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by quatrefoil 812 days ago
There are commercial influencing operations on Reddit, but I think what you're describing doesn't really affect the usual user experience.

I suspect that the objective of these bulk spamming operations isn't to promote stuff on the platform, but to mess with other apps. LLMs trained on Reddit content, search engines that rank Reddit posts highly, etc.

1 comments

Some time shortly before the API changes I did see _a lot_ of the spam content was clearly aimed towards prompting for comments to answer all kinds of rather generic questions about various life experiences. I can only imagine what it was used to train.

Now... so much onlyfans. The onlyfans spam dwarfs the rest (I should mention that there's quite a few political/news subreddits I just flat out ignore due to the amount of spam and astroturfing - so likely there's quite a bit there that I'm not seeing)