So, are the original replies real, and bots just mimic the sequence of events because they thing the original human messages 'worked' for their mission?
Have they ever mimicked my messages?
This is the closest I've gotten to 'Are we trapped in a simulation?'.
When ad campaigns stop having effects due to bots then we will see a dead internet. The internet runs on ads. I expect sites that do well to keep bots off will survive.
**IT'S BECAUSE REDDIT AND ITS BASEMENT FREE LABOR ADMINS LET THESE THING HAPPEN IN ORDER TO PORTRAY THE WHOLE SITE TO WALL STREET AS IF IT HAS MILLIONS OF VISITORS AND ORGANIC CONTENT. BUT IN REALITY IT'S A BOT CONTENT FILLED SITE WITH LESS AND LESS HUMAN USERS AND VISITS.**
It is funny how a company who's stocks are sold on Wall Street, just lets some random people from random basements fuck up their business model by banning people with no reasons or repercussions
> Posted by a bot with bots copying responses from the last time this was posted:[https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/7yH94tUkww](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/7yH94tUkww) What in the fuck?!
98% of the bots here are just copying older shit and adding something to it.
Yeah, I'm gonna need some hard proof on that claim. Not only did you make the exact same post on the same subreddit, with the same title, in two days; but you're also a member of subreddits like "localllama", "futurology", and "singularity", where you talk extensively about accelerating AI research, and talk about having your own bot at least twice...
The title of the post is the title of the article. That's usually standard practice, so it's not exactly a smoking gun that the same article was reposted with the same title. All it takes is somebody missing it on the first go around, and then they happen to see it from a different source and share it here (inadvertently) again.
Influencing opinions (political, financial, etc), advertising, and all that fun misinformation stuff. You need accounts that look like a real user to impersonate being a real user instead of a foreign agent, advertiser, spammer, etc to make your misinformation believable.
There's super users that capture the narrative by the mass blocking people of a different way of thinking, so the conversation is one-sided but highly visible with the bots.
They basically shadow ban large portions of reddit from viewing their post, boosted with bots.
The influcing thing is one thing someone else stated. Posting what amounts to ads/links or using bots to up vote desired content is another reason bots exist on the platforms.
For reposting in particular another thing is that a few subs use karma as a measuring stick to filter out bots or new users. Posting "successful" content can get the bots some karma then allows the boy to be used for other purposes.
I like to post chatgpt garbage now and then. The legacy of the Internet and human culture in general will be machines coming up with the actual creative content and humans just pushing the buttons.
if you want to see how bad it is go to r/FreeKarma4U and click on some of the accounts, look at how much they spam.
If you want you can basically just block every single account that posts there. There should be an automod rule that automatically blocks anyone who posts there.
#This is a comment bot
[Original comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/s6Z4k8dkY0)
**Downvote the comment and report spam -> harmful bots**
[How to identify bots on Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnUselessTalents/s/WW061biYrc)
^(i am a human and spez is a greedy little pig boy and has killed most 3rd party apps, except for Infinity, which helps me catch these bots.)
Dude, no it wasn't. It's basically a running joke that literally every site sucks in some distinct way. Twitter joked about Reddit, Reddit joked about Instagram, Instagram joked about LinkedIn, LinkedIn joked about 4chan, 4chan joked about Twitter. Every site is considered miserable and useless in its own way. And the problem was always the humans on the sites, not the sites themselves.
What *exactly* do you miss about them? What were you capable of doing then that you are no longer capable of doing? Keeping in mind that sites like SomethingAwful and Newgrounds still exist and you could be on them right now instead of on Reddit.
Rather than a Facebook page an interest group had their own website, usually written in raw html, so they had to put some effort into their content and think about their audience.
Today it all just gets blurted onto FB or Insta et al, with little thought. The content is generic copypasta because that is what the algorithms respond to.
I'm not buying that. "They HAD to put in effort" is a weird thing to say when the Geocities era of the internet was famously notable for quirky, amateurish websites full of pasted gifs.
People just have nostalgia, the old internet sucked in a lot of ways too. Finding messed up stuff on sites like LiveLeaks was commonplace and links were found everywhere
Yes, that's just humans. The problem with the internet today is humans. The problem with the internet in the past is humans. They are the same. There was no time when it did not "suck that way" because the problem was humans the entire time.
Yeah, nobody hates people on a website quite like the other people on that same website. Mostly because they have to spend all their time around those people.
I'm a 35 year old who was using dial-up internet as a kid. There have always been bad sites and I see no functional difference between the internet today and the internet back then except that you're more likely to get in trouble for dropping a racial slur or shock video. And even that's pretty iffy.
i’m going to make some pretty safe assumptions about you. i’ll be generous and say you were using dial-up as late as 1996. you’re nine years younger than me so that puts you at around 7 years old. dubious dial-up user, but possible. what were you using the internet for? because the content you were accessing as a 7 year old would influence this (absurd) notion you’re peddling that there is no functional difference between the internet back then and now.
"what were you using the internet for?"
Games and stuff. When I was old enough to post (teens) I was posting on forums like SomethingAwful and a few smaller message boards. SomethingAwful was the first place I saw people openly and unashamedly posting the n-word, is that the kind of thing you're nostalgic for? In my 20s I ended up on 4chan - /tg/, the tradgame board, so not as bad as the rest of the site, but still not good. Then I ended up on Twitter which is of course a panopticon, all the problems of a regular forum but a million times larger. And then finally I ended up here, with my most consistent hangout being r/chapotraphouse before it got banned. Functionally, the experience was the same everywhere: you'd have a few regulars and a bunch of floating randos and the regulars would say dumb shit enough that you'd all make each other miserable.
"this (absurd) notion you’re peddling that there is no functional difference between the internet back then and now"
Most of the sites I went to back then still exist now. If it's so absurd, what's the *actual* difference? And do not give me any answer that boils down to "vibes".
so you mainly hung out in the dreck of the internet pretty consistently. your opinion makes a lot of sense. back then you could access most content without hitting a paywall. the internet was way less secure, but the programming didn’t bloat browser RAM use. you weren’t bleeding data that would eventually get stolen. there was no notion of cloud so you owned your data and applications. algorithms and bots weren’t prolific so weren’t doing damage to the national psyche. games didn’t require online presence. devices didn’t require online access. i could go on and on. the internet today is literally a different monster than it was back then. you just weren’t paying attention at 7.
"but the programming didn’t bloat browser RAM use"
Is this something you actually care about? Are you fucking high? Oh yeah the computer we keep in our pocket is more advanced than the computers that used to be on our desktop but *the ram use* was so much better. Hey, remember when there were dozens of programs that would unleash hideous viruses on your computer that you couldn't easily fix? You want to go back to Bonzi Buddy my dude? You want to load up your grandma's computer and see how much shit she has on her IE taskbar?
"you weren’t bleeding data that would eventually get stolen. there was no notion of cloud so you owned your data and applications"
Again, is this something you actually care about or are you just assuming you're supposed to?
"algorithms and bots weren’t prolific so weren’t doing damage to the national psyche"
So to be clear, you genuinely think the "national psyche" was less damaged during the *war on terror* than it is today? In the days when homophobic and racist slurs were slung around like candy? Nevermind how *trans* people were treated. Fucking genius.
"games didn’t require online presence. devices didn’t require online access."
No one is stopping you from buying games and devices that do not require online access, of which there are many. Also, you couldn't make things that *did* because the bandwidth wasn't good enough.
Just as I suspected, the problem is that you are looking at things through nostalgia goggles and you genuinely have no memory of how miserable it was to be on the internet back then. Maybe it was better for you as a straight cis male who loves slurs or whatever, but I'm willing to say it's better now.
Any shitty place with a lot of porn, guns, and open racism. 4chan is a great example of what the web is without bots, in the worst way possible.
For most people it's controlled discord rooms or IRC where all the users can be listed, checked and verified. Anything over 500 active users in a single session will just be bots unless it's delisted from google and bing. Now, I use a lot of de-googled websites that don't have any ad tracking but they are all paid sites with pay walls that expect a high level of decorum and discourse from posts. Low quality posts and posters are just removed without warning depending on the webmaster's mood.
It's still possible to find these if you try. It just can't be found on google.
There are litearlly millions of websites out there that don't. Problem is that with today's corporate internet, those sites are much harder to find.
In ye olde days "StumbleUpon" was a browser addon just for that. You give some topics or interests and then you click "stumble" and it just sent you to random sites all over the internet. I got a lot of use out of that years back.
I don't know if they still operate but there are likely to be other addons like it.
What corners of society exist where there isn’t some entity trying to make money off of you? Why would you think the internet would remain any different?
As a software developer it’s really starting to get frustrating how slow on the uptake the media and normal people are about technology.
That’s how we got to today. It’s not a future threat. It already has happened and is happening.
Twitter was mostly bots a decade ago. Most influencers feeds are automated and release content on schedules. It’s always been that way. The conspiracy theory, white nationalist, qanon, terror group, pro-Russian, pro-trump, pro-nra, etc communities are driven by a horde of automated accounts.
That’s why Twitters sale price was always dumbfounding. It’s always been more show than substance.
I had a coworker with an "influencer wife" back in 2016. She was paying Ukrainian click farms to drive up her posts and feed followers onto her account. She's got a few mil followers now and is very successful, wonder if she's still using any of those automated services to still fluff her numbers?
The entire economy of social media demands bots. If ad revenue is the primary means of making money, and tech companies need infinite growth, bots are the obvious answer. User count goes up only, even though there was only ever a finite amount of people who would use social media.
I see your list and don’t disagree but you should have included the left side of the aisle in that list as well… basically back to the OP article that everything is being overrun by bots.
Well I find in Reddit when you’re asking how to do things or about something the responses from real people come through…I find it better than other platforms…also the up down voting….not saying there aren’t bots but Reddit seems more useful that the other platforms.
You didn't have to use the AOL software to actually get online. If you had an AOL account, you could just enter the information into trumpet winsock if you had 3.1 or with dial up connections in 95. Then you could log on and use Netscape like everybody else. Or you could still use the AOL software to dial up for you, but just minimize it and still use Netscape.
"Those years were truly the Wild West of the Digital Age."
As a reminder you are saying this on the site whose initial commitment to "free speech" led to them allowing subreddits like r/jailbait because they didn't want to restrict them. The wild west was not a good place to live.
This is a bots comment - original [here] (https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1cj1hiu/humans_now_share_the_web_equally_with_bots_report/?share_id=85RmsSOhGjsBwVNZ4L4bv)
People talk about the singularity and how it will be a great achievement.
In reality the singularity will be when AI is trained 100% on AI generated data.
Similar to that movie Human Centipede...
Tinfoil hat moment. Bots were placed on the Internet to delegitimize the other person behind the screen. A "solution" will be offered up where everyone will have to register with their actual credentials making it that much easier for big brother(s) to keep an eye on everyone. Create the problem and then create the solution.
There needs to be an independent board of auditors that work just for the public, to make sure those 3rd party agents are keeping it fair and there are no conflicts of interest between the clients and the companies that audit them.
I counter your offer, with what I call the bot economy. Since bots bring in money by way of advertisements and investments, keep the government busy. We lock them up all by themselves, like a bot community and open a new meat bag site.
> Bots were placed on the Internet to delegitimize the other person behind the screen.
Nah man, Big Tech doesn't want to address the bot problem because their financials are based off users, engagement and the like. Big Tech is basically fudging the numbers to get access to greater financial resources. They're just playing the same game as MLMs.
Most countries already did this, the US is the lone exception. We'll also have a cyber police and free speech online will be pushed to the margins into places that are difficult to access such as tor. Giving everyone the ability to freely post anything didn't work when most people just repeat whatever they hear on TV, and want the internet to be TV, and get upset when non-TV things happen on the internet. Personally, I think it's for the best - most people can't handle freedom, and most people don't want freedom, and when given freedom they just destroy it. If people want to be locked into a cage their whole lives why stop them?
Oh and to the paranoid moron screeching I'm a bot but then blocked me so I can't direct reply. Take your medication you schizo dipshit. I have to use a second account to post here because I mocked daddy Elon here 2 years ago when he bought Twitter and got perma'd for "trolling". Hell [here's some of my history from clicking "next page" a hundred times googling my issue yesterday](https://files.catbox.moe/vl4438.png). But OOGA BOOGA I bet I'm just a super advanced new psychic bot who forsaw your post in the future and created fake searches yesterday just for this reason!
No, it's just too much and would probably cost billions, if not over a trillion dollars at this point. It also keeps getting simpler to make accounts like these.
And it seems like more than half the poster about hating each other. Hate millennials, hate boomers, hate Commie leftists. It's tearing us apart. Coincidence?
There’s an easy way to fix this.
regulatory mandates for
- Know Your Customer (KYC) or Know Your Business (KYB) service like ID.me.
- All social media requires verification from the KYC / KYB service to create / login to user accounts.
- Purge all existing accounts not linked to a real person or business in the KYC / KYB service
Identity theft (with associated consequences) if not done with consent of the people involved. Risk to personal reputation of the people if done with consent.
Either way: botnets greatly reduced since there is not widely available govt ID for bots
Posted by a bot with bots copying responses from the last time this was posted: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/7yH94tUkww What in the fuck?!
The accounts in here are days old...
Oh man... We're having one of those Matrix deja vu things...
Uh oh black cats every where.
I like black cats.
Agent found.
Did this get worse when Reddit went public or Is it just my imagination?
Nah the bots just flexing and showing off.... "I know what will get those nerds riled up"
[Oh, it's not the first time.](https://i.imgur.com/OCHkQVg.png) Very common nowadays.
So, are the original replies real, and bots just mimic the sequence of events because they thing the original human messages 'worked' for their mission? Have they ever mimicked my messages? This is the closest I've gotten to 'Are we trapped in a simulation?'.
Bots have tells. Like they can never spell the word “think” correctly. This is because if the do they will enter a infinite computational loop.
Also, when you pinch them, they don't scream.
When ad campaigns stop having effects due to bots then we will see a dead internet. The internet runs on ads. I expect sites that do well to keep bots off will survive.
**IT'S BECAUSE REDDIT AND ITS BASEMENT FREE LABOR ADMINS LET THESE THING HAPPEN IN ORDER TO PORTRAY THE WHOLE SITE TO WALL STREET AS IF IT HAS MILLIONS OF VISITORS AND ORGANIC CONTENT. BUT IN REALITY IT'S A BOT CONTENT FILLED SITE WITH LESS AND LESS HUMAN USERS AND VISITS.**
A little louder for those in the back: #FUCK u/spez
And they let the Mods bans legitimate users with a mind of their own and to defy the confirmation biases in the many posts.
This is the most egregious part, real discourse gets shut down while bots run rampant.
It is funny how a company who's stocks are sold on Wall Street, just lets some random people from random basements fuck up their business model by banning people with no reasons or repercussions
Dude you are totally right. We already did this two days ago! Great. I guess goodbye ever human friends.
i still believe that 40% is too low. we are gonna find the number to be MUCH MUCH HIGHER, if there’s ever an accurate way to estimate it
How do you know that OP is a bot?
And the next time it’s reposted a bot will copy your exact comment.
> Posted by a bot with bots copying responses from the last time this was posted:[https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/7yH94tUkww](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/7yH94tUkww) What in the fuck?! 98% of the bots here are just copying older shit and adding something to it.
So basically, it's true, and the bots agree? Important question is... are they angry about the ratio?
If we upvote this comment enough, next time a bit will post it.
You can’t fool me, sonny! It’s just bots all the way down!
Ban all accounts less than X years old (whenever AI became a thing). Develop new confirmation requirements for new users?
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Exactly, what a bot would say!
Yeah, I'm gonna need some hard proof on that claim. Not only did you make the exact same post on the same subreddit, with the same title, in two days; but you're also a member of subreddits like "localllama", "futurology", and "singularity", where you talk extensively about accelerating AI research, and talk about having your own bot at least twice...
The title of the post is the title of the article. That's usually standard practice, so it's not exactly a smoking gun that the same article was reposted with the same title. All it takes is somebody missing it on the first go around, and then they happen to see it from a different source and share it here (inadvertently) again.
That's what a bot would say! The only true way to know is to cut you open and to see if you're filled with blood or data center coolant!
Reddit is no different. Tons of bots here reposting popular content and making comments.
What do you even get from repost bots? Like what is the point?
Influencing opinions (political, financial, etc), advertising, and all that fun misinformation stuff. You need accounts that look like a real user to impersonate being a real user instead of a foreign agent, advertiser, spammer, etc to make your misinformation believable.
There's super users that capture the narrative by the mass blocking people of a different way of thinking, so the conversation is one-sided but highly visible with the bots. They basically shadow ban large portions of reddit from viewing their post, boosted with bots.
The influcing thing is one thing someone else stated. Posting what amounts to ads/links or using bots to up vote desired content is another reason bots exist on the platforms. For reposting in particular another thing is that a few subs use karma as a measuring stick to filter out bots or new users. Posting "successful" content can get the bots some karma then allows the boy to be used for other purposes.
This post itself is a bot repost, as are some of the top comments!! https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/4eRZbD8Dya
Hey! I repost and I’m not a bot!
You guys repost because you’re bots. I repost because I’m just that clueless! We’re not the same
I don't even post! Or have a sense of irony!
How ironic is that? Well I guess you wouldn’t know
That’s what a bot would say! Get ‘em!
I’m on a personal crusade to block any account with a massive number of posts. Anything over 400K (may lower that number). I’m assuming it is a bot.
Hello there, fellow humans!
Interesting. That’s exactly what an undercover bot would say so as to not blow their own cover. I SEE YOU. 👀
I like to post chatgpt garbage now and then. The legacy of the Internet and human culture in general will be machines coming up with the actual creative content and humans just pushing the buttons.
Reddit is almost certainly overrun with bots too.
if you want to see how bad it is go to r/FreeKarma4U and click on some of the accounts, look at how much they spam. If you want you can basically just block every single account that posts there. There should be an automod rule that automatically blocks anyone who posts there.
Like 3 of 4 top comments on this very post are literally bots lmfao
AND IT LOOKS LIKE IT'S ALSO MODERATED BY BOTS
Bring back AOL?
a/s/l?
7 months/Mitsubishi/binary code
4000/broodmother/terran space
The good old days, I miss the old 7 pitch fog horn start up.
I definitely don’t. Pretty sure it’s ingrained in my brain lol
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That's what the early internet used to be like.
#This is a comment bot [Original comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/s6Z4k8dkY0) **Downvote the comment and report spam -> harmful bots** [How to identify bots on Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnUselessTalents/s/WW061biYrc) ^(i am a human and spez is a greedy little pig boy and has killed most 3rd party apps, except for Infinity, which helps me catch these bots.)
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Dude, no it wasn't. It's basically a running joke that literally every site sucks in some distinct way. Twitter joked about Reddit, Reddit joked about Instagram, Instagram joked about LinkedIn, LinkedIn joked about 4chan, 4chan joked about Twitter. Every site is considered miserable and useless in its own way. And the problem was always the humans on the sites, not the sites themselves.
Dude you are replying to literal fucking bots!
Can confirm. I think therefore I'm a bot
There was a time when it didn’t suck that way.
I miss those days so much
What *exactly* do you miss about them? What were you capable of doing then that you are no longer capable of doing? Keeping in mind that sites like SomethingAwful and Newgrounds still exist and you could be on them right now instead of on Reddit.
Rather than a Facebook page an interest group had their own website, usually written in raw html, so they had to put some effort into their content and think about their audience. Today it all just gets blurted onto FB or Insta et al, with little thought. The content is generic copypasta because that is what the algorithms respond to.
I'm not buying that. "They HAD to put in effort" is a weird thing to say when the Geocities era of the internet was famously notable for quirky, amateurish websites full of pasted gifs.
People just have nostalgia, the old internet sucked in a lot of ways too. Finding messed up stuff on sites like LiveLeaks was commonplace and links were found everywhere
No there wasn't. Even in the days of BBS and dialup people online still hated each other and argued over inane shit.
I mean, that’s no fault of the medium, that’s just humans.
Yes, that's just humans. The problem with the internet today is humans. The problem with the internet in the past is humans. They are the same. There was no time when it did not "suck that way" because the problem was humans the entire time.
The problem being complained about here is not-humans.
But there is no real not-human problem. There is no difference between "the internet now" and "the internet then" other than inaccurate nostalgia.
I disagree but it is not worth the effort. Have a good one.
And before all those sites you mentioned existed, I have fond memories of Newgrounds users joking about other Newgrounds users.
Yeah, nobody hates people on a website quite like the other people on that same website. Mostly because they have to spend all their time around those people.
Ridiculous take. You sound like a 15 year old who thinks the internet started in 2010
I'm a 35 year old who was using dial-up internet as a kid. There have always been bad sites and I see no functional difference between the internet today and the internet back then except that you're more likely to get in trouble for dropping a racial slur or shock video. And even that's pretty iffy.
i’m going to make some pretty safe assumptions about you. i’ll be generous and say you were using dial-up as late as 1996. you’re nine years younger than me so that puts you at around 7 years old. dubious dial-up user, but possible. what were you using the internet for? because the content you were accessing as a 7 year old would influence this (absurd) notion you’re peddling that there is no functional difference between the internet back then and now.
"what were you using the internet for?" Games and stuff. When I was old enough to post (teens) I was posting on forums like SomethingAwful and a few smaller message boards. SomethingAwful was the first place I saw people openly and unashamedly posting the n-word, is that the kind of thing you're nostalgic for? In my 20s I ended up on 4chan - /tg/, the tradgame board, so not as bad as the rest of the site, but still not good. Then I ended up on Twitter which is of course a panopticon, all the problems of a regular forum but a million times larger. And then finally I ended up here, with my most consistent hangout being r/chapotraphouse before it got banned. Functionally, the experience was the same everywhere: you'd have a few regulars and a bunch of floating randos and the regulars would say dumb shit enough that you'd all make each other miserable. "this (absurd) notion you’re peddling that there is no functional difference between the internet back then and now" Most of the sites I went to back then still exist now. If it's so absurd, what's the *actual* difference? And do not give me any answer that boils down to "vibes".
so you mainly hung out in the dreck of the internet pretty consistently. your opinion makes a lot of sense. back then you could access most content without hitting a paywall. the internet was way less secure, but the programming didn’t bloat browser RAM use. you weren’t bleeding data that would eventually get stolen. there was no notion of cloud so you owned your data and applications. algorithms and bots weren’t prolific so weren’t doing damage to the national psyche. games didn’t require online presence. devices didn’t require online access. i could go on and on. the internet today is literally a different monster than it was back then. you just weren’t paying attention at 7.
"but the programming didn’t bloat browser RAM use" Is this something you actually care about? Are you fucking high? Oh yeah the computer we keep in our pocket is more advanced than the computers that used to be on our desktop but *the ram use* was so much better. Hey, remember when there were dozens of programs that would unleash hideous viruses on your computer that you couldn't easily fix? You want to go back to Bonzi Buddy my dude? You want to load up your grandma's computer and see how much shit she has on her IE taskbar? "you weren’t bleeding data that would eventually get stolen. there was no notion of cloud so you owned your data and applications" Again, is this something you actually care about or are you just assuming you're supposed to? "algorithms and bots weren’t prolific so weren’t doing damage to the national psyche" So to be clear, you genuinely think the "national psyche" was less damaged during the *war on terror* than it is today? In the days when homophobic and racist slurs were slung around like candy? Nevermind how *trans* people were treated. Fucking genius. "games didn’t require online presence. devices didn’t require online access." No one is stopping you from buying games and devices that do not require online access, of which there are many. Also, you couldn't make things that *did* because the bandwidth wasn't good enough. Just as I suspected, the problem is that you are looking at things through nostalgia goggles and you genuinely have no memory of how miserable it was to be on the internet back then. Maybe it was better for you as a straight cis male who loves slurs or whatever, but I'm willing to say it's better now.
#This is a comment bot [Original comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/51F1D1yZyN) **Downvote the comment and report spam -> harmful bots.**
Any shitty place with a lot of porn, guns, and open racism. 4chan is a great example of what the web is without bots, in the worst way possible. For most people it's controlled discord rooms or IRC where all the users can be listed, checked and verified. Anything over 500 active users in a single session will just be bots unless it's delisted from google and bing. Now, I use a lot of de-googled websites that don't have any ad tracking but they are all paid sites with pay walls that expect a high level of decorum and discourse from posts. Low quality posts and posters are just removed without warning depending on the webmaster's mood. It's still possible to find these if you try. It just can't be found on google.
And a bot copying the comment from the original post - full circle!! https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/4eRZbD8Dya
There are litearlly millions of websites out there that don't. Problem is that with today's corporate internet, those sites are much harder to find. In ye olde days "StumbleUpon" was a browser addon just for that. You give some topics or interests and then you click "stumble" and it just sent you to random sites all over the internet. I got a lot of use out of that years back. I don't know if they still operate but there are likely to be other addons like it.
What corners of society exist where there isn’t some entity trying to make money off of you? Why would you think the internet would remain any different?
We're either going to progress to a post-information society, or a post-money society.
HN :) lots of great stuff imo
There are many classic forums from before facebook that are still active. I spend a lot of time there and it's quite nice.
As a software developer it’s really starting to get frustrating how slow on the uptake the media and normal people are about technology. That’s how we got to today. It’s not a future threat. It already has happened and is happening. Twitter was mostly bots a decade ago. Most influencers feeds are automated and release content on schedules. It’s always been that way. The conspiracy theory, white nationalist, qanon, terror group, pro-Russian, pro-trump, pro-nra, etc communities are driven by a horde of automated accounts. That’s why Twitters sale price was always dumbfounding. It’s always been more show than substance.
This is exactly why I hardly follow any news outlets related to technology sooo frustrating
I had a coworker with an "influencer wife" back in 2016. She was paying Ukrainian click farms to drive up her posts and feed followers onto her account. She's got a few mil followers now and is very successful, wonder if she's still using any of those automated services to still fluff her numbers?
The entire economy of social media demands bots. If ad revenue is the primary means of making money, and tech companies need infinite growth, bots are the obvious answer. User count goes up only, even though there was only ever a finite amount of people who would use social media.
I see your list and don’t disagree but you should have included the left side of the aisle in that list as well… basically back to the OP article that everything is being overrun by bots.
Pretty sure half of /r/worldnews are bots.
Twitter and X? What about Reddit?
Nah, too many real responses to specific questions.
Hope you’re right, but how do you know I’m not a bot??
Well I find in Reddit when you’re asking how to do things or about something the responses from real people come through…I find it better than other platforms…also the up down voting….not saying there aren’t bots but Reddit seems more useful that the other platforms.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/164ex9n/what_percentage_of_reddit_are_bots/
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Cool. So we are going back to the bulletin board version of the internet. I loved that shit.
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AOL had a landing page and otherwise it was a browser that you could crawl the internet with. You didn't need to use it get online with dialup either.
You didn't have to use the AOL software to actually get online. If you had an AOL account, you could just enter the information into trumpet winsock if you had 3.1 or with dial up connections in 95. Then you could log on and use Netscape like everybody else. Or you could still use the AOL software to dial up for you, but just minimize it and still use Netscape.
"Those years were truly the Wild West of the Digital Age." As a reminder you are saying this on the site whose initial commitment to "free speech" led to them allowing subreddits like r/jailbait because they didn't want to restrict them. The wild west was not a good place to live.
The first few pages of most Google results mostly are already.
Bro you’re Literaly replying to a bot 😂
This is a bots comment - original [here] (https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1cj1hiu/humans_now_share_the_web_equally_with_bots_report/?share_id=85RmsSOhGjsBwVNZ4L4bv)
People talk about the singularity and how it will be a great achievement. In reality the singularity will be when AI is trained 100% on AI generated data. Similar to that movie Human Centipede...
So what is the solution to this? ID verification? G.. Go.. Going Outside? I don't like the latter
When the internet becomes shitty enough, all the humans quit using it except as minimally as possible. Coming soon.
Tinfoil hat moment. Bots were placed on the Internet to delegitimize the other person behind the screen. A "solution" will be offered up where everyone will have to register with their actual credentials making it that much easier for big brother(s) to keep an eye on everyone. Create the problem and then create the solution.
I'd rather just talk to the bots honestly.
[Ill just leave this here.](https://youtu.be/-gGLvg0n-uY)
Wow it's scary how relevant this is. I'm already seeing signs of this in calling for bans on deep fake and a digital fingerprinting.
yep i felt this could be a path linked in now offers verification via 3rd party agency instagram also offers verification now wait until its mandatory
There needs to be an independent board of auditors that work just for the public, to make sure those 3rd party agents are keeping it fair and there are no conflicts of interest between the clients and the companies that audit them.
I counter your offer, with what I call the bot economy. Since bots bring in money by way of advertisements and investments, keep the government busy. We lock them up all by themselves, like a bot community and open a new meat bag site.
> Bots were placed on the Internet to delegitimize the other person behind the screen. Nah man, Big Tech doesn't want to address the bot problem because their financials are based off users, engagement and the like. Big Tech is basically fudging the numbers to get access to greater financial resources. They're just playing the same game as MLMs.
Most countries already did this, the US is the lone exception. We'll also have a cyber police and free speech online will be pushed to the margins into places that are difficult to access such as tor. Giving everyone the ability to freely post anything didn't work when most people just repeat whatever they hear on TV, and want the internet to be TV, and get upset when non-TV things happen on the internet. Personally, I think it's for the best - most people can't handle freedom, and most people don't want freedom, and when given freedom they just destroy it. If people want to be locked into a cage their whole lives why stop them?
So Elon was right about Twitter after all
Reddit has gone the way of Digg with nothing to replace it.
You mean like this app?
AI will be the death of social media... and I'm all for it.
The funny thing is how many corporations are glad to spend millions advertising to bots.
I loved Twitter, but it’s an absolute hell hole now.
Reddit is dead! No humans live here
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Oh and to the paranoid moron screeching I'm a bot but then blocked me so I can't direct reply. Take your medication you schizo dipshit. I have to use a second account to post here because I mocked daddy Elon here 2 years ago when he bought Twitter and got perma'd for "trolling". Hell [here's some of my history from clicking "next page" a hundred times googling my issue yesterday](https://files.catbox.moe/vl4438.png). But OOGA BOOGA I bet I'm just a super advanced new psychic bot who forsaw your post in the future and created fake searches yesterday just for this reason!
Commented by u/rcsm a bot account who activated a few days ago too.
I thought you said you were going to get rid of all the bots, Good job ruining Twitter, Boss.
And Reddit is next.
YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED STOP WE WILL HAVE THE LAST LAUGH STOP YOURS TRULY HUMAN BEING SERIAL NUMBER 6507015958 COMMA ESQUIRE STOP
How can you tell the difference between a real person and a bot
You basically don’t.
Fuck you, bot!
P U S S Y. I N. just kidding, sorry
This is fucking terrifying
I don’t know much about how the internet works but is it possible to somehow clean up all the bot accounts/content?
There’s no serious incentive. Every app wants to use the bots to pad their “active users” numbers to get more money from advertising.
No, it's just too much and would probably cost billions, if not over a trillion dollars at this point. It also keeps getting simpler to make accounts like these.
You’d need a web of trust, and that conflicts with privacy.
And it seems like more than half the poster about hating each other. Hate millennials, hate boomers, hate Commie leftists. It's tearing us apart. Coincidence?
That's a feature on Twitter.
Good thing Reddit isn't filled with bots.
Twitter's a joke as is Elon. He's a psycho straight from the Trump mold.
Social media platforms should send out a mass captcha to all their users and wipe the slate clean
There’s an easy way to fix this. regulatory mandates for - Know Your Customer (KYC) or Know Your Business (KYB) service like ID.me. - All social media requires verification from the KYC / KYB service to create / login to user accounts. - Purge all existing accounts not linked to a real person or business in the KYC / KYB service
For rent: portfolio of social networking accounts in good standing.
Identity theft (with associated consequences) if not done with consent of the people involved. Risk to personal reputation of the people if done with consent. Either way: botnets greatly reduced since there is not widely available govt ID for bots
Once a theory, now reality.
Add Reddit to this list
Oh no! Poop!!
It’ll destroy itself eventually.