Technology

This is a relative upgrade of classic Persona Management Software, using an AI to produce the comments instead of a human.

I was wondering when this would leave the military and political sphere and enter the mainstream... and here we are, it's straight being advertised pretty blatantly.

Further, it is why we need the same strict advertising laws we have for television and radio for the internet.

If it's an ad, it should have to say it's a fucking ad.

I've been pissed about this since Correct the Record and Cambridge Analytica. There is zero political willpower to do anything about it because the political groups were some of the earliest adopters of this fucking trash.

Ads, of any nature, political or otherwise, should be fucking labelled accordingly, god damn it. This isn't fucking hard.

EDIT: I wonder if this will result in independent websites like Lemmy to start using a filtering service similar to a Pi-Hole checking if the source of the comment is in any way tied to an advertising content delivery network. Start banning users and comments based on their source as an ad. Surely this would lead to advertisers using VPNs to try to bypass it, but... it's time we at least started considering ways to fight this.

Parasite SEO

Is there any other kind?

SEO disgusts me. On that topic I also hate when people in YT videos are begging for likes, subs ands comments to boost engagement and optimize their video in the algorithm. I get it, they are kinda forced to, but that's such a sad state of affairs.

Bots have been doing this on Reddit forever, it's a lot more noticeable now that most of the good users who generated content have left.

Reddit has had an issue with being a platform of public manipulation for a while. This is not new, it’s just much more noticeable now, and thus a lot less effective.

Reddit was always full of reposts and content yoinked from other sites, it’s just that the content taken from other sites was curated. There was also a fair amount of original content mixed in. The people who bothered to do the free labor of curating content from other sites or creating original content, have largely left or retreated to smaller subreddits.

Where as before the influence and marketing campaigns were mixed in with genuine/well curated content, now they are 90% of what is left. Even their content is worse than it used to be since it’s largely just LLM generated slop now.

AI is poisoning everthing.

Reddit is a lost cause. Even without ads, it's clear that Reddit management is pushing a lot of mindless junk to the front page. It didn't used to have so many moronic and fake AITAH and AskReddit posts (which in turn are posted by bots or paid posters) at the top. The whole thing is a steaming pile but people who've spent years on the site don't want to give it up.

If manipulating reddit isn't already a betting sport, it's not far away. Guessing it is in Russia (or at least a drinking game), just like the rest of the big 'social' netwerks. Enjoy your next election. Wherever you are :)

Time was, at least for me, the largest subs held the most appeal on account of comment quality and volume. That's been flipped on its head; the volume's still there, but it's mostly noise and a waste of time. For long-tail topics like building out a DC power system, I've really not found a better solution despite having intended to leave last year.

People talk about SEO as though it's something other than gaming search algorithms despite that being exactly what it is. It's in the name, after all. SEO is humans writing for machines in hopes of driving more humans to read content known to be lacking on its own merit. Writing a dating profile entirely in C makes more sense.