this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023

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Programming

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It's quite sad to see everything related to the blackout on /r/programming wiped. (lemmy.brendan.ie)

submitted 1 year ago by silver@lemmy.brendan.ie to c/programming@programming.dev

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/r/programming came back up two days ago and as far as I can tell everything relating to the blackout was wiped. I kinda expected it since spez was admin.

Another thing that surprised me was how much chatGPT bot spam there is (danm it is so so bad, wonder what the mods are doing over there.... ah yes, spez).

I used to sort by hot so it was hidden away a bit for me before.

Anyways I hope Lemmy does not fall into the same pitfalls!

goes back into lurk mode

top 25 comments

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[–] RonSijm@programming.dev 67 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Another thing that surprised me was how much chatGPT bot spam there is

Not really a bad thing. Part of the protest was to devalue the platform...

See what /r/ProgrammerHumor/ is doing - all titles are camelCase, and all the comments started including and returning things. It's not really something anymore that reddit could sell to AI content farms.

If mods are removed for participating in the blackout, the next best thing is probably to let their sub go completely unmoderated and let things turn into a shitshow with unable content by spam bots.

Don't think you can really teach an AI bot something by letting it regurgitate it's own output

[–] lowleveldata@programming.dev 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Oh Reddit who's going to protect you from the AI invasion after you removed the mods?

[–] coloredgrayscale@programming.dev 18 points 1 year ago

The solution is obviously to replace the mods by bots, to fight other bots.

Battle bots, but virtual XD

[–] PeeGee@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

My absolute favorite response is what /r/madlads did - they made all of their subscribers mods.

[–] AdmiralShat@programming.dev 41 points 1 year ago

What a shit show of a website

[–] Black_Gulaman@lemmy.dbzer0.com 36 points 1 year ago (2 children)

We must prevent these kinds of bots on getting a foothold here.

I acknowledge that we do have bots here [lemmy], reposting top posts from reddit. As we grow in number. We must also scale down these bots until the day that only moderating related bots are existing in our ecosystem.

[–] snaptastic 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What’s the point of those bots? There’s no karma to farm on Lemmy.

[–] nous@programming.dev 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What is the point in farming karma at all?

[–] snaptastic 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The accounts with high karma end up getting sold to businesses that want to use them to advertise (but make it look like grass roots support).

[–] nous@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

They want high valued accounts, karma is just one measure of that. Removing the karma from accounts does not remove the value of those accounts. Just changes what metrics are used to judge value. So there is still an incentive to create bots that try to create valued accounts even if those accounts are not actually creating valued content. The only question is what will businesses see as a valued account.

Though I do think removing karma is a positive as it forcing them to work a bit harder.

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

There already is some ChatGPT bot and I see people bringing it into threads sometimes. I downvote almost every person who does so, as I've yet to see a single case where it was actually asked for or meaningfully contributed.

I want more communities to have rules against unsolicited AI comments and for them to better enforce them (one of the cases I'm referring to was in a community that already had a rule against AI comments, but the comment had still been up for a while and had been upvoted).

[–] throws_lemy@lemmy.nz 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Anyways I hope Lemmy does not fall into the same pitfalls!

I really hope! Just watchout for Meta

[–] philm@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago

Yeah I have the feeling that sign-up should probably default to be manually moderated, to avoid a bot-swarm taking over accounts (and well probably a lot of bot instances need to be blacklisted then as well).

I'm not sure how dirty the game of big social media is/will be, but if they really feel threatened, they may start something like that (might make sense to be legally secured in that case...).

[–] Feyter@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What should meta possible change about Lemmy or programming.dev? They have no power here even if we federate with them.

[–] throws_lemy@lemmy.nz 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They have no power here even if we federate with them.

The current matter with Meta is that they have bad intentions towards the fediverse

https://infosec.pub/post/400702

And even if you don't have Threads app installed, Meta is also a privacy threat to fediverse users. If there are fediverse instances that are still federated with Meta.

Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of its users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who its users follow in the broader fediverse. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders.

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/

[–] philm@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah that's also my worry. That Meta (is it already legally allowed to use that name anyway...?) will try to grab data and analyze it for free kind of (without the potential ad revenue, but well at least free data...). With AI it can likely easily pinpoint/target each user and create a profile or something, maybe even link it with people on their platforms I guess...

Anyway they could still just use the API I guess, they just can't easily subscribe to the Activity streams via their official instance (but of course they could spin up an instance that just crawls and subscribes to every instance).

I'm really interested what their intention is exactly, but it's for sure not good...

[–] fades 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah yes, spez. I got permabanned the day 3p died for harrasment, clicked the link and it was a comment I had made a week prior insulting spez.

He really leans into the man baby version of Elon

[–] fuck_u_spez@lemmy.fmhy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

Yeah he's kinda a wannabe Elon, but I think he hasn't really found a fan base as Elon has, I'm not sure anyone really likes him lol

[–] glad_cat@lemmy.sdf.org 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

how much chatGPT bot spam there is

It doesn't surprise me at all. The spam was already there on /r/programming and /r/coding way before the blackout. I tried to report all the posts, I asked to become a mod to clean all this shit (and was rejected), but nothing worked. They don't want to clean the mess, and that's another reason why I don't care if reddit dies.

As for /r/learnprogramming, it's still filled with spam or people who cannot do a proper google query, it's as hopeless as the rest. I'm unhappy for all the newbies who want to learn something. I hope the "learnprogramming" of lemmy will be more successful.

[–] Hexorg 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To be fair, new programmers generally don’t know enough to construct a proper Google query either. And yes there are some lazy people who just don’t try. But sometimes you know what you want to achieve but any query you try seems to be unhelpful. For example, if I want to learn how to store settings in c++ the first link for me tells me to use boost. Now I need to learn about linking libraries and 300 other boost-isms. While anyone with any basic knowledge could recommend reading strings line by line and splitting the string on the equal sign.

[–] Deely@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

Judging by quality of Google search results I believe experienced devs have the same problems with Google as well..

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I had some lengthy period of time where I enjoyed regularly helping folks in r/learnprogramming. But it got exhausting fast. For every person putting in a good attempt at learning, there was 10 people who couldn't do the most basic level of googling and content was often extremely repetitive as a result.

The sub also faced a constant stream of people who just wanted to self advertise their own YouTube videos for teaching programming, as if the lack of such was the barrier to learning.

Oh, and soooo many people who clearly just wanted to be told the answer to their homework questions and weren't even hiding that.

[–] jere344@lemmy.fmhy.ml 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I posted a question on one of theses subs a few weeks ago and had mostly very generic answer that clearly didn't read all the post. I was confused at the time but it makes sense now, it was the same kind of basic trooblesooting steps by chatGPT. Reddit is doomed, there are way too much bots. We can only hope to find a solution before it spreads to the whole internet.

[–] thatsPrettyNeat@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

We'll have to prove we're a human every time and log in every time we use a service to be sure it doesn't have bots. But AI will get better and better at those too. Is captcha the next level above Go? Lol

[–] silver@lemmy.brendan.ie 1 points 1 year ago

Testing to see if I can psot here (languages seem to be messing some things up)

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