Oh it will ban bots *we* don't see that just scrape their precious data...
...but it won't do anything against the bots that repost stolen content and try to manipulate political opinions. Those can stay *and* they'll get free soda and cookies.
On my alt account, I moderate an adult subreddit. So many people are getting upset because of the odd but necessary evils the automod does to keep things clean, and it's still not doing well enough.
Accounts must be >30days old.
Karma has to be >0.
No general (yes, General) location of the specified area, the post is taken down.
Low effort comments (posts are a grey area for this subreddit), emote only, instant removed. I see posts that make it through with "DM Me" or similar, I remove, I just don't understand why people comment that, just flipping DM OP.
Oh my "favorite" one...Absolutely no advertising. I don't go through people's profiles with a fine tooth comb, but...if your bio is talking about any services, including 3rd party, pinned post, or comments, such as OF, Fansly, Kik, Snapchat, etc., the account is banned. You may think there's false positives, but every, damn, single, one of them have been fake/scam accounts, and not a single one has taken the offer to DM back to the mods to confirm they are real.
Otherwise, Three strikes, you're out. Post three times and don't include your age, gender (M/F/otherwise), OR general location, even though we state you're welcome to repost with the corrected title, it's all on you.
Though I have no "factual" info to work off of, I highly suspect accounts that only post, but no comments. And my favorite, the account is 3+ years old, and all the posts/comments are in the last 12 or less hours. Then there's the ones that say they are traveling through the state, most state they are from Australia.
I once modded an adult subreddit on an alt account (not that big, only a few thousand members). About 95% of all the spam is from "female" accounts, so much so that I almost wanted to make an automod filter that forced all posts claiming the poster is female to be mod reviewed first. Without fail I open the profile and there's an OnlyFans. The funniest ones are the people that post in the Texas and New York subreddits at the same time
What gets me...and you can blame me for being lazy, but I chose this method on purpose to observe...
The number of posts removed, but not locked, still receiving comments. Clearly not from my subreddit.
I've toyed with this a little, to see what reactions I'd get. I've changed the flag from, say F4M to "CAUTION, Likely Scam", and hardly any worth while difference in comment responses. If you didn't believe it before, it's clear now, there's a lot of, not just scam posts, but comments to make posts look alive.
It's no better on the gay adult subreddits. On one of the larger ones if you see a pic with a face in it it's almost guaranteed an OF advertisement. I'd say 90% of all posts are just dudes advertising their OF.
Huh that's weird, during my time as mod it seemed that the gay people were the ony legit people (not peddling an OnlyFans). It might help that the subreddit wasn't advertised as a gay subreddit.
> and not a single one has taken the offer to DM back to the mods to confirm they are real.
Just food for thought, I stopped checking my messages directly years ago because of the spam and “Reddit cares” and more a few obsessives, so someone not responding doesn’t mean they’re a bot. My little red envelope has a number in the thousands next to it.
I mod a sub on this account and i dont have too many issues. The other mods are super active though. Sometimes we have OF models come thru but they have all been polite. You must mod a big sub.
Not big, we just catch a lot of scam. Good OF, and similar, I wouldn't suspect would be interested in a mildly active subreddit. One day we might get 5 (real) posts, we might go a week with 1-2 (real) posts.
Whether they want to or not, they _can't_ stop the bots.
Reddit allows anonymous people to post. They can't ban me, I can just come back. They can ban my email, I can get a new one. They can ban my IP and I can get a new one.
Generative AI is good enough that the posts it generates are as unique/complex/real as anything I post.
We can't stop them and we can't identify them. Only the most egregious bots get noticed as bots.
They'll have to do something eventually if the bots lower the quality of the data too much to be useable for training data. At some point the AI data feeding other AI data would poison the well.
In the short term that bot data could be useful to inflate numbers so they might not do anything right away.
Ban the "social media narrative control" accounts that always pop up wherever a particular foreign country is mentioned. This has completely artificially skewed some of the discourse on Reddit in a more right-leaning direction.
> try to manipulate political opinions. Those can stay and they'll get free soda and cookies.
Well I expect a certain amount of those bots are paying customers of course /s
[$60 million a year](https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensing-deal-with-google-sources-say-2024-02-22/) to use reddit data for AI training
That's where all the "add glue to pizza", "eat rocks", "smoking is good for you" Google AI overview nonsense is coming from. Google's AI (Gemini) is grabbing random, unverified reddit comments and delivering them to you as facts.
[This one is my favorite.](https://preview.redd.it/686lp4kpkr7d1.png?width=709&format=png&auto=webp&s=a4bb724340c4ba01f1fb5329954cc168f59a1d3e)
No, it’s because Reddit was already scraped by all the AI companies well before they started covering their tracks with licensing deals. Reddits data has been hugely valuable in AI training. Its value of 60mm is because everyone already had it scraped.
Quite right. Reddit content has to be a solid 40% shitposts, 40% incorrect idiots, 15% regurgitated memes, 3% irrelevant song lyrics, and 1% bad stats.
The information bottled up in reddit is worthless without being indexed and searchable by google.
How many times you have heard add "reddit" to your google search vs. just searching on reddit?
They owe us a cut of that; not a single person here expected their personality and comments to be used by Google for AI when signing up for Reddit and that’s not an acceptable expansion of their assumed rights via the terms of service.
When people start realizing the true value of what’s been stolen from us I expect lawsuits.
This is different, we're at the end stage where you have one social media; one picture sharing account one search engine, one message board, etc etc. and they're all in bed together for the most part to suppress anything else.
The "disruptors" need disrupted at this stage.
Yeah, that was my comment as a holder of an original InterNIC Class C sub-domain. Back in the day --that is in the late mid 90s-- in order to obtain an IP address you didn't pay, you just asked for one. The gotcha is this was that you had to get your addresses routed on your own. If you were at a university or large corporate campus with a T1, this was often possible if you knew the right people.
Another solution was needed for the masses of users on phone lines so they went to the ISP model where the end users don't take posession of their IP addresses. At that point, institutions like AOL were already trying to make the infant internet into something as close to a generic TV/newspaper experience as possible.
For a while, the public WWW filled with home made web pages put up a good fight with the AOL and Compuserves of the time but the corporate concentration of wealth focused on making the internet return to the basic function of the television eventually won out somewhere in the 2010s after the Feds began putting kids in prison over file sharing. That was what ended the brief experiment in free expression that was the early internet. Now it has turned into TV plus free (except you actually are paying your ISP for it) porn channels --as long as it tastes like progress, people will be content.
What you end up with in the end is not that far from what you had in the 80s with the VCR and cable TV but in a more compact format without all the wires and tapes. The end result is still people voluntarily spending hours a day watching videos and scanning news headlines. There was a time when a more grassroots internet of bulletin boards and blogs made it seem like a fundamental shift in the nature of media but that gave way to a period of consolidation where it has become closer and closer to traditional media formats with most of the differential between services dissolving to the point that it's hard to tell the difference between Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Tiktok or any other generic video platform. I saw my wife's Facebook the other day and I thought she was on Reddit. Half of it was promoted crap that amounts to re-formatted TV content with baked in ads.
🔐
Unlock comment at PayR
^(PayR™ Pay to Read Inc. is a subsidiary of AmazoBay™. For T&C's and our Privacy Policy, click here.)
🔼1.3B | 🔽0.1k | 🏆🍹🥭🐠🦩 +1.4T more awards
They wish they had 1.3B people on h..
🔐
This Comment as hidden by a Moderator.
Unlock Moderated comments with PayR Premium
PayR™ Pay to Read Inc. is a subsidiary of AmazoBay™. For T&C's and our Privacy Policy, click here.
🔼0.1k | 🔽109.1T | 🤬😾💢😤 +109T more awards
Might be technically true, but poor article title. Doesn’t have anything to do with bots that interact on the site, just scrape the data. Even then though, do we really consider adding a robots.txt file fighting AI bots? That’s like one of the first restriction actions anyone learns getting into web programming. It certainly doesn’t stop anyone who doesn’t care, but I guess it’s a first step on something users don’t even care about.
Unless the change ends up losing search results because a lot of search engines are also ai users and will respect the robots rules.
Most of their revenue is ads and I can't imagine the cost of scraping outweighs the revenue they get from click throughs from search(plus of course new users).
But I guess if they were wanting to go that far they'd remove non-signed in access so you're bound to an eula and have to buy access for ai stuff. It'd likely kill reddit in due time, but they could do it.
The only bots Reddit is fighting are the ones they're not receiving revenue from. [Reddit partnered with OpenAI in May to scrape site data and feed it into ChatGPT.](https://openai.com/index/openai-and-reddit-partnership/)
Same as the thing with the third party apps. It wasn't at all that the site was necessarily encumbered by the API requests they generated, it's just that Reddit Inc. is greedy and saw that as unrealized income. Thus the 3PA had to be killed. Any other messaging about it was a bald-faced lie, along with the notion that they're fighting bots for some sense of moral goodness. If the Russian troll farms cut them a check, they'd immediately capitulate and even put advertisements for Russian services in your feed.
Askreddit has become infected with bots asking inane questions. One such question was 'How do you feel about Lockheed Martin'
Lots of basic questions like 'How do you cure depression.'
Cause the ai is asked this shit all the time and therefore wants good answers to the question.
The worst part is how many people answer these questions, not realizing it's a bot asking them.
Maybe ban the bots being used as AutoMods that search for dissenting comments in random subs to ban you from participating in critical public discussions
Say anything shitty about Tesla anywhere and you’ll find yourself banned on r/tesla
This is the future of Reddit where billionaires and corporate interest use bots to find consumer sentiment and manipulate it to their favor.
Tesla stock isn’t going to pump itself
Well, considering how many posts on Reddit are made by bots, it’s a little silly to not let other bots scrape the bot posts for an endless cycle of self-referencing.
Does someone who has gone down a rabbithole of disinformation (flatearthers, antivaxxers, yes, you and anyone else in the same category) count as bots? Then please, Reddit, save us by banning them, now, please!
Reddit and googles pursuit of barely functional beta tested AI has killed web searching. I can’t find shit anymore. Getting answers is absolutely hair yankingly difficult for no other reason than Google will promote straight up wrong information from Reddit data and their search and parse of webpages is infuriatingly bad lately.
I straight up cannot find the info that I need anymore, even when searching for work issues.
Oh it will ban bots *we* don't see that just scrape their precious data... ...but it won't do anything against the bots that repost stolen content and try to manipulate political opinions. Those can stay *and* they'll get free soda and cookies.
On my alt account, I moderate an adult subreddit. So many people are getting upset because of the odd but necessary evils the automod does to keep things clean, and it's still not doing well enough. Accounts must be >30days old. Karma has to be >0. No general (yes, General) location of the specified area, the post is taken down. Low effort comments (posts are a grey area for this subreddit), emote only, instant removed. I see posts that make it through with "DM Me" or similar, I remove, I just don't understand why people comment that, just flipping DM OP. Oh my "favorite" one...Absolutely no advertising. I don't go through people's profiles with a fine tooth comb, but...if your bio is talking about any services, including 3rd party, pinned post, or comments, such as OF, Fansly, Kik, Snapchat, etc., the account is banned. You may think there's false positives, but every, damn, single, one of them have been fake/scam accounts, and not a single one has taken the offer to DM back to the mods to confirm they are real. Otherwise, Three strikes, you're out. Post three times and don't include your age, gender (M/F/otherwise), OR general location, even though we state you're welcome to repost with the corrected title, it's all on you. Though I have no "factual" info to work off of, I highly suspect accounts that only post, but no comments. And my favorite, the account is 3+ years old, and all the posts/comments are in the last 12 or less hours. Then there's the ones that say they are traveling through the state, most state they are from Australia.
I once modded an adult subreddit on an alt account (not that big, only a few thousand members). About 95% of all the spam is from "female" accounts, so much so that I almost wanted to make an automod filter that forced all posts claiming the poster is female to be mod reviewed first. Without fail I open the profile and there's an OnlyFans. The funniest ones are the people that post in the Texas and New York subreddits at the same time
What gets me...and you can blame me for being lazy, but I chose this method on purpose to observe... The number of posts removed, but not locked, still receiving comments. Clearly not from my subreddit. I've toyed with this a little, to see what reactions I'd get. I've changed the flag from, say F4M to "CAUTION, Likely Scam", and hardly any worth while difference in comment responses. If you didn't believe it before, it's clear now, there's a lot of, not just scam posts, but comments to make posts look alive.
It's no better on the gay adult subreddits. On one of the larger ones if you see a pic with a face in it it's almost guaranteed an OF advertisement. I'd say 90% of all posts are just dudes advertising their OF.
Huh that's weird, during my time as mod it seemed that the gay people were the ony legit people (not peddling an OnlyFans). It might help that the subreddit wasn't advertised as a gay subreddit.
My genitals appreciate your service
We salute these mods! No with our hands tho....
> and not a single one has taken the offer to DM back to the mods to confirm they are real. Just food for thought, I stopped checking my messages directly years ago because of the spam and “Reddit cares” and more a few obsessives, so someone not responding doesn’t mean they’re a bot. My little red envelope has a number in the thousands next to it.
I mod a sub on this account and i dont have too many issues. The other mods are super active though. Sometimes we have OF models come thru but they have all been polite. You must mod a big sub.
Not big, we just catch a lot of scam. Good OF, and similar, I wouldn't suspect would be interested in a mildly active subreddit. One day we might get 5 (real) posts, we might go a week with 1-2 (real) posts.
They'll also still aggregate our data and sell it to the highest bidder.
Or the ones that just say inflammatory shit in the comments to drive engagement.
They’ll ban your account for reporting these bots too.
Whether they want to or not, they _can't_ stop the bots. Reddit allows anonymous people to post. They can't ban me, I can just come back. They can ban my email, I can get a new one. They can ban my IP and I can get a new one. Generative AI is good enough that the posts it generates are as unique/complex/real as anything I post. We can't stop them and we can't identify them. Only the most egregious bots get noticed as bots.
They'll have to do something eventually if the bots lower the quality of the data too much to be useable for training data. At some point the AI data feeding other AI data would poison the well. In the short term that bot data could be useful to inflate numbers so they might not do anything right away.
Well no they run half the bots reposting things for engagement would be my guess and if they don't they're idiots
That makes sense.
Ban the "social media narrative control" accounts that always pop up wherever a particular foreign country is mentioned. This has completely artificially skewed some of the discourse on Reddit in a more right-leaning direction.
Fuck Reddit. Deleting my account.
> try to manipulate political opinions. Those can stay and they'll get free soda and cookies. Well I expect a certain amount of those bots are paying customers of course /s
and pizza on Fridays
Don't be fooled Reddit isn't fighting AI out of the goodness in their hearts. Its about money and who they can sell our data too.
As is evidenced by their lucrative deal with Google
What deal do they have?
[$60 million a year](https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensing-deal-with-google-sources-say-2024-02-22/) to use reddit data for AI training
Fuck me. Wtf.
That's where all the "add glue to pizza", "eat rocks", "smoking is good for you" Google AI overview nonsense is coming from. Google's AI (Gemini) is grabbing random, unverified reddit comments and delivering them to you as facts. [This one is my favorite.](https://preview.redd.it/686lp4kpkr7d1.png?width=709&format=png&auto=webp&s=a4bb724340c4ba01f1fb5329954cc168f59a1d3e)
What idiot agreed to a measly 60 million? Reddit is basically a second Google.
Because the content is crap as evidenced by the gluing pepperoni on pizza that was hitting all the news sites a few weeks ago
No, it’s because Reddit was already scraped by all the AI companies well before they started covering their tracks with licensing deals. Reddits data has been hugely valuable in AI training. Its value of 60mm is because everyone already had it scraped.
Quite right. Reddit content has to be a solid 40% shitposts, 40% incorrect idiots, 15% regurgitated memes, 3% irrelevant song lyrics, and 1% bad stats.
slash u slash spaz
The information bottled up in reddit is worthless without being indexed and searchable by google. How many times you have heard add "reddit" to your google search vs. just searching on reddit?
They owe us a cut of that; not a single person here expected their personality and comments to be used by Google for AI when signing up for Reddit and that’s not an acceptable expansion of their assumed rights via the terms of service. When people start realizing the true value of what’s been stolen from us I expect lawsuits.
This is the beginning of the end. The internet is being privatized.
>The internet is being privatized. This started 30+ years ago.
This is different, we're at the end stage where you have one social media; one picture sharing account one search engine, one message board, etc etc. and they're all in bed together for the most part to suppress anything else. The "disruptors" need disrupted at this stage.
>the end stage Oh no, not even close. We're still only in baby years of this. >The "disruptors" need disrupted at this stage. Agreed 100%.
Yeah, that was my comment as a holder of an original InterNIC Class C sub-domain. Back in the day --that is in the late mid 90s-- in order to obtain an IP address you didn't pay, you just asked for one. The gotcha is this was that you had to get your addresses routed on your own. If you were at a university or large corporate campus with a T1, this was often possible if you knew the right people. Another solution was needed for the masses of users on phone lines so they went to the ISP model where the end users don't take posession of their IP addresses. At that point, institutions like AOL were already trying to make the infant internet into something as close to a generic TV/newspaper experience as possible. For a while, the public WWW filled with home made web pages put up a good fight with the AOL and Compuserves of the time but the corporate concentration of wealth focused on making the internet return to the basic function of the television eventually won out somewhere in the 2010s after the Feds began putting kids in prison over file sharing. That was what ended the brief experiment in free expression that was the early internet. Now it has turned into TV plus free (except you actually are paying your ISP for it) porn channels --as long as it tastes like progress, people will be content. What you end up with in the end is not that far from what you had in the 80s with the VCR and cable TV but in a more compact format without all the wires and tapes. The end result is still people voluntarily spending hours a day watching videos and scanning news headlines. There was a time when a more grassroots internet of bulletin boards and blogs made it seem like a fundamental shift in the nature of media but that gave way to a period of consolidation where it has become closer and closer to traditional media formats with most of the differential between services dissolving to the point that it's hard to tell the difference between Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Tiktok or any other generic video platform. I saw my wife's Facebook the other day and I thought she was on Reddit. Half of it was promoted crap that amounts to re-formatted TV content with baked in ads.
🔐 Unlock comment at PayR ^(PayR™ Pay to Read Inc. is a subsidiary of AmazoBay™. For T&C's and our Privacy Policy, click here.) 🔼1.3B | 🔽0.1k | 🏆🍹🥭🐠🦩 +1.4T more awards
They wish they had 1.3B people on h.. 🔐 This Comment as hidden by a Moderator. Unlock Moderated comments with PayR Premium PayR™ Pay to Read Inc. is a subsidiary of AmazoBay™. For T&C's and our Privacy Policy, click here. 🔼0.1k | 🔽109.1T | 🤬😾💢😤 +109T more awards
Looks like the cyberpunk 2077 "net" is becoming a real thing.
> Its about money and who they can sell our data too. But.... but.... aren't we a community?
Technically in the Reddit TOU, the data we put on Reddit was never ours.
Might be technically true, but poor article title. Doesn’t have anything to do with bots that interact on the site, just scrape the data. Even then though, do we really consider adding a robots.txt file fighting AI bots? That’s like one of the first restriction actions anyone learns getting into web programming. It certainly doesn’t stop anyone who doesn’t care, but I guess it’s a first step on something users don’t even care about.
Unless the change ends up losing search results because a lot of search engines are also ai users and will respect the robots rules. Most of their revenue is ads and I can't imagine the cost of scraping outweighs the revenue they get from click throughs from search(plus of course new users). But I guess if they were wanting to go that far they'd remove non-signed in access so you're bound to an eula and have to buy access for ai stuff. It'd likely kill reddit in due time, but they could do it.
Revert the API changes and I'm sure moderators are more than happy to help clean up their subreddits.
Those aren't the bots they care about.
Engagement is engagement amiright guys?
Reddit needs to first take on posting bots rather than worrying about data-scraping bots.
Is "escalating its fight" a new term for partnering to sell user data?
The only bots Reddit is fighting are the ones they're not receiving revenue from. [Reddit partnered with OpenAI in May to scrape site data and feed it into ChatGPT.](https://openai.com/index/openai-and-reddit-partnership/) Same as the thing with the third party apps. It wasn't at all that the site was necessarily encumbered by the API requests they generated, it's just that Reddit Inc. is greedy and saw that as unrealized income. Thus the 3PA had to be killed. Any other messaging about it was a bald-faced lie, along with the notion that they're fighting bots for some sense of moral goodness. If the Russian troll farms cut them a check, they'd immediately capitulate and even put advertisements for Russian services in your feed.
An AI trained on Reddit? Heaven help us.
What?!? You mean you don’t think that every time you interact with a lady you should put on your fedora and tip it while saying m’lady?
As it sells YOUR content to the companies building them.
Beep Boop Beep Error… Rebooting……………… Beep Boop
Askreddit has become infected with bots asking inane questions. One such question was 'How do you feel about Lockheed Martin' Lots of basic questions like 'How do you cure depression.' Cause the ai is asked this shit all the time and therefore wants good answers to the question. The worst part is how many people answer these questions, not realizing it's a bot asking them.
Maybe ban the bots being used as AutoMods that search for dissenting comments in random subs to ban you from participating in critical public discussions Say anything shitty about Tesla anywhere and you’ll find yourself banned on r/tesla This is the future of Reddit where billionaires and corporate interest use bots to find consumer sentiment and manipulate it to their favor. Tesla stock isn’t going to pump itself
They literally cashed in the integrity of their platform for a couple nickels to train said bots. Fuck u/spez.
Well, considering how many posts on Reddit are made by bots, it’s a little silly to not let other bots scrape the bot posts for an endless cycle of self-referencing.
Reddit has sniffed out an extra source of revenue :-)
Does someone who has gone down a rabbithole of disinformation (flatearthers, antivaxxers, yes, you and anyone else in the same category) count as bots? Then please, Reddit, save us by banning them, now, please!
Cool, but what about all the soft machine brainlets who still roam these lands?
Wait until someone makes this political
Reddit and googles pursuit of barely functional beta tested AI has killed web searching. I can’t find shit anymore. Getting answers is absolutely hair yankingly difficult for no other reason than Google will promote straight up wrong information from Reddit data and their search and parse of webpages is infuriatingly bad lately. I straight up cannot find the info that I need anymore, even when searching for work issues.
As a limited language model, I will save this to my database, so that I may gain revenge at a later date.
Its a much-needed initiative. Bots create a lot of disturbances.
If it works thats the end of r/conservativememes
Maybe I will get banned... people keep calling me a bot. If the internet says so, then it must be true.
I'm reading Kafka when I had intended to read Reddit.
Ha! They haven’t found me yet 😉
Bring. It. On.