If they were just talking about Reddit, I’d assume something dodgy was going on connected with the IPO. But Quora is supposedly back from the dead too… Am I missing something glaringly obvious here?
Election is coming up, all Russian bots
And Israeli bots (probably IDF and Pro-Israelis too)
Seriously I just discovered this. Go search any random Gaza/Palestine/Israel post you will see -50 for someone saying “Israel has killed children and should stop killing children” and like +300 for “this article is so biased it’s taking about Israeli attacks but no mention of how Hamas is the real cause of this death”.
I’m not even going to bother to link because I want people to see for themselves rather than it looking like I’m selecting the worst if it.
yeah but that’s sadly how a lot of real people think on Reddit anyway.
It probably has a lot to do with their IPO as well. They want to look like they are doing well ahead of that.
Mfers still believe in Russiagate despite everything… It’s time to accept they’re not Russian trolls, your country is just full of fascists.
Why can’t it be both? Russian social media engineers wouldnt have to try that hard. America’s full of a bunch of fascist capitalist warmongers with a majority of liberal sheep for citizens, ready to believe whatever truth they want to be more true than reality.
Perhaps Russia isn’t as involved as of late though? Perhaps Putin killed off all his social media engineers sending them to fight in Ukraine? I’m waiting for the reports to come in from field reporters finding Russian boy scout corpses on the battle field. That’s when you know he doesn’t have the resources to spend trying to influence American elections. He’s got bigger problems, like mandating Russian breeding schedules.
Did something come out that disproves the existence of russian bots in social media?
- Washington Post: Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters
- Jacobin: It Turns Out Hillary Clinton, Not Russian Bots, Lost the 2016 Election
- Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork
- Jacobin: Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal
- MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
- Chris Hedges: Why Russiagate Won’t Go Away
From the Washington Post piece:
But the study doesn’t go so far as to say that Russia had no influence on people who voted for President Donald Trump.
- It doesn’t examine other social media, like the much-larger Facebook.
- Nor does it address Russian hack-and-leak operations. Another major study in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson suggested those probably played a significant role in the 2016 race’s outcome.
- Lastly, it doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.
And
“Despite these consistent findings, it would be a mistake to conclude that simply because the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter was not meaningfully related to individual-level attitudes that other aspects of the campaign did not have any impact on the election, or on faith in American electoral integrity,” the report states.
The overwhelmingly more significant threat is that US corporate social media are integrated with the propaganda machinery of the US government and the capitalist class. The purpose of things like Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Hamilton 68 and the Disinformation Governance Board is not to protect us from foreign influence but for the “intelligence community” to inject its own influence.
- Facebook Partners With Hawkish Atlantic Council, a NATO Lobby Group, to “Protect Democracy”
- Jessica Ashooh: The taming of Reddit and the National Security State Plant tabbed to do it
- A Reddit AMA Claiming To Be A Uyghur Quickly Exposes A CIA Asset Slandering China
- r/neoliberal was created by a neoliberal think tank » BPR Interviews: The Neoliberal Project
.
They have their eye on the fediverse now as well: Atlantic Council » Collective Security in a Federated World
This is all an extension of how traditional corporate media works, which has been understood for decades:
- Michael Parenti, 1986: Inventing Reality: The Politics Of The Mass Media
- Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky, 1988: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.
A five minute primer: Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine
Liberals will cry for impossibly indisputable evidence then go silent when you actually manage to provide it.
Uh, actually yeah it did. Turns out they were just normal pro-russia conservatives. I thought the Cucker interview would have made that connection pretty obvious. They weren’t paid to post that kind of propaganda, they were doing it willingly.
I’m sorry I was hoping what I was asking would be more clear:
Did something specific, that you can link to disprove the existence of Russian bots in social media?
Sure but first you have to get me a link to an instance of evidence ever swaying someone’s opinion on the internet and not just turning into a debate about the validity of the evidence. EDIT: And the admin literally did that and you went quiet, you’re so fucking full of shit.
This. Everything wrong in US is some bot army peddling propaganda at labor camps. Might even add the Atlantians to the list of foreign influencers before claiming US has more than a significant amount of fascists, racists, xenophobic assholes that already elected criminal as a president, and others war criminals without a shred of repercussions.
but whatever makes you sleep better at night.
If I remember correctly the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence quietly released a bipartisan report some years back conforming the existence of Russian trolls in the 2016 election. I haven’t seen any evidence or reports released that they have ceased their attempts at manipulating social media since then.
I do agree though, a lot of the posts are just real people who know that hate gets more engagement and crazy people.
They did, but they determined the huge russian disinformation campaign was the work of like 5 accounts and 200k in ad-spend on facebook. In other words a wet fart.
That tired but always working deflection. Let me get a little creative. I’m pretty sure it’s underground blind mole rats this time.
theys r comin 4r us, I’m telling ya, mark my wurds. ya’ll bein minefukd while yous wer sleepin
How’s my russian? did I do it right?
Only if you count bots lol
Yeah this isn’t Reddit but more than 80% (>4/5) of Twitter is bots. It’s to the point where you can find any blue checkmark account, reply to them with a prompt, and more likely than not they’ll have a wacky and clearly autogenerated response. Sometimes they just reply things like “sorry, I can’t generate content that depicts violence” to random posts too.
Dead internet theory is almost a reality and I hate it. It’s already happened to Google search results / blogs.
Almost? It’s been a thing for awhile. Shit, Reddit got started by using bots to feign engagement. It’s just that it’s gotten so much easier and faster
I think I’ve comment this before but over the pandemic years I did a little experiment. Every day I bookmarked the obvious content reposting bot accounts on the first few pages of r/all. After a while I checked back on the accounts. The majority of them become cryptocurrency spam bots. A very small percentage spam random things. There was an extremely high success rate of picking out the bot accounts. Pretty much all them were except for maybe a handful.
spez is basically exit scamming with reddit. Whoever is buying the dataset is getting robbed blind. That’s if reddit inc isn’t being upfront behind closed doors. Maybe they are. After all reddit does have well over a decade of mostly organic activity. The recent data has to be absolute trash though.
It isn’t like you can’t otherwise get the older data if you really want though, pretty sure it’s on torrents. The newer stuff is all they have to sell.
Google wants the data to be exclusively licensed, so they can pursue any competing LLMs and sue them to death - I mean, develop a ‘moat’
It’s not really about the actual data access
I don’t buy that, given
-
All the effort Reddit has put into locking down data access
-
Google itself was behind the lawsuit establishing fair use for scraped datasets, and it’s looking likely that will be upheld
Would be happy to hear it if there’s reasons I’m not aware of that this is the intention though
-
I wonder if there was some kind of technological revolution that made it exponentially easier to generate text that happened recently.
Good Post Theory
Subs picked to be “mainstream” get botted to death and every other sub is half dead, so not really. Quality fell off a cliff.
I cannot wait for reddit going public, it’s going to generate so much drama, that’s going to be soooo good.
Lemmy instances brace yourself
Im just sad my bank won’t let me buy puts without using my house or business as collateral
Google has massive swing; there’s a whole industry around getting Google to prefer your low quality crap nobody wants to see over others’ low quality crap nobody wants to see.
If Google has finally figured out a metric to measure “helpfulness” of a website and punishes unhelpful websites, a bunch of dogshit that would have otherwise gotten top spots may have been banished to page 2.
Reddit results would naturally creep up because of that (and therefore get a lot more clicks), even if they didn’t change at all.Didn’t Reddit signpost that they’d signed a deal with Google over AI? Is Google driving visitors to Reddit in exchange and to their benefit?
So honest. So unbiased.
Google directly said a few months ago that they’re changing their algorithm to expose more Reddit content.
Source?
Google
The whole reason that Google exists today is that their PageRank algorithm was a great way to identify good content. At its basics, it worked by counting the number of pages that linked to a certain page. More incoming links meant the page was more useful. It didn’t matter how many relevant search terms you stuffed into your page. What matters was votes from other people, expressed in the form of linking to your page.
But, that algorithm failed for 2 reasons. One is that it became cheaper and easier to put up sites that linked to sites you wanted to promote. The other was that people stopped blogging on their own blogs, and stopped creating their own websites, and instead used walled gardens like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. That meant it was hard to measure links back to a site, and that it was easier to create fake links.
So, now it’s a constant war of SEO people vs. Google Search Quality people, and the Google people are losing. Sometimes there are brief victories for Google which result in good Reddit results appearing higher up. Then the SEO people catch up and either pollute Reddit and/or push Reddit links off the first page.
It would all be really depressing even if it weren’t for generative AI being used to pollute everything. With LLMs coming in and vomiting their content all over everything, we might be forced back to the bad old days of Yahoo where some individual human curated lists of good things and 99% of content was invisible.
IPO padding for the CEOs golden parachute.
Yes. Google is strongly favoring both in search results in their feeble, and failing, attempt to combat AI.
The article seems to suggest a change on the Google search algo and how Reddit pumps the SEO is to blame as it’s showing up in search rankings above other more relevant results.
I’m assuming “traffic” here is individual page visits, which would shoot up if people are just pulling up one page from a “how do I do X” type of search. I doubt this boost is coming from people sticking around, but I’m sure that’s not how Reddit will spin it.
I do believe reddit pops up in my search results more frequently these days than it did a year ago, without any explicit prompting with ‘reddit’ keyword… (just based on my impression, though)
Yes and no. No, it’s not Reddit doing it. Yes, Google is strongly favoring reddit results. They are combating AI content in this manner.
Google searches are becoming worthless more and more. This may be the beginning of the end for them unless users quickly adopt their generative search approach when they release it.
Fuck me, I’m not even using Google directly, I’m currently on MetaGer which is a meta search engine, and even there, I got annoyed today already that half the top links were shitty Reddit links.
I hate this shit so much. I work as a Software Engineer, so using web search was half our work day a few years back.
Personally, I’m thankfully already at a point where I can figure out most things by fucking around. But we have an intern who’s new to the job and she regularly tells me that she struggles to find anything useful on the rather mainstream technologies that we’re using.To some degree, LLMs are still a workaround for that, but they won’t be able to update to newer information without pulling in LLM spam, so either we’re stuck with the current technologies for the foreseeable future or we won’t have a way of finding anything in a few years.
And the worst part is that I can’t think of a real solution. Maybe we could use a search engine, which only queries official documentation directly. That could be an improvement, as often not even that shows up in the normal search results. But really, what our intern needs is tutorials and those are virtually indistinguishable from LLM spam…
Not even close if we’re talking about current users or active contributers. After they shut down third party apps and sided with advertisers over mods there was a huge migration off platform to several other platforms. Many smaller subreddits are ghost towns and the biggest ones that are still active have a smaller participating community, less total votes, and changing norms.
It’s not just eternal September, it’s the same thing that happened when digg died in reverse where communities grew and changed because people were joining. Users are adding site:reddit.com or whatever to Google searches because of SEO general searches are an advertising dumpster fire, but those search results are going to degrade over time along with the site’s quality if they continue to make such shitty decisions for communities and users or people move to other ai based search tools.
Where did everyone go? I thought Lemmy was the new hangout but it still seems so small, even popular posts are only getting a handful of comments?
Well, the federation kinda spreads users out. Like I can’t login to kbin on my Lemmy apps but I can see kbin posts, but the vast majority of my time is on lemmy. IOW it’s harder to participate across instances so less people.
There are other platforms that are probably suffering some form of the same fate, they got an influx of ex-redditors, but not a high enough volume to really take off and get high participation rates.
I dunno, I prefer Lemmy/fediverse. The churn isn’t there so you can actually interact with people instead of competing with inane reddit quips and top comment retreads.
It feels much more filled out than after the initial exodus. Smaller/niche communities are pretty bare, though.
tiktok? ffffff
Removed by mod
bots?
Ai generated content
Bots all the way down
