Spam in conversational replies to blog posts

Then again, you should live under the assumption that your Google account could be banned at any time with no recourse. You do have local backups of all your Google account data and don't need your Gmail account to access anything important, right?

I've acquired a sense for at least some of the bots. There's this set of bots that post a high-engagement post about once a day to an implausibly large range of subreddits, with implausible regularity. I can tell by the way I remove them and the way that the other subs are mostly not that most subs have not figured this out yet.

There is an obvious solution to that problem, which I haven't wanted to put out there, but I've become increasingly suspicious that it's already been figured out anyhow, which is to limit a specific user account to a specific "persona" with plausible interests and posting rates.

And that's where I think the race may well end, victory spammers. If there's a winning move against that in general I haven't figured it out.

I know reddit is concerned about this at the corporate level but I'm not sure they realize this is possibly their #1 threat, towering above all others. Not that I have any specific suggestions about what to do about it either. And it's years before the masses realize this and stop visiting, and by the time that happens all the social media companies are going to be in trouble for the same reason. You can see the leading edge here on HN but it's still only an almost negligible fraction of the total userbase of something like Reddit today. But that will change.

"For many years" being around 20 years at this point. Not sure reddit is a great example, given the founders admitted to using sockpuppets almost since day 1 in order to generate fake activity on the platform.

Most of the creators delete those comments, but if you get in early, you'll see them.

It's maybe account laundering, but on any popular post you'll see at least half of the comments are tangential at best. They're not an expression of anything a person would express, like replying with just skull emojis to a random news post, or saying "he really said" with an exact word to word recreation of a throwaway quote from a video. No one ever replies to these posts, they get like 2 upvotes (if that), the platform doesn't reward them at all but they constantly appear in a very artificial looking way.

The advantage of hiding one's comments is precisely that they do not show up as easy as before on Google, discussions don't get derailed because of comment muckrakers going through their opponent's post and accuse them of being anti-zionist or pro-zionist, and actual stalkers have a far more difficult time tracking down victims.

The reliability of reddit comments has been questionable even before LLMs. Because people trying to push whatever they are interested in pushing realized that having organic-looking comments is the perfect way to sway people who don't trust professional publications and traditional ads. And now with LLMs in the mix, there's basically not even a cost to doing this and making it look like tons of people love your product and are sharing their friendly thoughts and advice.

You could probably have a workable social network just with the following properties:

1. Use combination of digital friend-of-a-friend invite chains as well as sign-ups at physical 3rd spaces to build out the social network

2. If a user's account is found to be abusing the network, kick the user that invited that account plus everyone in that branch of the invite tree

3. To re-enable an account from a kicked branch, each user has to visit one of your 3rd spaces (and temporarily lose their invite privileges after re-enabling).

4. Security engineers do what they normally do at social media companies, except you now incentivize them to publicize efforts to reveal attackers so that you generate foot traffic at the 3rd spaces.

Now instead of hiding a report that grandma is friends with a Russian bot, your giddy security team does a publicity stunt to kick 100,000 users on Thursday.

And that will generate record drink sales at your 3rd spaces on Friday. (Senior citizen's discount applies.)

Not that I am happy with it, it would be ideal to have my old internet back.

The problem is, the other side definitely does not play by the rules and has no intention to. Why should we "police our side" and weaken ourselves? The endless purity testing on the progressive side of politics is a large part of why the far-right is so damn powerful worldwide.