this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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Reddit probably isn’t, as that would be cooking their metrics and Huffman would get fucked by the long arm of the SEC. They might still be, Huffman loves Elon and Elon got away with tons of shit.
Advertisers are probably paying more content farms to astroturf it though.
Plus without the API, do you really think people just stopped scraping Reddit? They just run a headless Chrome instance now and I bet Reddit doesn’t look the gift horse of traffic in the mouth.
Yup, in fact we just banned ~13 accounts tonight from a subreddit I'm still involved with. That's just the ones we identified, and it's only a medium sized subreddit
A user noticed that the responses to a post sounded a little off and reported it. Turns out there was a network of bots using generative AI to mix real academic advice (ex. "Go talk to the advising office") with occasional subtle advertisements (ex. "I recommend using grammarly and (advertised service)".
Once we caught on, we looked through the history of those accounts and gathered as many as we could identify and banned them all.
I don't think this is Reddit's doing, and they're usually good about banning spam bots site wide once a mod report is made. Still, they benefit from increased activity and they have an incentive to do less of that. It was also much harder to notice the problem because of the AI generation. If a user didn't explicitly report it, I probably wouldn't have noticed
I highly suggest you ban what the were advertising and not just the account.
If advertiser's realize the shady bot farms they deal with are causing any comment that mentions their product to be automatically deleted, they will stop.
This is going to be the Idiocratizing of the internet. AI is going to be training in itself with these unidentified posts and get dumber and dumber.
Let’s hope no one lets it have access to anything important…
It feels a little like how steel from before above ground nuclear testing, called low-background (or pre-war) steel because it isn’t contaminated is prized for building some sensors.
Pre AI information need to be preserved, otherwise we might not really know if the info we’re seeking is fact based in any way.
That happened in September of 1993.
93/94 was when I first got AOL on a 14.4k modem. I’m one of those shitty users!
We used to use gopher and college FTP sites to download warez as a freshman in HS, and then moved on to Hotline trackers.
I know, because I was there!
I was too. The internet was never for normies or businesses and between the two of them they've managed to turn it into a complete dumpster fire.
Except I can totally see them committing securities fraud in order to pump up the numbers. It seems very much like something they would do.
I think that’s what this part of the comment was about:
The SEC got its funding slashed by Trump - are they like the IRS now where they don't have the resources to truly do the job anymore?
The API is not gone, and is still free for both “for non-commercial researchers and academics under our published usage threshold” and “for moderator tools and bots”
https://www.redditinc.com/blog/apifacts
There are several ways to add your personal API key to (modified) final versions of Sync, Relay, Infinity, and even Apollo on iOS to be able to continue to use those clients, however Reddit has changed how Reddit links work, so those methods are becoming more and more broken.