Unauthorized AI bots
Reddit: User content belongs to us. You can’t scrape, collect, use, or have bots interact with it… unless you pay us.
Also reddalso Reddit: since all users have left, most of our traffic now consists of posts from AI bots that we’re really really blocking!!
I don’t believe that for 1 millisecond.
Spez won’t be able to stop himself from enshitifying reddit in any way he can to appease those VC pump&dump scammers he’s spent the last decade ruining reddit for.
Fuck reddit, It’s a shithole.
No they won’t lol
If they didn’t do it already, it’s not gonna happen now. This is lip service to the shareholders
They want more users to make accounts. Blocking nsfw content to non-users was a start but now they can make a bigger push.
Nsfw Still works in old.reddit as a non user.
Or so a friend tells me
It’s in their best interest to suppress non-human conversations. What are you talking about?
Is it? Reddit has been full of bots for years.
And if the r/CMV thing didn’t make it apparently, the recent wave of them weren’t “caught in the act” and only became a “problem” when the researchers announced their shitty experiment.
If realistic chat bots can fool the masses, why on earth would reddit get rid of them? It helps their metrics. “Look at how active our site is! Buy stock!”
half of thier site are bots, RUSSIA probably makes a majority of those bots, something reddit isnt doing anything about
You’re not wrong but what does Russia have to do with anything here?
Meta is paying to make its bots, Reddit gets it for free!
A metabot walked into a subreddit…
I know you enjoy hating on Reddit but what you’re saying doesn’t make any sense. Reddit is an advertising business. Bots don’t view advertising but adds infrastructure cost. Additionally, humans are way better at engagement with the platform and people than bots.
Bot activity brings “engagement” which generated more page views from actual humans. Literally the only downside of this announcement is the optics of having bots in the first place.
The bots were already indistinguishable from humans on reddit, do you really think that this recent scrutiny is going to lead to fewer bots? Or might it actually lead to better bots?
Additionally additionally, as it says in the article, reddit sells its content to OpenAI, and in order to do that, they need it to be organic. If you feed AI output back info AI, it makes the output worse, not better. So, there’s another financial incentive to ensure that the people talking on reddit are actually human.
I would like to remind you of two things. The first is that reddit used to have a mod tool called “BotDefense”. Its shutdown in July of 2023 directly lead to a major uptick in Spam Bots.
The second is that part of the ad revenue is “impressions”. Impressions are just an account (bot or human) “viewing” the ad and they do not require a click-through. The platform hosting the ad still gets paid for those.
If openai kept buying reddit data after 2022, they are idiots. They let the cat out of the bag.
they are selling it to both OPENAI and google for thier AI too.
No it isn’t and they have openly talked about doing this practice back in the early days of reddit to make the site appear more active than it really was. Nothing has changed.
Only their own bots are allowed.
Where on Earth have you gotten that bizarre idea? It is in their interest to promote engagement, human or not, by any means necessary.
I always get ‘Blocked by Network security’ for trying to access Reddit from a VPN
If only they accepted the reality of massive residential proxy networks…
A shitton of apps not only sell your data but also use your device as a tunnel.
the users that posts links,a re using rotating mobile proxies, plus other sophisticated methods to hide thier browsers.
What, like Xitter did?
What and destroy 90% of their traffic?!?
“That’s a bold move, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for ’em.”
AI bots.
Not the rest of them.
Yeah the manual bots are ok (humans?) I guess
Yeah it’s definitely the bots and not the fashy admins that drove me away from reddit.
I mean the bots don’t help. The sheer number of obviously AI subreddits and response farms is crazy. There’s like 6 prominent “Am I the Assholes”, a bunch of text message “screenshot” subreddits which have always been easy to fake, and a bunch of “explain the joke” ones too. I stop reading halfway through most text posts and comments because it’s obviously AI
the number of the explain the joke threads on the all page is ridiculous.
I made a lemmy post about it but I theorize they’re crowdsourced AI training. Post something, post a couple of separate AI interpretations of it, then analyze the highest up voted AI and “organic” responses, and feed that back into the model. Rinse/repeat
That’s fair, it just seems like that if they’re going down the list of problems looking for things they can do to make reddit a better place, it doesn’t make sense to not start at the top.
“Better for who?” is the question you need to ask yourself, because it’s absolutely not the users anymore.
Yep, entirely fair. S’why I left.
Por que, no los dos?
I mean it’s definitely both, but the fashy admins were the last straw.
Everyone has their own reasons. If you disagree with their management, then you should celebrate other people choosing to leave, even if for different reasons than your own.
I’m not complaining about people leaving, just saying the bots are not the biggest problem.
Like “closing the gate after the sheep already escaped”, but in reverse?
like: Closed the gate after the wolf got in?
Closing the gate after the wolves have got in eaten all the sheep, had a nice rest, and then left. And then about 30 years past.
Sure maybe small trees are now growing in the now ungrazed pasture, but I guess late is better than never.
No they wont. Just those who haven’t paid them first.
*reddit will tag their own chatgpt bots to prevent them from being banned, and then through false positives will ban the last of the real users from the site.
i bet they also ignore half of the propaganda bots to look fair in thier moderations. the only signicant bannings we see is actual users, and the low hanging fruits, of and people posting links to thier businesses.
This has nothing to do with bots. Verification comes with more info provided on your part, which they will sell.
It can be both. Reddit has a history of fabricating conversations. The way they sell advertising implies a certain level of engagement from their user base which can lead to bots pushing products in the form of reviews or by mention.
I think it’s worth noting that Reddit, at one time, did have third party bot protection; however, it only protected their advertising. I can only imagine what the rest of their traffic looks like, but I would not be surprised if they were using bots of their own.
Like you said, they can make some money selling your information but they can also control the narrative how they choose.
what about their own Ai bots lmao?
Lol, they’re the ones using the bots to fake engagement in the first place.
I Think Thies weil continue to work. Only foreign bots are exkulpiert.
Hah, yeah. One could say it’s a form of digital nepotism.
“Only our bots get go work here!”
