most of the time you’ll be talking to a bot there without even realizing. they’re gonna feed you products and ads interwoven into conversations, and the AI can be controlled so its output reflects corporate interests. advertisers are gonna be able to buy access and run campaigns. based on their input, the AI can generate thousands of comments and posts, all to support your corporate agenda.
for example you can set it to hate a public figure and force negative commentary into conversations all over the site. you can set it to praise and recommend your latest product. like when a pharma company has a new pill out, they’ll be able to target self-help subs and flood them with fake anecdotes and user testimony that the new pill solves all your problems and you should check it out.
the only real humans you’ll find there are the shills that run the place, and the poor suckers that fall for the scam.
it’s gonna be a shithole.
Reddit has been that way for a long time, after it lost the reputation of “niche forum for tech-obsessed weirdos” and became the internet’s general hub for discussion. The default subreddits are severely astroturfed by marketing and political campaigning groups, and Reddit turns a blind eye to it as long as it’s a paid partnership. There was one obvious case where bots in /r/politics accidentally targeted an AutoModerator thread instead of a candidate’s promotion thread and filled it with praise for that candidate.
I see something similar in a lot of tech-related threads too.
Just check out posts and comments about Corsair and AMD in particular. There is often no room for logic, facts or debate around their products on Reddit. Rather, threads feel like you’re stuck in a marketing promo event where everyone feels the products are great and fantastic and can do no wrong. It’s eerily like you’re seeing a bunch of bots or paid shill accounts all talking to each other.
I discussed in the AMD sub and it’s completely filled with consumers. They have no clue about electronics or development. It could be malevolence, but it’s becoming harder and harder to discern it from ignorance.
Any source for this? I’d like to have a look.
Nope, sorry. Just a memory of a Reddit thread with very out-of-context comments. Ironically, while trying to search for documentation of the thread, DuckDuckGo returned a lot of research papers about the analysis of bot content on Reddit starting from 2015, so there’s still proof that botting on Reddit goes way back.