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A16z-backed Doublespeed hacked, revealing what its AI-generated accounts promote

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Re: A16z-backed Doublespeed hacked, revealing what its AI-generated accounts promote

#111

Post by UncleMeat »

hhh wrote: post #17
Noaidi wrote: post #7

My god, horrific. Does not everyone know everything online is a psyop now? I will tel you, they don't. No one studies things, no one takes the time. AI, social media, it all has to be protested, boycotted. Now it seems war is coming from the US it could not be more true that at this moment.

No, we should not stop something that is inevitable. We should work with it to find ways that it fits into a productive society, such as anonymously verifying that you are a citizen so the cost of abuse is at least a felony.

This is moral failure.

Re: A16z-backed Doublespeed hacked, revealing what its AI-generated accounts promote

#112

Post by tomhow »

anigbrowl wrote: post #107
dang wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't looked at the article but its title is pretty baity and that's probably why we changed it, per https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .

Bad call. 'Major VC firm investing in slop farm' is the newsworthy aspect here. 'startup selling slop as a service' is mildly interesting but there are lots of companies like that already.

OK fair enough, I've found a way to include A16Z.

Re: A16z-backed Doublespeed hacked, revealing what its AI-generated accounts promote

#113

Post by UncleMeat »

tomhow wrote: post #94
jpalawaga wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody knows what Doublespeed is, everyone knows what a16z is. Doesn't putting the part that's pertinent to people in the headline oblige readers-to-be? I'd say that the change is editorializing more than the original was "linkbait".

A16z invests in _a great many_ companies. Without the company name in the title, you have to click to find out who the company is. That’s the point. The title gets readers riled up and activates them to click. The title we’ve set is intended to give enough information to pique curiosity for those who will be curious about the topic - the company name, what the company does (AI-generated promotional content), what’s h…

a16z is incredibly important to this ecosystem, far more so than any individual company. And them investing in many companies does not exempt them from people identifying when they invest in vile companies.

I am very sorry, but that's a critical part of the story.

Re: A16z-backed Doublespeed hacked, revealing what its AI-generated accounts promote

#114

Post by nerdponx »

osn9363739 wrote: post #110
boh wrote: post #33

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.

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?

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.

Re: A16z-backed Doublespeed hacked, revealing what its AI-generated accounts promote

#115

Post by PacificSpecific »

thephyber wrote: post #36
ipython wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I agree with you. I think that great role models are sadly in short supply these days.

I don’t think they are in short supply, but the vast majority of them aren’t the super-successful so we don’t see their names often. They are the teachers, coaches, and engineers. The problem is the anti- role models are the ones who get all of the media: Andrew Tate (mysogenistic pyramid schemer and pimp / sex trafficker of high school girls), Joe Rogan (his mind is so open that his brains fell out), Jordan B Peters…

It's admittedly a bit tasteless but Nick Mullins Jordan Peterson impression leaves me in tears every time.

Re: A16z-backed Doublespeed hacked, revealing what its AI-generated accounts promote

#116

Post by exasperaited »

anigbrowl wrote: post #107
dang wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't looked at the article but its title is pretty baity and that's probably why we changed it, per https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .

Bad call. 'Major VC firm investing in slop farm' is the newsworthy aspect here. 'startup selling slop as a service' is mildly interesting but there are lots of companies like that already.

> Major VC firm investing in slop farm

And this would be an entirely clickbait-free, fact-based summary of what they are doing.

It's not far off fraud as a service. This activity could get people prosecuted in EU countries and the UK.

Re: A16z-backed Doublespeed hacked, revealing what its AI-generated accounts promote

#117

Post by rchaud »

pinnochio wrote: post #80
estimator7292 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BBSes and forums have existed for literally longer than the internet

The demographics of who was online before the internet went mainstream matter a lot, here. It wasn't exactly a representative slice of the general population.

Forums were still going strong a decade after the Internet went mainstream. They only started to fade after smartphones took off and many forums took years to introduce mobile themes. For sports teams however, forums never faded, there tens of millions of users on team-specific soccer forums for example.

Re: A16z-backed Doublespeed hacked, revealing what its AI-generated accounts promote

#118

Post by rchaud »

boh wrote: post #47
themafia wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Absolutely not. From almost day 1 Reddit has been plagued with jokey meme-speak, which is partially why specialist forums are still thriving (audio/video stuff, XDA-developers, European soccer teams, SomethingAwful boards and up until a few years ago, Notebook-Review).

Re: A16z-backed Doublespeed hacked, revealing what its AI-generated accounts promote

#120

Post by jrflowers »

songodongo wrote: post #73
SilverElfin wrote: post #9

This feels not very different from the recent report revealing how Nick Fuentes has a lot of artificial likes and comments on videos that push his content, due to a large following that responds to commands delivered via Telegram etc. A VC backed corporation using a large phone farm to manipulate the public is no better than Nick Fuentes.

[flagged]

>The organization that recently released the report alleging the contrary is the same one that released that report earlier this year claiming that if you say “Christ is King” then you’re a white supremacist.

No, Rutgers University did not publish a report that says “if you say ‘Christ is King’ then you’re a white supremacist”. You can read about it here, it’s only 20 pages and well-sourced.

https://networkcontagion.us/reports/3-13-25-thy-name-in-vain...

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