent viewers dropped by a large amount. "Fake it until you make it" is a viable strategy with streaming. It's all about fake engagement to game the algorithm and end up in people's feeds.
- ryanjshaw 9mo agoThanks, this was the piece I was missing.
- ipython 9mo agowow... honestly, reading the Twitter feed for Zuhair ("CEO" of DoubleSpeed) makes me sick. https://x.com/rareZuhair https://x.com/rareZuhair and https://www.zuhair.io/ https://www.zuhair.io/. If you want more photos of his phone farm... it's all on his twitter page: https://x.com/rareZuhair/status/1961160231322517997 https://x.com/rareZuhair/status/1961160231322517997 "Accelerating the dead Internet"? Why are we, as a community, encouraging the acceleration of enshitification of our common spaces? So weird to me...
- Noaidi 9mo agoIt is not weird, it is greed and control.
- neilv 9mo agoHe sounds like an intelligent but misguided teenager. Maybe he's not a bad kid, and just needs better role models than the companies he mentions. If we never do things that later make us cringe and want to correct, we're not reflective and self-critical enough.
- ipython 9mo agoFWIW, I agree with you. I think that great role models are sadly in short supply these days.
- thephyber 9mo agoI don’t think they are in short supply, but the vast majority of them aren’t the super-successful so we don’t see their names often. They are the teachers, coaches, and engineers. The problem is the anti- role models are the ones who get all of the media: Andrew Tate (mysogenistic pyramid schemer and pimp / sex trafficker of high school girls), Joe Rogan (his mind is so open that his brains fell out), Jordan B Peterson (charlatan who dresses up banal self-help advice with pseudo-intellectual jargon to seem profound, drug addict who is still taking very big risks with his health, frequently argues strawmans by misrepresenting postmodernism, Marxism, atheism, etc). Our heuristics of who we should look up to are skewed because too many young people revere wrath and fame over ethics, morals, and values which may hold us back from success.
- Noaidi 9mo agoMy god, horrific. Does not everyone know everything online is a psyop now? I will tel you, they don't. No one studies things, no one takes the time. AI, social media, it all has to be protested, boycotted. Now it seems war is coming from the US it could not be more true that at this moment.
- hhh 9mo agoNo, we should not stop something that is inevitable. We should work with it to find ways that it fits into a productive society, such as anonymously verifying that you are a citizen so the cost of abuse is at least a felony.
- Noaidi 9mo agoNothing makes this inevitable. People like you who want to do nothing about it makes it inevitable.
- hhh 9mo agoWhy? Generic computation existing always means this will be possible. The cats out of the bag. You can’t regulate computation globally. You can only enforce it on the platform level. I want to do plenty about it, I want to make the barrier to allow this shit online identity theft to make it too expensive to do.
- UncleMeat 9mo agoThis is moral failure.
- Hizonner 9mo agoHow about a few prison terms for conspiracy to defraud? And not for small fry like the "CEO" of this company either. Why not, say, 10 years for Marc Andreesen, personally? And, no, no "disrupting" it with serve-your-time-as-a-service, either.
- qingcharles 9mo ago
- SilverElfin 9mo agoThis feels not very different from the recent report revealing how Nick Fuentes has a lot of artificial likes and comments on videos that push his content, due to a large following that responds to commands delivered via Telegram etc. A VC backed corporation using a large phone farm to manipulate the public is no better than Nick Fuentes.
- jbm 9mo ago[flagged]
- buellerbueller 9mo agoReddit wasn't explicitly pushing white nationalism. Furthermore: reddit is a platform; Fuentes is content. That's a meaningful difference.
- songodongo 9mo ago[flagged]
- jrflowers 9mo ago>The organization that recently released the report alleging the contrary is the same one that released that report earlier this year claiming that if you say “Christ is King” then you’re a white supremacist. No, Rutgers University did not publish a report that says “if you say ‘Christ is King’ then you’re a white supremacist”. You can read about it here, it’s only 20 pages and well-sourced. https://networkcontagion.us/reports/3-13-25-thy-name-in-vain-how-online-extremists-hijacked-christ-is-king/ https://networkcontagion.us/reports/3-13-25-thy-name-in-vain...
- SilverElfin 9mo agoEven if they said that, why would it be dismissed casually? There may be good justification to associate the two. It’s clear the phrase has flooded X this year alongside a lot of supremacist stuff.
- bossyTeacher 9mo agoHow long until the company gets sued by X/Meta/Tik Tok?
- hephaes7us 9mo agoBot activity could push up engagement metrics on these platforms, so (in some sense) those companies aren't necessarily incentivized to stop this.
- heroprotagonist 9mo agoThey don't even take down the spam you report. I doubt they'll do anything until their user base declines.
- ajross 9mo ago"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." Seems like the Butlerian Jihad is arriving ahead of schedule, and the real horrors demanding the uprising aren't oppression and violence, but viral marketing and sockpuppetry.
- jaredcwhite 9mo agoYeah, but also the violence already started via hacked brains. OpenAI is having to fend off multiple lawsuits because its chatbot users started taking their own lives.
- dredmorbius 9mo agoGPT-assisted other-directed violence and/or crime will be a whole new liability game.
- bpt3 9mo agoWTF happened to a16z? They used to be at the pinnacle of the VC sector, and now they seem to actively seek out the most toxic portcos possible.
- neuroelectron 9mo agoOnce you have infinite money, you tend to want infinite power next
- bpt3 9mo agoI don't disagree, but lighting money on fire hyping NFTs and whatever other random fad strikes them as interesting doesn't seem to be the way to accomplish that. My actual guess is that they got way too big, both in terms of headcount and fund size, to limit their investments to what is expected to be the best of the best in terms of financial return and societal impact.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 9mo ago> Once you have infinite money, you tend to want infinite power next People who get to what seems like infinite money only do so because they were seeking money as a means to power for which they have an insatiable desire in the first place, its not that getting to (even practically) infinite money triggers the desire for unlimited power, its that it is a symptom of it.
- bflesch 9mo agoIf you read "Careless People" you'll notice that Andreesseen was prioritizing cash over morals for a long time, and his Facebook investment/involvement was also producing highly unethical things
- drcongo 9mo agoReally?! They've always made a little bit of sick come up for me. Marc Andreessen has always been a grotesque parody of Lex Luthor.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 9mo agoWhy isn't this company sued for computer fraud and abuse?
- gruez 9mo agoBecause using the CFAA as a cudgel against things you don't like, whether it's journalists exposing insecure government systems, or companies engaging in deceptive marketing practices is a bad idea? For the latter, there's already laws against it that doesn't involve CFAA, eg. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-255 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B...
- WarOnPrivacy 9mo ago>> Why isn't this company sued for computer fraud and abuse? > Because using the CFAA as a cudgel against things you don't like, whether it's journalists exposing insecure government systems, or companies engaging in deceptive marketing practices is a bad idea? I think you're confusing bad ethics with a bad idea. A prosecutor's job is to win, not behave ethically.
- Nextgrid 9mo agoWhen you're a company with funding and/or a network of benefactors behind it a lot of laws stop applying. And if all else fails, I hear pardons aren't particularly expensive these days.
- boh 9mo agoAI is pretty much killing social media in the long term. Even pre-AI, a good chunk of posts/comment sections on sites were bots/paid. Reddit is becoming less believable than ChatGPT. I guess there's still the Onion-verse.
- themafia 9mo agoI'm not convinced you can have an impromptu global conversation to any positive end. Humans are not well suited to this task and an unsupervised mostly anonymous forum plays to those weaknesses and provides no support to generate positive outcomes. It was never a particularly good idea at the scale it's currently deployed at.
- boh 9mo agoReddit was pretty solid before people started cultivating their personal "brand"/only fans page/crypto pick.
- OtherShrezzing 9mo agoReddit has been an absolute dumpster fire from the get-go. Its Wikipedia page has one of the largest “controversies” sections of any publicly listed company. Many of the controversies are so significant they have their own Wikipedia page.
- oska 9mo agoNot wanting to particularly defend Reddit but a controversies section on a wikipedia page is hardly a good metric, in my opinion. Wikipedia is often used to malign various entities (and protect others).
- rchaud 9mo agoAbsolutely not. From almost day 1 Reddit has been plagued with jokey meme-speak, which is partially why specialist forums are still thriving (audio/video stuff, XDA-developers, European soccer teams, SomethingAwful boards and up until a few years ago, Notebook-Review).
- kotaKat 9mo ago* * *
- tomhow 9mo agoI explained the title here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307121
- kotaKat 9mo agoand it's not a good one.
- tomhow 9mo agoYou’re welcome to suggest a better one! Edit: Fine! I found a way to get a16z in there and keep it to 80 chars.
- kotaKat 9mo ago"Fine!" with a bonus collapsed, censored comment chain. Awesome, cool job. What petulance we have this morning, Tom.
- dredmorbius 9mo agoMeta-discussion isn't in the spirit of intellectual curiosity. HN mods deprioritise and/or bury those threads. Even where the points made are otherwise correct or useful. tomhow's acknowledged the criticism and revised his edit to reflect it. You've won your argument. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29788452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29788452>
- tomhow 9mo agoThanks you. For the record, I replied "Fine!" as a friendly acknowledgement of the community winning the argument. I collapsed some of the subthreads, because, at the time, these meta subthreads were taking up most of the main thread. However I deliberately left some uncollapsed – even though we would normally have collapsed all of them – so as not to hide the fact that there was debate about the title. I also turned off default penalties (flamewar detector, flags) and restored the submission to the front page to give it more exposure.
- nickphx 9mo agowhy was the original title edited to remove the reference to a16z? why hide investment into socially unacceptable product? if you are going to be a scumbag weasel, own it.
- tomhow 9mo agoEdit: Fine! I found a way to get a16z in there and keep it to 80 chars. Both for length reasons and because it was clickbait. The original title doesn’t even have the actual company’s name in it, only the name of the investor, which is intended to elicit just the kind of ragey reaction you’re exhibiting in this comment. On HN, titles need to be more neutral and factual (I.e., include the name of the company the article is primarily about). (Also, you seem to be implying some conflict of interest? Doublespeed and a16z have nothing to do with HN/YC.)
- jpalawaga 9mo agoNobody knows what Doublespeed is, everyone knows what a16z is. Doesn't putting the part that's pertinent to people in the headline oblige readers-to-be? I'd say that the change is editorializing more than the original was "linkbait".
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- tomhow 9mo agoA16z invests in _a great many_ companies. Without the company name in the title, you have to click to find out who the company is. That’s the point. The title gets readers riled up and activates them to click. The title we’ve set is intended to give enough information to pique curiosity for those who will be curious about the topic - the company name, what the company does (AI-generated promotional content), what’s happened (hacked). I don’t love the title but it’s the best I could come up with to fit within the 80 character limit. Anyone is welcome to suggest a better one that is compliant with the guidelines. (Edit: s/ countless / a great many /)
- sp527 9mo ago> The hacker, who asked for anonymity because he feared retaliation from the company, said he reported the vulnerability to Doublespeed on October 31 Lmao. Nice.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo agoActual title: "Hack Reveals the a16z-Backed Phone Farm Flooding TikTok With AI Influencers"
- gnabgib 9mo agoYes.. it was updated to this by mods
- shagmin 9mo agoOriginal title was better in multiple ways. Mods did a disservice here.
- edm0nd 9mo agowait is there more than one mod on HN? I for some reason have always thought it was just that @dang guy as the only one. Is he just the top mod and there are others underneath him?
- jfindper 9mo agotomhow is the other one, and evidently the one who changed the title. apparently for "clickbait" and "length".
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo agoPerhaps of interest There is an 80-character limit on titles This title is 75 characters
- yodon 9mo agoStreisand effect? A mod changed the title to something other than the originally submitted original article title, to protect a major VC. Not cool.
- dang 9mo agoI haven't looked at the article but its title is pretty baity and that's probably why we changed it, per https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- danudey 9mo agoThe baity-feeling title is actually pretty spot-on, honestly.
- anigbrowl 9mo agoBad call. 'Major VC firm investing in slop farm' is the newsworthy aspect here. 'startup selling slop as a service' is mildly interesting but there are lots of companies like that already.
- tomhow 9mo agoOK fair enough, I've found a way to include A16Z.
- exasperaited 9mo ago> Major VC firm investing in slop farm And this would be an entirely clickbait-free, fact-based summary of what they are doing. It's not far off fraud as a service. This activity could get people prosecuted in EU countries and the UK.
- kotaKat 9mo agoAnd it’s been shunted to the third page as of 8:20 AM ET the next morning. Really interesting behaviour going on.
- ackfoobar 9mo agoI checked out one of the accounts mentioned, mostly to check if I can discern fake accounts. The content is just still pictures. I'd dismiss those whether or not they're AI. Well, I'm not on TikTok anyway. This reminds me of some youtube videos when I was researching some stuff to buy. Those videos are just still images plus text-to-speech narration, usually with an annoying background music.
- lawlessone 9mo ago>Well, I'm not on TikTok anyway. I'm not on tiktok and the videos often won't play for me because of that. Are they still images as videos with tts or literally just still images?
- ackfoobar 9mo agohttps://www.tiktok.com/@chloedav1s_ https://www.tiktok.com/@chloedav1s_ is the first account mentioned in the article. (Unless TikTok's UI is horrendously bad and I misunderstood) They are literally still images.
- mmooss 9mo ago> mostly to check if I can discern fake accounts You are making yourself easier to fool: You don't know which fake accounts you overlooked, and by increasing your confidence you make yourself more vulnerable to them in the future.
- ackfoobar 9mo agoYour scenario is sth like: guy sees bad AI, good AI, and genuine content in his feed. Bad AI gives him confidence in his ability to detect slop, but he thinks the good AI is genuine content. Here the higher the quality of the slop, the harder it is to detect. In this case some slop is hacked and exposed. I check them out to see if they're good yet. The quality of the slop is unrelated to whether they'd get hacked.
- CamelCaseName 9mo agoHack reveals that startup is doing exactly what it said it was doing Okay, is this just an ad then?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- grahamlee 9mo agoAs the submitter, I want to point out that I submitted this post with the original title. The one that makes it clear a16z are behind the social media astroturfing. The mods changed the title.
- tomhow 9mo agoThat’s fine, you did nothing wrong. I explained the title change here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307121. Edit: The community has spoken and I've come up with a way to include a16z in the title whilst keeping it under 80 chars.
- grahamlee 9mo agoOK thanks for clarifying your reasoning!
- technion 9mo agoHilarious - i was literally just telling someone that im seeing no end of ads for vibit, and the dozens of glowing comments looked fake to me.
- bicepjai 9mo agoSo this is the reality we're living in now, where bot farms have become normalized? I always associated bot farms with authoritarian regimes like Russia and China, but are we becoming the same thing? And VC funds are actually backing this? I hope I'm not the only one who finds this completely insane. I can't even listen to the a16z podcast anymore; my mind now permanently associates them with bot farms. These are the news that makes me think does people ever think about moral values and ethics.
- aomix 9mo agoI keep believing there’s a web of trust type future for social media but I can’t articulate it.
- sellmesoap 9mo agoGorilla marketing and bot farms have been around for a very long time. There are bot farms to amplify all sorts of messages. A friend who is a 'performance artest' paid almost nothing to have his linked-in account amplified by a large number of nonsense accounts on that platform. 'creators' frequently buy followers so 'the algorythm' will surface their 'content'. My first roommate 20 years ago almost got a job riding the train and having 'organic' conversations about how great some product is. My solution is to buy nothing and poke and laugh at everything. (Edited for spelling)
- alsetmusic 9mo ago* Guerilla