The Dead Internet Theory

[Gimmick Account]

We can at least determine who ISN'T a bot by their actions. For instance, bots can't make clever comments based on context.

Then again, neither can people on reddit

I am not so sure. Even back before bots were useful it was standard practice for "managed persona" accounts to be run by multiple people. They'd just use shared internal notes to keep the details/personality consistent. Adding automation in between doesn't change the formula much. If one post in twenty is still a professional shitposter it'd throw most people off the scent, provide a higher value service, and magnify your manpower by that much.
But why couldn't AI be witty too? It's clearly only a matter of sophistication, ymmv on whether you think that technology is available yet to organisations with the greatest specific need and in some cases practically unlimited resources.

One of the things to remember is that this phenomenon is noticed only when bots fuck up:

r/GME - WSB shill bots think SSR is a ticker and are spamming it🤣🤣🤣

13,197 votes and 2,103 comments so far on Reddit

www.reddit.com

Reddit only noticed bots shilling stocks when the bots mistakenly identified some patterns as organic talk about a ticker symbol.

How much of WSB posting is bots that are otherwise undetected? 1%? 95%? No one knows.

Also remember there's people with an interest of spreading awareness (or distrust) of both counter-opinions and actual bot activity they know is happening but can't prove. I always wonder when this stuff gets posted whether they were designed to be detected. Convincing people that anyone with a particular opinion must be shills exclusively is pretty powerful and at this point gets under the radar in a way conventional identity politics might not.

 

[Bongocat]

Also remember there's people with an interest of spreading awareness (or distrust) of both counter-opinions and actual bot activity they know is happening but can't prove. I always wonder when this stuff gets posted whether they were designed to be detected. Convincing people that anyone with a particular opinion must be shills exclusively is pretty powerful and at this point gets under the radar in a way conventional identity politics might not.

The chances of a competent organization pulling a "double op" like that is nearly 0. A tiny fraction of people have that level of critical thought and it would almost certainly backfire on normies. Think about how banal most political propaganda is, but it works regardless. Making your messages shallow and obvious is politics 101.

 

[Gimmick Account]

The chances of a competent organization pulling a "double op" like that is nearly 0. A tiny fraction of people have that level of critical thought and it would almost certainly backfire on normies. Think about how banal most political propaganda is, but it works regardless. Making your messages shallow and obvious is politics 101.

The media is shallow because it's meant to be consumed by questionably literate herds. Other means of manipulation can be extremely subtle.

That example ain't subtle though. Telling redditors what they want to hear is all they do on reddit. Throwing together a false flag shill twitter or one of those "script error" bot examples you see sometimes is something a single nerd with a personal interest could do in an afternoon.
"Exposing" a bot is the key part, and doesn't imply the bot in question was a genuine part of any kind of mass operation. You can still have real shills though, along with people faking evidence to try to throw light on them.

 

[Bongocat]

That example ain't subtle though. Telling redditors what they want to hear is all they do on reddit. Throwing together a false flag shill twitter or one of those "script error" bot examples you see sometimes is something a single nerd with a personal interest could do in an afternoon.
"Exposing" a bot is the key part, and doesn't imply the bot in question was a genuine part of any kind of mass operation. You can still have real shills though, along with people faking evidence to try to throw light on them.

If it's a smaller actor targeting a specific group for a specific purpose, that makes more sense then, yeah.

 

[malt ipecac]

Reading this thread makes me want to re-read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

If anyone interested in this idea hasn't read it: maybe give it a shot.

My take is that that social media has dramatically raised the floor of the Turing test we consciously or unconsciously run in our minds as we infinite-scroll our way through reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Never before has it been easier for a machine to convincingly imitate a human, and it has very little to do with those machines becoming any "smarter."

For example: a "like" on one of these platforms is literally binary information. Either you like a piece of content or you don't.

In practice, maybe you add some more degrees of freedom. Maybe we're dealing with a selection of a half-dozen animated reaction emojis or the option to add a premade overlay to your profile picture -- wow, so different. You're just barely moving beyond that when you branch out to lobotomy-tier comments like "" or "Omg. This."

Ignoring the question of whether such content is authored by silicon- or carbon-based morons...the fact that we can't help but care -- even just a little bit -- feels fucking pathetic. Even if we could confidently rule out any possibility that such content is bot-generated, it would be the same bot-tier content.

As the crab said: what difference does it make? The spam filter shouldn't make exceptions for "organic" spam.

 

[Yourmomshouse]

this is a pretty good post about DIT
https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.p...net-theory-most-of-the-internet-is-fake.3011/

 

[12FluidOunces]

Let's say demoralization bots are 100% real. Are re-moralization ("un-demoralization", maybe?) bots possible? What would that look like?

 

[The Real SVP]

Let's say demoralization bots are 100% real. Are re-moralization ("un-demoralization", maybe?) bots possible? What would that look like?

The ultimate counter is to get normal people off the internet and off mass media and to limit your own online communication to people you have met in person.

 

[Bongocat]

Let's say demoralization bots are 100% real. Are re-moralization ("un-demoralization", maybe?) bots possible? What would that look like?

Whenever you post anything, they just respond "Based"

 

[ditto]

this is a pretty good post about DIT
https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.p...net-theory-most-of-the-internet-is-fake.3011/

> I am into loli and feet for instance.
Into the trash.

 

[Gimmick Account]

Let's say demoralization bots are 100% real. Are re-moralization ("un-demoralization", maybe?) bots possible? What would that look like?

I don't see how. Whole systems behind platforms, maybe.
Trouble with bots is you're just choking out our channels even more and most of it is targeted identity stuff. Negativity sticks better, so you can't un-see the steady stream of "white bois can't compare" bots for example, and how would you counter that without denigrating some other segment? Which they or someone else already has covered.

What I mean by systems is, what if Google's secret Wintermute is modelling your brain by knowing your inputs well enough to know what's got you down? It could then model a remedy by conditioning you with YouTube recommendations. Which works better if you think it's just a dumb revenue/engagement-optimising suggestion bot.
But they'd really do the opposite, lol.

Maybe AI analysis is how we'll track all these fuckers down one day, though.

 

[Bad Gateway]

Let's say demoralization bots are 100% real. Are re-moralization ("un-demoralization", maybe?) bots possible? What would that look like?

YouTube Relaxing N64 Music playlists

 

[Sperghetti]

This thread just made me remember something.

3 years ago, there was a campaign on Reddit raising awareness about net neutrality where tons of subreddits were getting spammed with a link to a site called battleforthenet.com. But rather than being boilerplate text all posted by one account, the links were posted by many different accounts (including moderators), and usually had a title customized for the particular sub it was posted in. (For example, r/DnD got "Roll for initiative in the Battle for Net Neutrality! Don't let the FCC destroy the internet!")

The weird part is that these posts all got shitloads of upvotes, to the point where they became (and still are) the top-ranking post of all time in many subreddits, sometimes by a longshot:

• r/earthporn, a subreddit for nature photos, has one of these posts as the top of all time at 151k upvotes while the next highest post is 100k
• r/mallninjashit had one of these posts reach 39.6k upvotes with 83 comments, while the next highest post has 27.2k upvotes and 784 comments
• r/streetfighter had their post score 55.5k upvotes while the next highest of all time has 3,017 upvotes
• r/battlerite, a sub for a game I've never heard of had theirs reach 61.1k upvotes, while the next highest post has 1,549. Somebody in the comment remarked that the net neutrality post somehow got more votes than there were members of the sub.

The posts are all still there. (Unfortunately archive.md won't capture the site properly for me.) The funny thing is that outside of the occasional complaint about spam while it was going on and a few comments about the fishy amount of upvotes, I never really saw anybody mention it again.

If you can pull off this much astroturfing in a place like Reddit where anyone can see the evidence of it and barely anyone bats an eye, then how much of this shit is happening in places like Twitter or Instagram all the time? How much "trending" content was never really a trend at all?

 

[BootlegPopeye]

If you can pull off this much astroturfing in a place like Reddit where anyone can see the evidence of it and barely anyone bats an eye, then how much of this shit is happening in places like Twitter or Instagram all the time? How much "trending" content was never really a trend at all?

One of the weirder ones, that I had never noticed until someone in the TDS thread pointed it out - every Sunday, like clockwork, there will be some kind of LBGT trending hashtag on twitter. When I first read about it, I paid attention for about 6 weeks or so and, yes it was happening every Sunday. Stopped paying attention because I just assumed it was programmed into twitter to do this at a certain time. Always seemed like odd hours, like 8 AM. The 'trend' themselves usually had low four figure mentions.

I've never had a reddit account, but when I've had to look up something on the site, the interactions seem so inorganic, I don't see how anyone could post there. I just assume half of the posters are bots.

 

[melty]

A GPT-3 bot posted comments on Reddit for a week and no one noticed

Busted: A bot powered by OpenAI’s powerful GPT-3 language model has been unmasked after a week of posting comments on Reddit. Under the username /u/thegentlemetre, the bot was interacting with people on /r/AskReddit, a popular forum for general chat with 30 million users. It was posting in...

www.technologyreview.com

Seems like it got caught posting too much and an expert looked at it. I'm thinking a little more seriously about this theory.

 

[Knight of the Rope]

The posts are all still there. (Unfortunately archive.md won't capture the site properly for me.)

I got you, my dude.

• r/earthporn, a subreddit for nature photos, has one of these posts as the top of all time at 151k upvotes while the next highest post is 100k (source / archive)
• r/mallninjashit had one of these posts reach 39.6k upvotes with 83 comments, while the next highest post has 27.2k upvotes and 784 comments (source / archive)
• r/streetfighter had their post score 55.5k upvotes while the next highest of all time has 3,017 upvotes (source / archive)
• r/battlerite, a sub for a game I've never heard of had theirs reach 61.1k upvotes, while the next highest post has 1,549. Somebody in the comment remarked that the net neutrality post somehow got more votes than there were members of the sub. (source / archive)
  
  

Also everyone which of us Kiwi Farmers are bots do you think? I reckon we should absolutely be suspicious of anyone with a profile created after 2020 and who goes for low-hanging fruit like self-deprecating jokes and archiving in lieu of actual content.

 

[Tealeaf]

Also everyone which of us Kiwi Farmers are bots do you think? I reckon we should absolutely be suspicious of anyone with a profile created after 2020 and who goes for low-hanging fruit like self-deprecating jokes and archiving in lieu of actual content.

Beep, boop. Bots are not capable of self-referential humor. You may pass, kiwi of the flesh.

 

[Knight of the Rope]

Bots are not capable of self-referential humor.

Then explain best:

 

[Gimmick Account]

A GPT-3 bot posted comments on Reddit for a week and no one noticed

Busted: A bot powered by OpenAI’s powerful GPT-3 language model has been unmasked after a week of posting comments on Reddit. Under the username /u/thegentlemetre, the bot was interacting with people on /r/AskReddit, a popular forum for general chat with 30 million users. It was posting in...

www.technologyreview.com

Seems like it got caught posting too much and an expert looked at it. I'm thinking a little more seriously about this theory.

Jesus. Here's that GPT-3 bot's profile by the way: https://old.reddit.com/user/thegentlemetre/overview
It's actually pretty funny which is scary.

 

[Bender]

Also everyone which of us Kiwi Farmers are bots do you think? I reckon we should absolutely be suspicious of anyone with a profile created after 2020 and who goes for low-hanging fruit like self-deprecating jokes and archiving in lieu of actual content.

None of us are bots, we can't get past the captcha on the registration page.