AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO'
AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO'
A market for manipulating Reddit using AI have emerged.
What a time to be alive. We are in an age where every new technology shall be seen as a way to produce more advertisements.
You might not know it, but catapults were originally invented to deliver ads across long distances. Only later was their usefulness for warfare discovered.
After the invention of the airship, catapults became obsolete for advertising. They continued to be used though in the trenches of World War I.In modern times something similar happened with the atomic bomb, which was originally developed by the Mushroom Marketing Board to be a giant illuminated billboard in the sky. It was repurposed as a weapon after it was found to reduce, not increase, mushroom sales in neighborhoods where it was deployed.
Welcome to the printing press
”BUY MORE JESUS!”
Can we go back to when every technology was just weaponized instead? No? This is somehow worse.
"How can this invention help us sell more sugar water?"
This is a relative upgrade of classic Persona Management Software, using an AI to produce the comments instead of a human.
I was wondering when this would leave the military and political sphere and enter the mainstream... and here we are, it's straight being advertised pretty blatantly.
Further, it is why we need the same strict advertising laws we have for television and radio for the internet.
If it's an ad, it should have to say it's a fucking ad.
I've been pissed about this since Correct the Record and Cambridge Analytica. There is zero political willpower to do anything about it because the political groups were some of the earliest adopters of this fucking trash.
Ads, of any nature, political or otherwise, should be fucking labelled accordingly, god damn it. This isn't fucking hard.
EDIT: I wonder if this will result in independent websites like Lemmy to start using a filtering service similar to a Pi-Hole checking if the source of the comment is in any way tied to an advertising content delivery network. Start banning users and comments based on their source as an ad. Surely this would lead to advertisers using VPNs to try to bypass it, but... it's time we at least started considering ways to fight this.
Hell yeah! This comment is spot-on and it totally rocks and so do you.
Parasite SEO
Is there any other kind?
Exactly, I'm like "that's redundant"
SEO disgusts me. On that topic I also hate when people in YT videos are begging for likes, subs ands comments to boost engagement and optimize their video in the algorithm. I get it, they are kinda forced to, but that's such a sad state of affairs.
SEO disgusts me
Gods yes. It basically steamrolls everything and you end up with two situations: people who knowingly game the algorithm for malicious intent and pollute search engines and media platforms, or you have people who are earnestly playing to the algorithm to help their "content" get noticed because that's the only way it will get noticed. It creates this homogeneous landscape where everything looks the same, everyone's doing and posting the same things, everyone is chasing trends and virality, and no one is doing anything interesting or creative anymore because novel ideas that aren't SEO'd to death don't get noticed.
So what we end up with is our current situation: a toxic landscape of "influencers", "content creators", content farms, ad farms, bots, etc. polluting everything, and people with genuine passion and interesting ideas getting buried under a sea of engagement bait, rage-bait, and disguised ads.
So true! Well said!
As the passive aggressive outro from SuperfastMatt goes:
"It used to be that you had to impress people to get people to watch your show, now you just have to impress the algorithm. So do me a favour, hit that subscribe button, all hail the algorithm."
Depends on how they do it. If the like-and-subscribe begging is at the end of the video, thats ok in my opinion. But if the 10m01s video starts with an insanely loud intro followed by begging followed by a "hey guys" followed by a sponsor segment followed by a Discord server promotion, then that's just obnoxious.
Recently I also unsubbed from a channel that started using community posts for ad promotion. Made me irrationally mad, not gonna lie.
SEO is of itself is not all bad. Content creators need to do certain things, which do little directly for the consumer, but help the algo understand what the content is and how the owner would prefer it be seen. For example, something simple like the title attribute of a web page tells the search engine how it should label the content in the search results. That's SEO and generaly a good thing for everyone.
As you say, the "please like, subscribe, comment and say a prayer to the algo" annoyance is just what we have to accept for free content on these platforms. It's the cost of anyone being able to upload video to YT.
Where it goes wrong imho, is filling the world with essentially meaningless machine produced content to aid in the rankings. This isn't new with AI btw. People have been using article "spinning" or outsourced garbage content creation for years or decades to do the same and potentially even better than what AI does. In the old days building thousands of links from garbage content to your content in order to have the algo see the links as "votes" for the supposed quality of the content. Those of us who ran forums saw this all the time.
SEO is wrong - it's like an arms race where the shittiest party spending the most wins and every one else needs to play by the rules to even exist.
The world would be better off if noone did it in the first place and search engines could just do the job they intended to do.
Google totally went to shit in the last years with their first page often full of websites great at SEO but horrible in whatever you were actually looking for.
Meanwhile the little ultra-specific forum that had a thread years ago about your specific search and no money for SEO is somewhere on page 5 while websites just repeating the search phrase over and over with no answer in sight are at the top.
That whole industry can cease to exist from one day to the next and nothing of value would be lost - if anything value would be gained for the average person
Want to back you up on a point. People have been copy/pasting, or adding fluff like a high school paper, to AP articles since its inception. This was happening well before the earliest days of the internet.
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Lemmy and similar are not inherently more resistant to this. Actually, they are probably less resistant from a technical standpoint, since there is virtually no barrier to creating an account. I didn't even need an email address to sign up, let alone a phone number like the corporate sites require nowadays (not sure about Reddit, but Google, Facebook, and Twitter all require phone verification to register last I checked).
I fear that we are not ready for the wave of spam that will come as soon as the fediverse becomes mainstream.
On a more fundamental level, I don't know how to reconcile the competing goals of accountability and privacy.
Realistically, there is no way to distinguish AI comments from human comments. Not in any way that wouldn't become obsolete the day after it was implemented.
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Bots have been doing this on Reddit forever, it's a lot more noticeable now that most of the good users who generated content have left.
I remember when I first started noticing bots bad was in 2016. They have been there for a while now. It's advertisers turn now though. It's at the end stages
"Most Reddit Addicted City" was Eglin Air Force Base in 2014. Eglin has a history of research about social media influence at their facility.
That post has been pretty blackholed by the internet at this point. The bots probably started as early as 2010-2012.
Have you seen /r/worldnews the first 10 page of comments are all hardcore Israel supporters.
It's kind of jarring because they're not really in the rest of the site.
The information warfare units only seem to care about the frontpage so they really stand out. Especially how ham fisted they are about it.
I got a huge strike, which eventually led to me being account banned from Reddit (seven year account, 600k karma) for calling out Israel for the pogrom against the Palestine people. Reddit is really trash now, most of the reference questions are 2+ years old.
It’s in a necrotic state of rot right now.
Have you seen /r/worldnews
I try my best not to
Reddit has had an issue with being a platform of public manipulation for a while. This is not new, it’s just much more noticeable now, and thus a lot less effective.
Reddit was always full of reposts and content yoinked from other sites, it’s just that the content taken from other sites was curated. There was also a fair amount of original content mixed in. The people who bothered to do the free labor of curating content from other sites or creating original content, have largely left or retreated to smaller subreddits.
Where as before the influence and marketing campaigns were mixed in with genuine/well curated content, now they are 90% of what is left. Even their content is worse than it used to be since it’s largely just LLM generated slop now.
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Persona Management Software has existed for at least a decade. The only difference here is you're removing the human that controls it from the equation, because AI is now advanced enough to produce what sound like realistic responses in real-time. You used to still have to have a human with a bunch of pre-written scripts running hundreds of sockpuppet accounts through Persona Management Software. Now it's just one step removed with the AI working with the pre-written scripts for you.
AI is simply enhancing what was already a long-standing terrible practice. It was already a terrible practice before AI was involved. In this case, it was poisoned before AI was even applied.
Reddit is a lost cause. Even without ads, it's clear that Reddit management is pushing a lot of mindless junk to the front page. It didn't used to have so many moronic and fake AITAH and AskReddit posts (which in turn are posted by bots or paid posters) at the top. The whole thing is a steaming pile but people who've spent years on the site don't want to give it up.
If manipulating reddit isn't already a betting sport, it's not far away. Guessing it is in Russia (or at least a drinking game), just like the rest of the big 'social' netwerks. Enjoy your next election. Wherever you are :)
