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by Gigachad 78 days ago
A lot of them read like twitter bots with generic “wow beautiful <emojis>”

Wherever there is profit to be made on the internet, you have massive amounts of weird abuse and botting to game the system. Maybe not even literal bots, but paying a sweatshop in India to leave thousands of generic comments to boost your rankings on the algorithm.
1 comments
ssl-3 77 days ago
People were responding with period-correct, insipid “wow beautiful <emojis>” replies for decades before we had bots to do it.

It was noise when it was only people; it's still just noise when it also includes bots.

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Gigachad 77 days ago
What makes it noise is less the actual comment itself. If I showed someone a piece of art in person and they said this to me, it would be a genuine response. What makes this particular instance noise is it reeks of mass automated messaging with no thought behind it. These comments are generic because they aren't people commenting on the thing they saw, they are just templates being spammed out on mass so they make them generic to fit any context.
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ssl-3 77 days ago
Perhaps.

To me, this present-day noise is indistinguishable from the pre-bot noise. It's the same noise, in that both things are just noise of that shape. "How beautiful!" "I really feel this one!" "I love this song!"

Sometimes, the signal-to-noise ratio is better. Sometimes it's pretty bad. It always has been this way in online discourse -- especially with things that appeal to old folks.

In a track where the protagonist primarily complains about feeling old, it makes sense that most of the comments are that of what old folks have always written online.

(Are these particular comments primarily bot spam? Maybe. I peered into the depths a bit, and accounts for the top comments I looked at had been around for years. That isn't evidence for or against a well-orchestrated long con, but orchestration is hard and people who write insipid comments are plentiful.)

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