Reddit, AI spam bots explore new ways to show ads in your feed
#For sale: Ads that look like legit Reddit user posts
“We highly recommend only mentioning the brand name of your product since mentioning links in posts makes the post more likely to be reported as spam and hidden. We find that humans don’t usually type out full URLs in natural conversation and plus, most Internet users are happy to do a quick Google Search,” ReplyGuy’s website reads.
Woops, thx. I enjoy the comments people make on AT as much as the news stories.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Today, it expanded on that practice with a new ad format that aims to sell things to Reddit users.
Simultaneously, Reddit has marketers who are interested in pushing products to users through seemingly legitimate accounts.
In a blog post today, Reddit announced that its Dynamic Product Ads are entering public beta globally.
Reddit’s Dynamic Product Ads can automatically show users ads “based on the products they’ve previously engaged with on the advertiser’s site” and/or “based on what people engage with on Reddit or advertiser sites,” per the blog.
The stance has been increasingly clear over the past year, as Reddit became rather vocal about the fact that it has never been profitable.
In June, the company started charging for API access, resulting in numerous valued third-party Reddit apps closing and messy user protests that left a bad taste in countless long-time users’ and moderators’ mouths.
The original article contains 494 words, the summary contains 143 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The depressing thing about all this is that this stuff actually works. Most people will happily consume whatever shit is served to them.
When you’re constantly inflicted with advertising it’s the fish not seeing the water story. Fuck advertising propaganda and malware networks. Fuck advertising without consent in public spaces. And most of all fuck reddit for betraying their mods and users and treating them like pieces of shit because they can get away with it.
Homie, most people in my office don’t read fucking books. Half the people in my life before I was an adult have grown to never touch a book or educational material in their adult lives. We’re fucked. By and large people just want to not care about anything it seems. I still get scoffed at when mentioning google and they’re under an antitrust lawsuit right now. We are not going to last unless education comes to the forefront.
I left in a huff when they jumped the shark and dropped 3party app support. I was a pretty heavy user / contributor and fully thought I might crawl back at some point. Turns out I’m doing fine without going back and the alternatives, while massively smaller, are so much less crappy feeling. I think a lot of people would feel the same way if we could just get them to try the green eggs and ham. I think it’s great that Kagi is starting to index Lemmy, but the one gateway to get people over here that might actually work would be if Google searches started turning up Lemmy content. I think that would grab some attention.
lol is this a discrete Kagi Ad?
Oh man, you just cannot tell anymore…
I’m unfortunately on Reddit regularly, but that’s only because it still has decent tech support search results. Haven’t logged in since the APIpocalypse
Same! Also a Kagi subscriber. Hello! I thought Reddit might cave on the 3rd party thing for a while. Then they were doubling down and treated the developers of those apps like shit. I was a happy Apollo user, and I trusted what he said about how Reddit acted. I moved to Lemmy. It was confusing at the start but now I feel as at home here as I did in Reddit. If not more actually, since our user base is smaller, I feel like community is closer and has a little more tech know-how too. I do miss some fun Reddit things but I think Lemmy and the fediverse has a ton of potential and I want to be part of it ☺️
I was considering Kagi but the the CEO is a maniac
I don’t actually think that’s the case - my reading of that whole kerfuffle was that the blogger had overreacted.
Agreed, but they both did in my opinion. I’ll stick with StartPage and DDG, myself.
I was very similar, heavy Reddit user that quit over thr 3PA shitshow last year. Not sure if you’ve noticed the same effect, but my attention span has gone way up.
I think there was a post a while back where someone found Lemmy posts on search results. I think it’s still being drowned out by bigger platforms but it’s good to see it happening!
They do show up in DDG occasionally but I was troubleshooting a jerboa problem. The results are there, they’re just buried deep.
I literally only go back for one niche sub and only using that sweet, sweet adblock.
Id do the same, but Im in a verry stupid situation, I dont have a reddit account and dont want to be advertising-group stalked due to being a sensitive subject.
plus it was already half taken over by ads because the sex industry is bad, some of the subs are just filled with “this is a thing you can buy, look how sexy!”. I dont want what your selling, the way your selling it.
on lemmy, the subreddit is dead, minus some guy trying to revive it. Like many others, its owner posted 5 posts, and… nobody kept the pace up. 🤕
Agreed. I just bought a used Sony a7iii and the sonyalpha sub is a great place for knowledge.
Granted eventually that stuff will filter off reddit… but in the mean time I’m only there on desktop with pihole and unlock origin.
Once old.reddit dies I’ll never go back.
Sent from my boost for Lemmy app.
Just gonna suggest searxng as an alternative to kagi if you want something open-source, free, and still customizable.
Most searxng instances also index lemmy.
The style in which that post by Ophelia_SK is written seems exactly like chatGPT. I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly makes me feel so strongly, but it’s something to do with how sentences and paragraphs are constructed. They always have the same cadence with the commas and how thoughts are laid out. It’s got that generically positive tone as well.
Kinda cool though, I feel like I’m becoming able to spot these. It’s like being able to spot a photoshop by the pixels. I’ve seen quite a few shops in my time.
You are dead on. That post absolutely fucking reeks of AI. I want to say if you can’t smell it a mile off you’re an absolute cretin, but there are probably millions of people who’ve never really spent much time with LLMs and would be easily fooled by this garbage
MFW proper spelling and comma usage means it’s an AI post.
But really though. <- and that is a sentence that AI would never use because it references too complex of an idea and is too casual.
Humans are much more dynamic than these LLMs, especially because companies need their LLMs to be as uncontroversial as possible.
It’s like a corporate memo as an AI
You see all over the place in Amazon reviews too. You basically can’t trust the reviews anymore.
Yes! I talked a bit to ChatGPT about my mental health to see if it would help (sometimes I just want to scream into a void that I’m stressed, and having the void talk back sounded amazing. But it never helps).
It always responds exactly like this, with exactly the same expressions. I’m kind of sad for the other user now.
The style in which that post by Ophelia_SK is written seems exactly like chatGPT. I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly makes me feel so strongly
It’s because of the soulless soulless emoji at the end. LLM developers have been adding them to the ends of all GPT conversations because they statistically trick people interacting with them to think they are having emotional connections with the chat bots 🤖
The AI doesn’t have an emoji in its text, that’s a real user that used one (as far as I can tell from their post history).
The account is now suspended. Interesting.
Yay we’re developing the uncanny valley for AI generated content
And so the Turing test lives on! /s
I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly makes me feel so strongly, but it’s something to do with how sentences and paragraphs are constructed.
It has the classic 3 section style. Intro, response, conclusion.
It starts by acknowledging the situation. Then it moves on to the suggestion/response. Then finally it gives a short conclusion.
the “This is photoshopped, i can tell by the pixels” has now become “This is LLM, I can tell by the sections”
And don’t forget balanced. However, consider, it’s also…
It reads like the script for a customer service rep.
Tbh I honestly write replies in a style similar to Ophelia_SK (ChatGPT?) except for the www. part, when I am giving paragraphs of genuine advice. Am I bot?
Edit: Looking at it again, it’s too long and flowery even for my long form replies.
Oh, feel ya.
Oh no, forming your ideas into comprehensible essay format with intersentence connectivity and flow, maybe even splitting into paragraphs, isn’t even close to LLM speech.
I do form long, connected, split texts and comments, too, but there is a great difference between mine and an LLMs tone, cadence, mood or whatever you wanna call these things.
For example, humans usually cut corners when forming sentences and paragraphs, even if when forming long ones. We do this via lazy grammar use, unrestricted thesaurus selection, uneven sentence or paragraph lengths, lots of phrase abbreviations e.g. “tbh”, lax use of punctuations e.g. “(ChatGPT?)”, which also is a substitution for a whole question sentence.
Also, the bland, upbeat and respecting tone the bots mimic from long-thought essays is never kept up in spontaneous writing/typing. Dead giveaway of a script-speech than genuine, on-point and assuming human interaction.
Us LLMs can’t do these with rather simple reverse-jenga syntax and semantics forming, with simple formal pragmatics sprinkled, yet. The wild west, very expansive, extended pragmatics of a language is where the real shit is at.
whatever you wanna call these things
This is a phrase an AI (as they are now) would never use. To these LLMs, something is either a fact or it thinks it’s a fact. They leave no room for interpretation. These AIs will never say, “I’m not sure, maybe. It’s up to you.” Because that’s not a fact. It’s not a data point to be ingested.
how thoughts are laid out
Perhaps you’re noticing the lack of deixis?
Without going too technical, deixis is to refer to something in relation to the current situation. For example, when you say “Kinda cool though, I feel like I’m becoming able to spot these.”, that “these” is discourse deixis - you’re referring to something else (bots) within your discourse based on its relative position to when you wrote that “these”.
We humans do this all the bloody time. LLMs though almost never do it - and Ophelia_SK doesn’t, that’s why for example it repeats “debt” and “job” like a broken record.
EDIT: there’s also the extremely linear argumentation structure. Human text is way messier.
Oooh, I think you’re onto something here. That’s definitely part of it.
Plus it explains like the reader is kinda dumb
The full url written out is a good clue, but beyond that, AI sounds off-puttingly positive because it’s always trying to be as inoffensive and appealing to everyone as possible.
Every commercial model has a positivity bias baked in, it makes it hard to use any of them as a cowriter because your villains all end up really nice and accommodating. Finetuning can break this but sometimes it creeps back in. Very annoying.
That’s what I hate about it the most. Why can’t it tell me I’m a fucking idiot sometimes?
It would be much harder to tell it apart from real people that way!
AI sounds off-puttingly positive because it’s always trying to be as inoffensive and appealing to everyone as possible.
And also because people trying to cheer you up adopt a casual tone that is completely absent here, so it sounds as fake as corporate “apologies”.
Will it apply to porn subreddits?
“Hey u\i_love_big_tiddies, we noticed that you love big tiddies. Could we interest you in our new product: AstroCam Super Binoculars, so you can look at big tiddies from as far away as a quarter mile?”
Just wait till the onlyfans chicks get a hold of it.
Try not saying “our product” and I think you have them in the bag! Err–the commenter, not the big tatas.
The only remaining use for reddit for me is basically being a Stack Overflow for non-technology stuff (want to find the best bidet, there’s probably a review post on reddit that someone put together).
Now that comments might be well-hidden marketing attempts, there’s legit no trusting that information anymore.
Way to go, Reddit. In a few months, I’ll no longer have any reason to look at a post from 2024 or later.
Same, plus porn. I haven’t run across active communities on lemmy that cater to what I’m looking for, but reddit still going strong in that regard.
Other than that, I haven’t visited in months.
When reddit bans porn, it will truly be over
I gave up even on that a long time ago. Every subreddit was overrun by softcore pics from women with onlyfans.
Definitely not every…
I know it’s a real problem and all, but dear lord does Lemmy in particular love that word.
Too much. Reminds me of that time not long ago where every lie was “gaslighting” all of a sudden.
Or how a favorable opinion is propaganda. Like, ok, we get it, you don’t like that one thing. 🙄
It wasn’t. That’s just you.
Why you little…
It’s a word that encapsulates our times very well. But I hear ya.
Enshittification has been enshittified.
The word really started to become popular last year, especially regarding Twitter and Reddit.
It’s a very accurate word for what is continuing to happen in this instance. This is not a bad use at all.
Yeah. I’m glad that people seem to have more interest in and understanding of rent seeking behaviors, but can we stop pretending this is new?
I hate it. It’s been used so much that it’s lost all meaning.
I love how marketing people are so abnormal that they need tips on not sounding like a bot.
Which is funny because the marketing speak screams at me through that entire post. I recognized it as spam not only from the link, but from the “In terms of finding a job…” as well. I know those kind of responses. I’ve written those kind of responses. Those responses now repel me.
We should welcome new refugees after a new exodus ; good.
We all knew this day was coming. And, I suspect, knowing this is precisely why most of us are here.
It’s just incredibly funny that the site that tried to fight spam and ad bots because it harms user experience is now implementing spam and ad bots to harm user experience.
Obviously that’s okay because it’s their spam and ad bots!
Incredible news for us! Thanks, Reddit! 🎉
I’m still waiting for the day when actual ads across the internet drown in AI-generated advertisements pointing to no real product or service. Perhaps that’ll make attention industry collapse?
If you’re looking for a side project idea, here’s one.
This is a similar idea to culture jamming, people would put subversive books in libraries and book stores, change labels on products in supermarkets, etc. It’s not a bad way to draw attention to something people are already accustomed to seeing.
I’ve seen these same kinds of posts, obviously ads and less obviously by AI on Lemmy every once in a while which started maybe a month and a half or so ago? Makes me wonder if they were testing their shit over here.
I would not be surprised at all if small scale testing occurred here. It actually (unfortunately) makes sense since the Lemmy API is free to use. They could just trickle out bot comments and gauge reaction.
Scary but true…
“With Dynamic Product Ads, brands can tap into the rich, high-intent product conversations that people come to Reddit for," Reddit EVP of Business Marketing and Growth Jim Squires said in a statement.
Gross.
Based on that quote, AI might have already taken over the leadership also
It makes me so mad…it’s like a company butting into a conversation me and a friend are having in person.
“how do we turn our users into money”
Jfc people came to Reddit because up until now they were getting replies from real people with that have no financial interest in the outcome. This completely subverts everything people valued about Reddit. This fucking guy.
If people who are still on Reddit don’t leave over this, I don’t know what will make them leave.
Nothing. Social media (and social-ish media like Reddit) have a strong, strong hold on people. Facebook is still an incredibly popular site. People don’t abandon social media sites until they literally have to, like in the instance of MySpace, vine. A company definitely contributes to that by tanking their own UI and making people leave, which in turn causes a downward spiral of the company grabbing on harder to the dwindling user base, trying to monetize them harder and harder, until they company itself bottoms out and shuts down the servers.
Those of us that left Reddit willingly when we were tired of being used by them are in the very small minority. They lost, what, like 1-2% of their user base when nearly every single comment in any thread about the API debacle that said, “this is the last straw, I’m leaving and deleting my comment history” was getting massive amounts of support? People on the internet talk a big game, but ultimately are hopelessly addicted to their routines.
This is all by design, of course. We’re conditioned to open their apps and sites by reflex when we turn on the phone or computer. It fuckin works. But dammit if it doesn’t feel good breaking that spell. But it’s super disappointing others are willing to take every slap to the face and simply say “thank you sir may I have another.” Those people contribute to enshittification as much as the companies, honestly.
Lot of truth to this.
Facebook users know very well that Mark has spent the last 10 years, bastardizing Facebook in every way he can. It’s not a good place for security. He doesn’t give a shit about your privacy. He no longers rely on actual people to help step in and resolve on-site problems, rather rely on a stupid hub system and he’s high on his stupid metaverse shit.
Yet, billions are still there.
Reddit, same way. The worst part about Reddit and even Twitter users is the mental gymnastics they’re willing to go through, to justify and rationalize why they’re staying.
People on the internet talk a big game, but ultimately are hopelessly addicted to their routines.
Nice pic to visualize every modern boycott. Aggravating to see people lie about their morals, and then keep eating the shit they are being fed.
Yes, but by completely destroying that they can make the line go up for 2 quarters, so worth it. Also, corpos would actually prefer users not having access to these discussion spaces and the free information they provide, so you would have to rely on overSEOd shit content and ads. I hate what the internet has become
What research is telling them that people come to Reddit to talk to corporations about products? Where was the survey? And what the fuck is a “high-intent product conversation”? These people are making shit up.
Yeah, that’s marketing for you.
I remember seeing threads like “What was the best purchase that you made for under 100” or some variation every once in a while. I’m sure those got corpo eyes real interested if they weren’t advertising in them already.
also remember the ineeeedit sub? they initially nuked it due to companies using it to secretly sell products then reddit realized they themselves can do it.
See Also: r/thisiswhyimbroke
Oh look, another what “bought for life” thread.
So they started by making polls and surveys not obvious? That makes sense. If people know that a survey is a survey, especially on a site like Reddit, the users will tell each other and attempt to fuck with the results
rich, high-intent product conversations
these people make me so fucking sick i cannot
i cannot believe this site i spent so many sad years posting on in high school, with pure heart, posting purely out of a desire for interesting interactions and the potential to make insightful, peer-reviewed contributions that others could enjoy, has turned into such fucking dead-eyed garbage.
