341–350 of 781 posts
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Reddit is more or less dead to me, as the popular subs are botfests and the niche subs are empty. I'm lucky to get a single reply on gaming subs.
The fact that reddit enabled hiding your posts is crazy to me. In a time where knowing who's engaging in a community is more important than ever (am I talking to a bot or a troll?) reddit removes even more options to validate.
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In order to make this viable, wouldn't you have to verify identity repeatedly? What's to stop me from providing a valid identity and then handing my account over to an agent after I'm verified?
That's why a web of trust was suggested. You keep track of who vouched for who and down weight those who vouch for users that prove to be bots. In theory at least. It's certainly more complicated than only that in practice.
And by small, I mean: This whole trusted group could fit into one quiet discord channel. This doesn't seem to be big enough to be useful.
However,if it extends beyond that, then things get dicier: Suppose Bill trusts me, as well as those that I myself trust. Bill does this in order to make his web-of-trust something big enough to be useful.
Now, suppose I start trusting bots -- maybe incidentally, or maybe maliciously. However I do that, this means that Bill now has bots in his web of trust as well.
And remember: The whole premise here is that bots can be indistinguishable from people, so Bill has no idea that this has happened and that I have infected his web with bots.
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It all seems kind of self-defeating, to me. The web is either too small to be useful, or it includes bots.
Like many modern woes, it’s a problem of trust. The baseline level of trust in an online interaction has been eroded significantly by LLMs. The question is, how can we reverse this trend and increase trust? I have a sneaking suspicion that it would help enormously if the stock prices of the largest companies in the world were not tied to how effective they are at hijacking as much of humanity’s time and attention as…
The fediverse has been around for well over a decade in some form or another. It never caught on with society enough to make a difference. And unfortunately, the fediverse has now developed such a distinct culture of its own, Highly Online people with distinctive political and social shibboleths, that it even alienates many tech idealists around the world, let alone the general public.
I have largely written Reddit off and no longer visit it after an experiment I did where I had an agent karma farm for me and do some covert advertising. As I went through the posts it wrote I realized that as a reader I would have NO idea that these were just written by a computer. Many many people (or other bots) had full on conversations with it and it scared me a bit. I am not quite there with Hacker News but I d…
> I am not quite there with Hacker News but I do know for a fact that many "users" here are LLMs. This just makes me wonder...so what? Some of the oldest posters here with the most karma continue to post absolute garbage takes on topics ranging from US healthcare to history of USSR, that are trivially disproven by learning the very basics from a Wiki article (e.g. not a high bar). To be fair, this opinion slop is als…
No? I’m imagining not at least. Because there would be no point to it.
If you would enjoy it, then I’m surprised you’re here and not just simulating the experience with your LLM by yourself.
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I'd be interested in working on a problem like that. I have a strong preference for remaining anonymous or at least making it a reasonably high bar to tying my online identity to my personal identity I would love to be involved in helping to design a sort of "human verified" badge that doesn't necessarily make it possible or at least not easy for everyone to find your real identity I've been thinking about it a bunch…
I agree its a very, very interesting problem. Maybe one of the biggest problems of the coming decade. I suspect it will be a long process: first there will be goverments that force people to use ID, but that will be abused, hacked and considerably restrict freedom of speech, so after that phase people will start to create better ids. The problem is really pretty simple: You need an authoratitive source to say "This p…
I have largely written Reddit off and no longer visit it after an experiment I did where I had an agent karma farm for me and do some covert advertising. As I went through the posts it wrote I realized that as a reader I would have NO idea that these were just written by a computer. Many many people (or other bots) had full on conversations with it and it scared me a bit. I am not quite there with Hacker News but I d…
Serious question: If there are so many LLMs on online forums, who is doing it? Is it just 1000s of research students or something more nefarious? Is it AI businesses building up evidence that their output is as highly scored as humans therefore "buy our software"?
Plain advertising, governments' propaganda, political propaganda for one group or another to shift public opinion (it's done on TV networks, why would they not do online campaigns?), astroturfing by corporations promoting acceptance or fighting negative news (e.g. rideshare, AI, whatever certain wealthy personalities are doing) ... the list goes on.
HN has always been relatively influential in the tech industry and therefore worth influencing, and now the cost is very cheap - you don't even need to hire many people, so less-resourced operators will find it worthwhile (and they will also attack lower-value forums).
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I just don't see a world where a small community ends up having to deal with a dedicated set of potentially spoofed identities. There are already tools like slow-downs and post limits for new members that can protect against this. HN is the biggest community I'm in by an order of magnitude and it's the only community I know that can't just use a slow mode type mechanic to halt this kind of attack.
Have you considered sock puppets? It's not out of the question to handle with human mods but detecting them automatically is pretty bad if someone is supplying credentials to each one, and sometimes it does take months or years to notice that new user Y is banned user X.
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People live in and depend on that waterway. Just because it's beneath your standards doesn't mean it isn't vital. You're giving "let them eat cake" energy.
I can assure you nobody in the world "lives in" nor "depends" on reddit to live.
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People that like to fancy themselves as good llm content detectors just end up accusing everything they don't like as llm content. The only thing worst than a slop comment are the people that bitch about it incessantly. I'm convinced it's become a new expression of a mental illness.
A mere opinion is not mental illness.
I have largely written Reddit off and no longer visit it after an experiment I did where I had an agent karma farm for me and do some covert advertising. As I went through the posts it wrote I realized that as a reader I would have NO idea that these were just written by a computer. Many many people (or other bots) had full on conversations with it and it scared me a bit. I am not quite there with Hacker News but I d…
Serious question: If there are so many LLMs on online forums, who is doing it? Is it just 1000s of research students or something more nefarious? Is it AI businesses building up evidence that their output is as highly scored as humans therefore "buy our software"?
It's actively encouraged by some of the platforms too. In Gmail and Google Docs, you have incessant AI prompts along the lines of "help me write this". I think LinkedIn does the same.