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I have largely written Reddit off and no longer visit it after an experiment I did where I had an agent karma farm for me and do some covert advertising. As I
by carlgreene 4mo ago
I have largely written Reddit off and no longer visit it
after an experiment I did where I had an agent karma farm for me and do some covert advertising. As I went through the posts it wrote I realized that as a reader I would have NO idea that these were just written by a computer. Many many people (or other bots) had full on conversations with it and it scared me a bit.
I am not quite there with Hacker News but I do know for a fact that many "users" here are LLMs.
Online communities are definitely dying. I guess I hope that maybe IRL communities have a resurgence in this wake.
- olalonde 4mo agoMore of a philosophical question but if you have no idea whether it's a human or robot, does it really matter? Personally I dislike AI slop only when I can tell it is...
- paulhebert 4mo agoYes, for a number of reasons: - I am trying to learn about the topic at hand and trust a human's comment more than an LLM's guess - I am trying to connect with other humans to fulfill my social needs - I am maybe spending time to help another human out with a response because I want to help someone else - I am interested in the perspective of other humans Those are just a few reasons. For each of those if it's actually an AI I feel I'm losing out on something.
- Forgeties79 4mo ago[flagged]
- WolfeReader 4mo agoHe's stating a fact. Turn on showed in your options and scroll to the bottom of the comments on any popular story. There are so many agentic users here.
- Freedom2 4mo agoI generally disagree, because the level of discourse here has always been very high, curious and intellectual.
- carlgreene 4mo agoIt has, and the well prompted agents still give that. It's very weird.
- Forgeties79 4mo agoI just don’t even understand the appeal of having a bot interact on forums for you unless you’re astroturfing for your company or personal brand or whatever
- hackable_sand 4mo agoMaybe 1:100 comments match any one of those attributes. Most comments are just grammatically "correct". Not a high bar.
- Freedom2 4mo agoThe comments that aren't grammatically correct get pedantically corrected by those HNers too, so that's nice.
- layer8 4mo agoHaving to turn on showdead (which I have turned on by default) demonstrates that’s it’s not much of a problem in practice.
- skupig 4mo agoPeople are definitely trying to make HN bots because I have seen several get flagged. No idea to what end though.
- krapp 4mo agoPossibly to test reactions to a bot they plan to build a startup around. I've seen some claim they do it to avoid stylometry or being fingerprinted, or because of social anxiety problems. Some people just have a compulsive need to optimize everything, and HN's guidelines and tone policing are more easily followed by a bot than a human.
- isityettime 4mo ago> HN's guidelines and tone policing are more easily followed by a bot than a human. HN's guidelines aren't that strict and the mod hammer is a plushie. It's not difficult to get by here. It's also kind of useful for critical reflection/self-regulation to hear the occasional "you came in too hot" or "don't be boring" from a moderator. Seems better to me to just try to be sort of reasonable and let the mods nudge you if they need to and let your comments be downvoted from time to time. What is the goal of these people, to never experience correction in their lives? To never write an unpopular comment?
- krapp 4mo ago>What is the goal of these people, to never experience correction in their lives? To never write an unpopular comment? Yes?
- isityettime 4mo agoThat seems like a really extreme goal to me. I should hope there's a better way to address the anxiety or whatever it is that's motivating it.
- ceejayoz 4mo ago> What is the goal of these people, to never experience correction in their lives? Look at all the people who complain about cancel culture. There's a huge swath of people who don't ever want to hear "that was mean/bad/shitty".
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- chumblywumbly 4mo ago[flagged]
- paganel 4mo agoFor what it's worth the admins here have let the tone of conversation slip a little when it comes to AI, as in there are many people who now openly mock (and worse) the AI zealots and there's no admin coming in and "saving" the metaphorical day anymore. In the not so distant past that kind of behaviour was almost instantly reprimanded, kindergarten-style.
- jayd16 4mo agoDon't do it anywhere. He's a jerk for doing it on reddit.
- slaw 4mo ago[flagged]
- rexpop 4mo agoPeople live in and depend on that waterway. Just because it's beneath your standards doesn't mean it isn't vital. You're giving "let them eat cake" energy.
- cactusplant7374 4mo agoUnless you've discovered the secret sauce, LLM comments are very obvious. Even Altman revealed that they focused on coding at the expense of writing.
- potsandpans 4mo agoPeople that like to fancy themselves as good llm content detectors just end up accusing everything they don't like as llm content. The only thing worst than a slop comment are the people that bitch about it incessantly. I'm convinced it's become a new expression of a mental illness.
- bee_rider 4mo agoThe main thing I suspect of being LLM written is the sort of LinkedIn style: very short sentences, overly focused on sort of… making an impact on the user. But that’s also how a certain type of bad human writer writes. So in the end, I’m not sure I know if anything in particular was written by an LLM. I guess… “that’s not just an AI red flag, it’s generally shit prose” would be how ChatGPT would describe most things nowadays.
- transcriptase 4mo agoIt’s the distilled mediocrity of the statements. Never venturing beyond a 10% margin of what you would get if you sampled the opinions of 1,000 people who underwent jury selection by west coast liberals.
- cactusplant7374 4mo agoA mere opinion is not mental illness.
- potsandpans 4mo agoI wasn't suggesting you have a mental illness for having an opinion. More, commenting that just as bad as generated content if not worse is every thread where the top comment is an accusation and ensuing witch hunt. So, no, having an opinion is not a mental illness. Feeling compelled to call it out and discuss it on everything one reads may just be.
- voicedYoda 4mo agoI feel you. Especially in the larger subreddita. i participate, and mod, a few small ones, and the community there is pretty strong and folks shut down ai slop pretty quickly. I'm not saying being a mod means it's bullet proof, but i do notice smaller communities tend to self police better and know what's real. That said, your experiment scares me as well.
- carlgreene 4mo agoI will say that I believe you probably have absolutely no idea because it's not "slop". It looks like every other reddit comment you see. My experiment was focused on niche subreddits as well due to the nature of the product I was trying to market.
- 10xDev 4mo agoUnless their account is <1 year I wouldn't assume they are a bot.
- embedding-shape 4mo agoSo easy to purchase online accounts nowadays, neither karma nor age of the account matters anything anymore.
- transcriptase 4mo agoReddit astroturfing firms and bot farms learned to buy/use “seasoned” accounts over a decade ago. I’d venture there have been countless bots just in a holding pattern harmlessly building up reputation and a human-like history of posts across different subs etc just to eventually be either activated or sold to someone else to “burn”
- 10xDev 4mo agoSo what is the comment frequency of these bots? There must be some signal in the activity even if the comments themselves pass the turing test.
- jayd16 4mo agoDoes it matter? With enough you can just have them upvote each other.
- transcriptase 4mo agoEven if there was, I doubt Reddit cares enough to go after them when it’s boosting their valuation
- Rebelgecko 4mo agoIf you find one account you can find a few dozen spam accounts by building a graph of what posts they reply to
- 4mo ago
- order-matters 4mo agoPublic* online communities are dying. Discord is thriving
- echelon 4mo agoThis. Everything important has moved to discord. Which is sad because of how undiscoverable and unsearchable it is.
- ceejayoz 4mo agoThis shit will come to Discord too.
- order-matters 4mo agoon the public servers yeah. but the ones im in with real people who know each other will be fine. I think the problem is not keeping agents out of private real people spaces, but for people who dont have any pre-existing or 'real world' connections to these communities to find a way to prove they are a real person over the internet alone and get an invite On a related note, I think this is going to be the biggest challenge to most folks when it comes in resisting using government ID online. it will be the apple offered for easy proof youre not a bot to normal circles.
- thesuitonym 4mo agoIt's already there.
- cloverich 4mo agoare those attributes now assets?
- bluefirebrand 4mo agoSort of, except if no one can ever discover a community it is always dying by default Personally I'd love to find a decent online community these days, my social circle has shrunk considerably, but idk. It seems difficult to start fresh with new people nowadays
- jmyeet 4mo agoI've been on the Internet for decades at this point and one thing I've noticed is that communities that, for example, ban political topics actually mean "positions I don't like" as "political". This is somewhat related to the Overton window but really a bunch of (mostly conservative) ideas get normalized so aren't deemed "political". I see the same thing with "AI Slop". Yes, there is AI Slop but (IME) it's pretty easy to spot. But what's more annoying is how often people are willing to throw that accusation whenever someone takes a position they don't like, much like the "political" label. It's lazy and honestly just as bad as the slop itself because it unintentionally launders the slop in a "boy who cried wolf" kind of way. I also have a theory that some AI slop isn't inherently successful. It's just heavily botted by people who are interested in promoting certain positions. I bet you could make a pro-administration LLM bot and another one promoting a communist revolution and no amount of model tuning would make the second as popular as the first because the first would hit third-party botting as well as platform content biases (eg Twitter). I've personally been accused of being a bot. This is particularly true in recent time as I've tried to share facts and fact-based analysis of, say, what's going on with crude oil markets, the military operation in the Gulf and the politics and economics around it. I even saw one hilarious comment saying (paraphrased) "the bots are getting clever and posting about unrelated topics". This was funny because it never occurred to this person that no, it was just a real person posting something you disagreed with.
- ryandrake 4mo ago> I've been on the Internet for decades at this point and one thing I've noticed is that communities that, for example, ban political topics actually mean "positions I don't like" as "political". This happens on HN all the time. For a lot of downvoters and flaggers, there are two kinds of opinions: "Things I agree with" and "Too political for HN."
- cassepipe 4mo agoAnd yet if that was entirely the case, HN wouldn't be such an interesting place. This sounds very much like someone making fun of the attempts of rationalism/effective altruism "because humans are not rational but emotional beings". Yes, it is mostly true but not entirely true and that's what makes a difference. I am certainly guilty of downvoting (not flag) people I disagree with but I also read the guidelines and will downvote or flag a comment that seems to originate from one of my ingroups that would violate those norms because I value this place. And I have also been able to nuance my own opinions by reading a well-behaved (respecting HN norms) comment even though I don't like its vibe. I didn't see the flag system being abused. The flagged comments I have seen were most egregious norm violations. Whereas posts are generally flagged when they inherently highly flammable. It's generally a edge case and some of those make it through with a little moderation warning as top comment.
- echelon 4mo ago> where I had an agent karma Was this a browser using agent? What did you use?
- carlgreene 4mo agoIt used the browser agent to grab user cookies after signing in, then made API calls iirc. Using just a browser is way too token intensive and slow. It would look for 401 errors then run the browser automation to login with the credentials and grab the token.
- echelon 4mo agoI'm surprised these platforms don't have advanced heuristics to detect API calls and inauthentic traffic. Did you clone the Reddit API from browser traffic and then turn it into a 100% API driven thing? I'd imagine they'd be sniffing browser agents, plugins, cookies, etc. to fingerprint. Using JavaScript scroll position, browsing rate and patterns, etc. Maybe their protections just aren't that sophisticated.
- tardedmeme 4mo agoReddit is known to fingerprint TLS and quickly shadowban accounts that don't have the fingerprints of browsers.
- echelon 4mo agoTLS fingerprinting and Cloudflare are easy to bypass. There are lots of libraries that do so. The application-layer stuff is harder. Each application can develop its own heuristics, and that's difficult to automate in a cross-cutting fashion. Reddit doesn't do anything about that? That seems stupid.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- 4mo ago
- vohk 4mo agoI think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust. Or rather turn them into little better than comment sections on news sites; thriving but worthless. I'm active in a number of online communities that are doing just fine but the difference is those all involve ongoing relationships, built over time and with engagement across multiple platforms. I've no doubt this clock is ticking too but it's still harder to fake a user across a mix of text chat, voice and video calls, playing an online game, etc and when much of the web of relationships extends back into real life activity. But I agree the golden age of easy anonymous connections online has ended.
- ubermonkey 4mo ago"I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust." Those sorts of places were always the only places with reliably good communities.
- bigyabai 4mo agoTo the contrary, platforms like Facebook and X demonstrate that even personal verification won't save you from identity politics.
- tardedmeme 4mo agoWhat is identity politics, is that age verification?
- evilduck 4mo agoIdentity politics have nothing to do with your actual identification documents. Think: Black Americans being treated as a homogeneous voting bloc, or that all Hispanic voters would be pro-immigration, or "the Evangelical vote".
- pjc50 4mo agoPeople will post appalling racism in newspapers under their own bylines and photos. Identity verification does not moderate.
- onlytue 4mo agoI find it amusing that this is the top comment. Reddit is so awful you finally wrote it off, but not before you used it to try to “karma farm and do some covert advertising”. It’s on-brand for HN hypocritical bullshit. But, since we are slamming on Reddit anyways without realizing how fucked HN is by the same petard, have an upboat fellow traveler.
- ishouldstayaway 4mo ago> since we are slamming on Reddit anyways without realizing how fucked HN is by the same petard Same as it ever was.
- napierzaza 4mo ago[dead]
- grey-area 4mo agoDid you ever introspect about who ruined Reddit?
- raincole 4mo agoYeah, if carlgreene specifically stopped doing that Reddit would be saved. They are the one savior.
- ishouldstayaway 4mo agoDo you sincerely believe that that's how grey-area's comment was meant to be read?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- raincole 4mo agoI sincerely believe it's a ridiculous comment that deserves to be ridiculed.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- grey-area 4mo agoThey directly contributed to the problem that they say forced them to leave Reddit.
- nickff 4mo agoIt’s a tragedy of the commons, many have done it, but no one user did it.
- Jordan-117 4mo agoI'd argue that Reddit leadership, which insulted, hobbled, and wrote off its mods and power users (destroying projects like /r/BotDefense) while doing little to crack down on the proliferation of bot repost content, had a major role in encouraging this. They might even like it better this way -- lots of extra fake engagement boosting traffic stats without messy human drama, which they can then ironically sell back to AI labs as training data.
- sovenyr 4mo agoDead Internet theory ?
- JTbane 4mo agoReddit is more or less dead to me, as the popular subs are botfests and the niche subs are empty. I'm lucky to get a single reply on gaming subs.
- tardedmeme 4mo agoThere's also a third category where the sub looks organic because the moderator deletes and bans anyone who doesn't post exactly what the moderator wants.
- octoberfranklin 4mo agoWait isn't that every sub? /s
- sgarman 4mo agoThe fact that reddit enabled hiding your posts is crazy to me. In a time where knowing who's engaging in a community is more important than ever (am I talking to a bot or a troll?) reddit removes even more options to validate.
- rgblambda 4mo agoI interpreted that as an attempt to mask the number of bots on the site so as to not scare paying advertisers into thinking their ads won't be seen by real humans.
- lizknope 4mo agoThey also now hide the number of subscribers. Before you could see if a subreddit was popular or not. Now you really don't know. I think reddit does this so they can promote stuff to the front page for clicks even if it isn't popular.
- baxuz 4mo agoI enabled hiding my posts because I kept getting harrassed and even doxxed.
- z3t4 4mo agoThere's this old meme where someone asks what will happen when AI bots posts helpful, curious and thoughtful messages!? That's mission accomplish :D They can't be better then the average human though because of training data, so I don't worry about AI comments getting up-voted by real humans, I am however worried about fake upvotes.
- altcognito 4mo ago> They can't be better then the average human though because of training data Is this based on the belief that an LLM can only represent an "average" human being?
- hleszek 4mo agoIt is not a meme, it's an xkcd: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- AuthAuth 4mo agoIf posting good messages is automated then the AI will post a good question and another AI will answer it and the humans will look and see nothing extra to contribute.
- lbriner 4mo agoSerious question: If there are so many LLMs on online forums, who is doing it? Is it just 1000s of research students or something more nefarious? Is it AI businesses building up evidence that their output is as highly scored as humans therefore "buy our software"?
- fidotron 4mo agoHN has historically been gamed for visibility. The stakes for doing this can be quite high if you can pull it off.
- thegrim33 4mo agoWe're in the middle of an active cold war where countries are trying to manipulate the citizens of rival countries to destroy their civilization without having to fire a single bullet. Anonymous, over the internet mass manipulation, all for some minimal electricity cost.
- thesuitonym 4mo agoThat's definitely the most insidious use, but I think the larger portion is advertisers and karma farmers (who later sell to advertisers).
- dylan604 4mo agohttps://www.npr.org/2024/09/05/nx-s1-5100829/russia-election-influencers-youtube https://www.npr.org/2024/09/05/nx-s1-5100829/russia-election... If Russia is willing to spend cash like that, then of course they're willing to run massive bot farms to pollute any forums they can. I'd be shocked if the US was not doing the same in any way they can. You have to ask why Trump killed Radio Free America as well when it was clearly not an big expense.
- pessimizer 4mo ago> Trump killed Radio Free America as well Not sure how this relates to the subject in a direct way. Radio Free America was a outlet explicitly created and utilized to spread US propaganda, but kinda sorta barely disguised as a journalistic enterprise (not really, if you were listening to RFA you knew what you were listening to.) Shutting it down seems to be a counterpoint to all of the covert participation of US intelligence on the web which has done nothing but escalate.
- roysting 4mo agoOn the other hand, I’ve been accused of being AI/bot and if I say things the mod doesn’t like and is not their favorite thing to hear I’m “flamebaiting” or engaging in personal attacks when pointing out specific things. Frankly, online communities have been doing for many years now, when the censorship, anti-free-speech, tone policing mods and mobs started dominating online and America really did not have the self-respect or confidence anymore to enforce the Constitution online.
- jrflowers 4mo ago> America really did not have the self-respect or confidence anymore to enforce the Constitution online. “Mods are Unconstitutional” lmao
- Forgeties79 4mo ago> On the other hand, I’ve been accused of being AI/bot and if I say things the mod doesn’t like and is not their favorite thing to hear I’m “flamebaiting” or engaging in personal attacks when pointing out specific things. Mod powertripping nonsense happens, but banning people is a very easy way to kick up a small shit storm so most of us generally avoid it unless somebody has repeatedly been an issue or just flagrantly breaks the rules. I’m not saying you aren’t telling the truth, but I’ve seen and heard this exact story a thousand times and the few that actually end up sharing proof (most refuse to) of what happened had a very skewed idea of how things went down.
- Keyframe 4mo agoHow do we know now that this comment wasn't written by LLM?
- carlgreene 4mo agoYou don't and that's the problem :)
- paganel 4mo agoReddit was already on its way way before this LLM craze, hopefully the recent tech-related changes will only accelerate that process.
- rgovostes 4mo agoSo you ran an "experiment" where you deliberately made someone else's community worse to see what would happen? Cool project.
- jsbisviewtiful 4mo ago> Online communities are definitely dying. I guess I hope that maybe IRL communities have a resurgence in this wake. Would be super fascinating to watch play out. I grew up before the internet so, historically, I know how to seek out external communities, but by early high school I was deeply entrenched in online life - so I'm very rusty with finding new IRL clubs, cliques, etc. Fortunately my life is full of many friends and I go out frequently, regardless. For those younger people that never had life without the internet, I wish them luck on their search but at the same time I'm very curious to witness their journey.
- antisthenes 4mo ago> I am not quite there with Hacker News but I do know for a fact that many "users" here are LLMs. This just makes me wonder...so what? Some of the oldest posters here with the most karma continue to post absolute garbage takes on topics ranging from US healthcare to history of USSR, that are trivially disproven by learning the very basics from a Wiki article (e.g. not a high bar). To be fair, this opinion slop is also present for new users and LLM bots, but is one kind really worse than the other, if both of them contribute to killing the community? We already know what kills communities. It's the eternal Septembers. Infighting within leadership also doesn't help, but time and time again it's the influx of too many new users that nosedive and drown out quality contributions.
- krapp 4mo agoAn irascible human being with "wrong" opinions is still better than a polite and factually correct bot because there's no fucking point in having a conversation with a bot. We're here to have conversations with people, not to prove fact beyond a reasonable doubt. Do you really not care one way or the other? Would you really rather just be talking to LLMs here? Or would you just script yourself as well and call it a day? Then what?
- antisthenes 4mo ago> We're here to have conversations with people, not to prove fact beyond a reasonable doubt. Maybe you are. I like getting to a reasonably correct model of a topic or issue. Bad human takes can still be useful here. I just get inevitably tired of the people crying about potential LLM comments all the time. > Would you really rather just be talking to LLMs here? Obviously we're not there yet, regardless of what I want. But there is a great number of HN threads posted here that touch on topics that have been discussed so many countless times, that an average LLM summary would do better than most comments.
- ninkendo 4mo agoWould you enjoy the experience of telling your LLM “make a HN-style comment thread on $subject with 200 comments, no trolls please”, and then actually spend time reading them? No? I’m imagining not at least. Because there would be no point to it. If you would enjoy it, then I’m surprised you’re here and not just simulating the experience with your LLM by yourself.
- culebron21 4mo agoI wonder, how much of the discussions on the results of agentic coding is just LLM slop.
- TacticalCoder 4mo ago> Online communities are definitely dying. I guess I hope that maybe IRL communities have a resurgence in this wake. You can have both IRL and online-free-of-bots. I already wrote about it but one of the very best forum I'm a member of, where real people are posting, requires to be vetted in, web-of-trust (but IRL) style. It's a forum about cars from one fancy brand and you can only ever join the forum by having a member (I think it may be two, don't remember) who's already in confirm that he saw you driving a car of that brand. It's not 100% foolproof (someone could be renting the car for two hours and show up at a cars&coffee or take a friend's car etc.) but this place really feels like a forum of yore. And people do eventually travel, so it's bound to happen that an owner shall go to another country, meet someone there, vet him in etc. Now, sure, it may not be the "1 million users acquired in three days thanks to my vibe-coded app" scenario but that is the point. You can imagine other domains where IRL communities have local groups, but where forums regroup different IRL communities all interested by the same hobby/topic/domain. And when people travel and meet, the vetted members do grow and connect. Oh and on the forums a lot of the posts are pictures, where "Julian xxx" met "Black yyy Cyril" and you see both cars (and from more than two people): suddenly it becomes much harder to fake a persona... You now need to fake both Julian xxx and Black yyy Cyril and fake the pics. And explain why your car has never been posted by any carspotter on autogespot etc. You can imagine the same for, say, model trains: "Met Jean at the zzz meetup, where he brought his wonderful 4-8-8-4 'big boy' locomotive, I confirm he's into the hobby, vet him in". Naysayers and depressive people are going say it cannot work but I'm literally on one such forum and it just works. P.S: if I'm not mistaken in the past in some nobility circles you had to be vetted by up to sixteen (!) other people from the nobility that'd confirm they knew you, your parents, etc. before you'd even meet the king/emperor/monarch to make sure that someone from far away couldn't come to, say, Versailles or Schonnbrun pretending to be a baroness or count or whatever. Quite the extensive check if you ask me.
- bossyTeacher 4mo ago> I do know for a fact that many "users" here are LLMs. Name and shame.
- Gigachad 4mo agoIf you look at the bottom of most threads here you’ll see a bunch of green username dead LLM comments. Those are just the obvious ones though.
- tayo42 4mo agoDo you have an example of comments people engaged with?
- ge96 4mo agoDoesn't help there is that feature that hides the user's posts and comments
- zahlman 4mo ago> As I went through the posts it wrote I realized that as a reader I would have NO idea that these were just written by a computer. I don't suppose you could show some examples? How convincing is the state of the art now?
- imadierich 4mo ago[dead]
- traderj0e 4mo agoIt's easy to botspam Reddit because even the real users always acted like bots. The big subreddits were the worst, but contrary to how the users keep saying "it's good if you find the right subs," no it's not. Wrote that place off like 10 years ago.
- alex1138 4mo agoIt might come down to shareholder/IPO stuff but you can tell Reddit doesn't actually care to put the effort in to crack down on bots (however you'd do that) because they already don't give communities proper moderation tools/third party tools and the site does censor Whatever allegiances (with people, or allegiances to ideas) Steve Huffman has, or people like him - it's not enough. It's a site seemingly killed by greed (Yes, I know moderating this stuff at scale is hard) - A human. Beep boop.
- sillysaurusx 4mo ago> I do know for a fact that many "users" here are LLMs. HN autokills comments it detects as LLM. I think maybe you're not giving HN enough credit. :)
- sltkr 4mo agoThe question is how reliable that detection is.
- bobomonkey 4mo agoIt needs help. I often pipe my screed though an LLM and post it. I do request that it use a 10th grade reading level, and no emdashes. For giggles, here's how it would look for this comment. Rather meta, but in this case it removed the "It needs hellp" so here we are. I often run my screed through an LLM before posting. I ask it to keep the writing at about a 10th grade reading level and to avoid em dashes.
- fn-mote 4mo agoI have read enough “you are replying to an LLM” comments that I am pretty sure this is still a hit or miss process.
- mmooss 4mo agoWhy do you think those comments are accurate? Maybe those comments are by LLMs? If you believe crowd wisdom on its face, you will have big problems with LLMs.
- hamdingers 4mo agoHN front page is about 25% LLM written blog posts at any given time.
- twoodfin 4mo agoThere’s no rule against submitting LLM-written—ahem, “cleaned up my notes”—articles, just comments.
- fpoling 4mo agoThere was a post today that Google introduced unbreakable capture that required unrooted phone to pass its QR code. We may end up with things like that…
- Aurornis 4mo agoFor a while there were a lot of posts from people experimenting with ChatGPT to write anger bait posts on Reddit where they would later edit the post to say it was fake, written by ChatGPT. I assume they thought they'd be teaching people a lesson by making them feel foolish for responding to AI stories, most of which were too fake to be believable. However it did not matter. The posts remained popular and continued to bring in comments even after the admission that they were fake. In advice subreddits, commenters continue to give advice on the situation. Some comments would say they saw the notice that it was fake but continue arguing about it anyway. This makes a feature of Reddit very clear: The truthiness of a post doesn't matter. The active commenter base on popular subreddits just wants something to discuss and, usually, be angry about. In retrospect it's obvious given that misinfo posts were the easiest way to karma farm for years even before AI.
- chromacity 4mo agoWe do precisely the same thing here. Here's a relatively recent post that, to me, seems obviously LLM-written. It just rattles off some management platitudes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47913650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47913650 It had 639 comments and 866 upvotes. And that's not a one-off.
- mmooss 4mo ago> I do know for a fact that many "users" here are LLMs What factual basis do you have for that?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- beloch 4mo agoReddit sold it's data to AI companies for training[1]. They could have refused, but companies like OpenAI likely would have harvested that data anyways. As such, it should not be surprising that AI models are pretty good at generating reddit posts. They were specifically trained to do that. This is sad, because Reddit remained one of the final bastions of human content on the internet. For several years, appending "site:reddit.com" to a google search was a valid way to get something usable out of a google search. Doing that is still an improvement over raw-dogging Google's ranking algorithms with an unfettered search, but AI slop increasingly is the result. This is one of my great disappointments in the current rise of AI. LLM's can give good search results when dealing with a topic they've been specifically trained on by human experts, but they're not good at separating human-produced signal from AI slop noise. We've done nothing to prevent a sea of AI slop from being dumped on top all the human signal that's out there. When AI companies enter their enshittification phase and stop investing in expert human trainers, the search results LLM's produce are going to fall off a cliff. Search is a bigger problem than ever. _____ [1]https://9to5mac.com/2024/02/19/reddit-user-content-being-sold/ https://9to5mac.com/2024/02/19/reddit-user-content-being-sol...
- mrtksn 4mo agoCommunities in FB, WhatsApp, Telegram etc are actually flourishing. As it appears real time gated communities are doing fine. It’s an unpopular opinion but I am looking forward to ID and age verified social media. If done right we can have real people around again. BTW, ironically the harsher communities like 4Chan doesn’t seem to suffer from the dead internet. I guess it’s either because the advertising value is too low to justify AI use there or maybe AI API providers refuse to work with such a content this reducing opportunities to infest with bots.
- ButyTh0 4mo ago[flagged]
- sixtyj 4mo agoIRL communities have to have some guides because a lot of people forgot how to gather. It can be seen among kids - try to give them soccer ball and see what they do with it :) Yesterday I was watching people on the street and on the tram. Every other person was staring at their phone and scrolling through something. That might scare me more than the fact that someone is chatting with an LLM bot online. (I am pro-ai, use it every day for coding that I couldn’t achieve pre-2022 as I am lame coder.)
- Natsu 4mo agoThis kind of thing made me imagine the creation of "digital towns" the other day. Imagine an online community where you can only join on the recommendation of two other members, who you must have actually met in person, to participate. Meanwhile, you leave at least some of the activity publicly available to the general public so that interested parties can meet up IRL and join. This could probably be implemented easily on top of existing online platforms like Discord, Reddit, etc. since it's really just a community building rule, not a community itself.
- j45 4mo agoReddit users are definitely smartening up on many subreddits to the same kinds of engagement happening.
- plumbline 4mo agoThis is actually my hope for AI-gen content as well. That after it gets so 'good' that people genuinely can't distinguish it from reality anymore that they'll retreat (or return triumphantly rather) to the physical world to gather truthful fulfilling experiences and dopamine.
- wussboy 4mo agoMy hope as well. If AI doesn't kill us all, the real world, with all its dirt and grime and beauty, will become the only thing that can be trusted
- deepfriedbits 4mo agoI've thought about this a lot as well and could definitely see it happening.
- intended 4mo agoThe issue is that the physical world for someone in the hinterlands of Tibet is not the same as the physical world for someone in SF. People were finding each other online when they couldn’t in person. This isn’t to say I disagree with you. Just expressing sorrow over the loss of such a grand moment in our shared history.
- jorvi 4mo ago> I am not quite there with Hacker News but I do know for a fact that many "users" here are LLMs People using LLMs without being fed their own post history are still pretty easy to detect. There's just something very recognizable about the cadence and tone of LLMs. What really stuns me is that if you call someone out for it, 9/10 times you get absolutely buried in downvotes. Even here on HN. Its like people are angry that you're lifting the curtain on the slop, that the writing they enjoyed is fake.
- barrell 4mo agoYes when I interact on reddit, I normally do so solely with the intention 'this is for an LLM'. I feel like a majority of the posts/comments I reply to are AI, a majority of the responses to my posts are AI, but have to keep telling myself to keep posting so it becomes training data. (I'm normally posting in the context of my startup - although I try to keep the self promotion to a minimum and always contribute to the "conversation," if LLMs replying to one another can be called such). For what it's worth, I created a community for paying users of Phrasing that has been going really well. I think free online communities may be going away, but there may be a future in exclusive/paid communities.
- HerbManic 4mo agoReddit has had a bot problem for well over a decade now but the sheer volume of it has exploded. It is also much more difficult to tell nowadays as the "quality" if you will is now at the good enough stage. Alas, Reddit is basically dead to me because of this.
- BatteryMountain 4mo agoI also believe it is used by AI companies to train their models: Post something semi correct (even grammar issues..), wait for humans to correct it in the comments and used upvotes as a confidence indicator, and then retrain models on this free refined data. Meanwhile people think they read a legit post, feel certain emotions and influence their behaviour, just so a bot can be trained.