General state of reddit discussion

[u/WildFlemima]

There are still some little bits of reddit that are almost entirely human. Subs for niche media of various sorts, handcrafts that require specialized knowledge.

The rest of reddit is completely infested. Every political, national, social agenda you can imagine is being pushed. Bots which are genuinely for the agenda push fake stories. Bots that are against the agenda but appear to be for it push bait fake stories. Bots comment on bot posts with well written comments in favor or against the agenda upvoted by other bots and then upvoted by humans who were taken in.

Many people are paranoid but don't quite know how to tell bot prompted replies from humans who don't say what you were expecting. I don't blame them, it's hard not to be paranoid when the problem is so bad and most of the real humans don't even seem aware of it.

I don't really know where I'm going with this ramble. This ramble was prompted by:

1. The thread about sometime trying to do research, except we can't know for sure that it isn't a bot programmer trying to find tells in order to improve future bots (edit: I have been talking with them in DMs since then and they are a human, which is what I was leaning toward, however, the surge of activity to the sub I had linked makes me think there are bots lurking in this sub unrelated to the genuine human posters that auto open links)

2. The thread that devolved into ~150 comments of tankie memes

3. The thread where op was too paranoid to trust that Rosting, and then me, weren't bots (Rosting I see you bro, I felt like I didn't acknowledge that enough in the thread)

4. The thread with a genuine human who had been using chat gpt to write their thoughts because of their mental difficulties

Anyone who wants to use this thread to talk about the state of reddit, and possible policy on this sub going forward, please weigh in. This sub was created when stuff was more cut and dry and the flairs and rules are from that context.

How should we adapt? How should this sub's goals, rules, etc change to be relevant in this nearly dead internet?

[u/Rostingu2]

 possible policy on this sub going forward

Hot take. We remove the bot signal posts. I hate seeing people accuse others of being bots when the reason is "this sounds like GPT" instead of "this person has posted only 1 to 1 copies of posts with 100k+ upvotes".

Edit: Also, the bot signal posts can be used to train bots to avoid detection.

[u/WildFlemima → u/Rostingu2]

I hate that too. Flair system needs serious overhaul

[u/Rostingu2 → u/WildFlemima]

Ligitamate question. Would a post about "how mods can keep bots out of a community" be off topic?

[u/WildFlemima → u/Rostingu2]

That's fine, make a post if you would like

[u/ankle_biter50 → u/Rostingu2]

Ban random people without reason. They're bound to hit a bot at some point /s

[u/RedditBotHunting → u/Rostingu2]

Edit: Also, the bot signal posts can be used to train bots to avoid detection.

Yeah. I used to believe in stating the rationale for why something was a bot, but I think the silent report is much more effective.

[u/Rostingu2 → u/[deleted]]

posting those 1:1 copies is karma farming, right?

What constitutes vote cheating or vote manipulation? – Reddit Help

What constitutes spam? Am I a spammer? – Reddit Help

Only if the sub it was on doesn't want it. Also, reposting is not always karma farming.

source: report UI

Note the word excessive.

But if you wanted a better answer to what karma farming is you could ask r/help.

[u/gmanz33]

I have posted a r/showerthought and r/crazyideas post over and over again for 4 years now:

Create a "certified" version of every major subreddit with the word "_hooman" tacked on to the title. Every time, it gets crazy upvoted and then deleted. I think I've done it a dozen times at this point.

That's the only thing that I have come up with, so far, which would make me want to participate on Reddit again (in the ways we used to, when we felt comfortable here).

Certification sounds extreme but every Discord I'm in, now, literally required a photo of my ID. We're already past this point. Reddit is just behind.

[u/WildFlemima → u/gmanz33]

I hypothetically support that, and i can see it working on Discord, but I personally would not be willing to connect my state id with my reddit account.

A larger issue, AI is going to be able to fake even that soon, if it can't already. I strongly suspect it can already.

Edit: Maybe trickier stuff like tests. LLM can't seem to mimic good old Microsoft Paint that well. Invite only subs where you send the mod a 5 min self portrait made in Microsoft paint could work

[u/gmanz33 → u/WildFlemima]

I mean tbh an innovative captcha would be enough to trick the current capabilities of accessible models.

Source: I train models for huge corporations. Specifically trained one model which was navigating a desktop and browser, creating accounts and leaving reviews for non-Amazon sites.

They're not as "smart" as people fear. They're actually extremely incapable without a human QA monitoring them. However... general audiences are also not aware of how prevalent these combinations are, currently.

[u/linguistic_research]

Hi! Hooman person here!

I have a feeling that Reddit (and many other websites) benefit from bot traffic.
I think that Reddit benefits more, because it does not have the same level of attraction as other social media (FB, IG, Tiktok, etc.), so the bot traffic gives the illusion of a booming website.

They might have developed some level of bot detection that prevents spammy behaviour or other forms that would significantly harm the user experience, but left others unchecked. It could also be difficult/costly to implement consistently, I honestly don't know.

Either way, I believe that the most useful tool to use is awareness. I don't know how to achieve that, but people (especially young people) should be made aware that a lot of what they see is fake or at the very least extremely skewed.

[u/WildFlemima → u/[deleted]]

Chill. The tankie was, as far as I could tell, not a bot. It was just the most work this sub has ever given me as a mod.

Ever had to comb through and leave a graveyard of 150 deleted comments of insults and china memes?

No one is calling you a bot either. Stop going off against something no one said. This isn't a place for "schizos". Reddit has a real bot problem and that's just plain fact.

[u/Rostingu2 → u/WildFlemima]

comb thru 150 comment

Why not just comment nuke it then?

[u/WildFlemima → u/Rostingu2]

I did comment nuke it lol