this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Technology
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The site is being astroturfed by bots as well. So many FirstWordSecondWordBunchaNumbers comments that are all exactly the same trying to pin this on the mods.
Reddit has been caught astroturfing their site before, multiple times. It's just not been reported on because it usually doesn't happen in English, or happened when the site was small and young. Except for the admin moderated subs like r/programming. Seriously just go read the Controversial comments in those posts. It's blatant ChatGPT spam.
There are entire alternate language versions of big subreddits filled with nothing but reposts of popular old posts run through a translator. Comments section and all.
SubredditSimulator was fun as an experiment but it's clear they'll artificially prop their engagement and I really hope advertisers catch on. If you're a journalist in tech reading this, you've got a hell of a story to break about a top ten website fluffing up its stats for an illicit IPO grab.
What do you mean by mentioning SubredditSimulator here? Wasn't that a GPT experiment made by a random user or was there something more nefarious at play that I completely missed?
SubredditSimulator was a fun experiment by a random user with increasingly improving realism, training ChatGPT on real comments.
It also showed Reddit Inc you can fake engagement and community interaction with bots, which are now astroturfing the fuck out of the site.
Dang, I never thought about that. It explains a lot though
There's another sub with GPT in the title, r/subGPT or something. The subreddit simulator always amused me, it was blatantly artificial - the content on this new one made me queasy, it was precisely the kind of one note jibber jabber we'd skim past constantly.