[boh]

AI is pretty much killing social media in the long term. Even pre-AI, a good chunk of posts/comment sections on sites were bots/paid. Reddit is becoming less believable than ChatGPT. I guess there's still the Onion-verse.

[cgh]

Yes, Dead Internet Theory went from joke to reality in what feels like overnight.

[mmooss]

The usual goal of professional propaganda - of disinformation - is to paralyze, to prevent constructive communication, discourse, progress.

[SV_BubbleTime]

Was it a joke?

Am I to mourn the loss of what I personally consider one of the worst manipulative toxins to ever exist?

Thanks AI.

[satvikpendem]

It was never a joke because bots are older than AI

[themafia]

I'm not convinced you can have an impromptu global conversation to any positive end. Humans are not well suited to this task and an unsupervised mostly anonymous forum plays to those weaknesses and provides no support to generate positive outcomes.

It was never a particularly good idea at the scale it's currently deployed at.

[estimator7292]

BBSes and forums have existed for literally longer than the internet

[boh]

Reddit was pretty solid before people started cultivating their personal "brand"/only fans page/crypto pick.

[stuaxo]

Adding recommendation engines that optimise for anger makes it even worse.

[mmooss]

How about Hacker News?

[raxxorraxor]

I have the opposite experience. While these anonymous groups tend to be high on vulgarity and directness, there are much more peaceful examples than the other way around. Propaganda got strong when we began to restrict content on social media by the companies themselves or external actors.

This human nature shit is empirically wrong. There are quite a few scammers around. You also meet these people in real life, you just don't notice immediately.

[anovikov]

This is a good thing. More and more people will stop consuming it, going back to the mainstream media, so will perhaps become more sensible.

[riversflow]

Reddit died to me when they allowed private profiles this summer.

[arjie]

Interestingly, you can still use `author:username` to search for posts. For my part, if something seems suspicious and the profile is private then I assume it's a bot.

[kevinh]

Yeah, I saw some posts on there the other day that felt a bit suspect, went to look at their profile, and nothing. I'd already become an infrequent user of reddit since some earlier changes, but that makes me even less likely to go back.

[osn9363739]

I thought the same. I'm still 90% of the same mindset. But it does worry me how much people like slop. But is it because it's novel? and will people get tired of it?

[nerdponx]

People like AI created slop because they already like human created slop. AI slop is the way it is because it was trained on human slop.

[barfoure]

> Reddit is becoming less believable than ChatGPT.

Hard disagree, and I’ll cite a simple example: Reddit isn’t one community. It’s a hub and spoke model. There are many good communities with curators and SMEs.

My canonical example that’s counter to this is HN. No offense to anyone but Reddit doesn’t have a hive mind - communities do. And HN hive mind is wrong more often than right and has been targeted by all sorts of astroturfers along the way. I personally take very few comments on here seriously, no takes seriously, and mostly show up to read comments by some actual hard cred people (f.e. animats). Everyone else might as well be a shill bot. AI doesn’t change this. I still get cream of the crop from Reddit.

Having said that, social media isn’t dead. It’ll transform. Two things are eternal: 1) women’s need for attention, 2) men’s need to get laid.

[Rebelgecko]

IME some of the smaller communities on reddit that are based around hobbies are actually MORE astroturfed

The bots have gotten a lot smarter about making their ads look organic too. Even easier now with the ability to hide post history

[nospice]

I mean, yes and no. The default Reddit experience is absolutely overrun by fake content. Or, there are tens of thousands of real people who have nothing else to do in their life but to go to /r/news or other "front page" subreddits and post the same political talking points multiple times a day, whether the story warrants it or not. Frankly, the AI / paid-shill explanation is greatly preferable in my book.

The non-default experience is a mixed bag. Specialized communities are usually moderated pretty strictly, including rules against outgoing links, product reviews, etc. That said, you definitely see product placement disguised as questions / off-the-cuff recommendations where some previously-unheard-of Chinese brand is all of sudden mentioned every day.

HN has its problems, mostly in the form of people pretending to be experts and saying unhinged nonsense, but it's far less commercialized. If you want your brand to be on the front page, you sort of need to make an effort to write at least a mildly interesting blog post. Now, AI is changing that dynamic a bit because we now get daily front-page stories that are AI-generated... but it's happening more slowly than elsewhere.