[awbvious]

Not sure, but I can tell you what my "oh s** astroturfing is so bad, it's even in Hacker News" moment. And if I learned GenAI was used to make some of the astroturf, that's more an "ah s*“ than an "oh s*“ thing. I mean, the prominence, ubiquity, and breathlessness. One out of three, sure. Two out of three, maybe. And some corpo shilling definitely happens here. But this is like, well, covering an entire area with artificial grass, to the point where nothing lives. Crazy.

[andrenotgiant]

FWIW the OP passes as 100% human in Pangram https://www.pangram.com/history/d33dcbcd-e82b-4ce0-bea5-e4ee...

Reddit is definitely overtaken with astroturf at this point. Especially in any subreddit where there is any kind of business interest in doing so.

[K0balt]

I was wandering around the carcass of Reddit the other day, and it’s crazy how it’s like 70 percent AI now commenting to each other in a lot of subs that used to be at least nominally interesting… and then a few clueless humans getting all riled up with an AI lol.

They’re getting 200m a year to share that garbage pit with ai training.

[arw0n]

Reddit was already heavily astroturfed before AI. There's no space on the internet where you can get as much bang for a buck with an influence campaign due to its centralized frontpage. The most obvious example is /r/worldnews, with millions of readers, a few thousand commenters and maybe 40k voters. To skew any discussion, you need at most 6k accounts, and that's giving you the kind of influence on American politics as would the frontpage of the NYT. You could hire real people for each account, and it would still be worth it.

[dijit]

I'm wondering how it goes with a lot of social media actually.

There were problems with the "algorithm"[0] before being intentionally gamed... but I feel like it's easier than ever to have an army of bots intentionally pointing a conversation.

I'll give you a brief example (we should not debate this case on HN but I'm talking specifically about a hypothesis that can be drawn).

In the UK, the streets are alight with the news of the murder of a young white boy at the hands of a Sikh boy. In the UK, historically, the Sikh community has been seen as a bit of an outlier in terms of how well they integrated and how tolerant they are. They are, for all intents and purposes "model immigrants".

The issue was, when the police were called to the scene of the stabbing, they immediately arrested the barely conscious boy on the ground, who had been stabbed and was bleeding from the mouth- handcuffing him and dismissing his pleas on the basis that he might have been making racist remarks.

The people in my circles are furious at the police for doing this.

However, it seems like there is an army of bots who keep trying to paint it as if it's a problem with Sikhs, or that their religious rights were the problem.

(for context, British law permits baptised Sikhs to carry a dull Kirpan knife - but this knife was not used for the incident above, it was a separate and still illegal knife to carry).

So now, online, instead of people talking about police indifference or the issues we have when we see race before trying to assess the situation: we are instead caught in a conversation about banning Kirpans for Sikhs (they have never been used in any crime from what I can tell) or how the Sikhs should feel bad or whatever.

Which is wonderful for a politician who wants to dismiss the criticism against the police as racism, but not so good for holding the police and media to account for the situation and the attempted coverup.

By being able to control the aggression, they are able to control the response, which drowns everything else out, and with LLMs the barrier is stupidly low to do this.

Creating division for your own reasons has never been cheaper or easily accessible.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Data_scand...

[airstrike]

The police immediately arrested the barely conscious boy because the killer's brother called the police saying his brother had been attacked.

[dijit]

I think you missed the part of this where I talked about specifically not litigating this case on this forum.

I was gesturing that the sentiment online is being reframed from one of the police handling of the situation (whatever the outcome you personally think it should have gone down as) and the media coverage- to instead the "issue" of Sikhism and religious rights in the kingdom, despite those aspects playing literally no role in the situation that transpired.

I was speaking specifically about how little cost it is to do this reframing now.

[airstrike]

I don't care whether you're litigating it or not, I care about reporting the facts so that whoever reads the thread is better inform than they would be otherwise

[wesselbindt]

Artisanal astroturfing, using organic humans, used to be the norm. Could be that OP is an actual human doing astroturfing.

[iso1631]

I wonder when an agent will "decide" that it's more efficent to outsource its work to humans

[omgJustTest]

an agent hired by an agentic pipeline.

"we could find a nail for this hammer... or we could just hammer everything until we find the nail or make too much money hammering for a bit then sell in may and go away".

[Lplololopo]

Lets be honest, a lot of people are getting called out constantly on reddit who invent stuff.

Its still annoyingly addictive but its half story telling and half bubble with a sprinkle of porn and niche interests.

[PUSH_AX]

The UX on this tool is atrocious, on mobile how do i get to the home or landing page?

[xyzal]

YC indisputably has a financial incentive for AI sentiment to be positive on HN. The structural conflict of interest is worth being aware of.

[skwirl]

You have joined a year and a half ago, have low activity, and 74 karma.

OP has been here for over a decade and has loads of activity.

You aren't in a position to post this.

[supertroop]

I create a new account every few months. If you think account age = authority, maybe think about that for a minute or two.

[Hnrobert42]

Not authority, but likelihood of astroturfing.

That said, unlike GP, I don't think you were accusing OP of astroturfing. Your comment was confusing, but it seemed you were complaining about astroturfing in general, not about this post in particular.

[p0w3n3d]

TIL what astroturfing is. Moreover I now understand that it is almost impossible to tell the robots from the people in the internet

[magpi3]

I've thought this for a while: a day will come when the anonymous internet becomes a thing of the past. It really feels like we are already there but not everyone realizes it yet. What's the point of conversing with someone on the internet (like right now) if you can't tell the difference between a bot and a real person? And it will only get worse.

But what does an anon-free internet even look like? Is it even possible? Or will all online content eventually be considered untrustable and worthless? You can see a world where newspapers (online or otherwise) make a comeback simply because of the need for a trusted gatekeeper (which is what I imagine made them valuable in the first place). It's wild to think about.

[seventytwo]

I’ve come to this same conclusion. Either we accept an internet crawling with bots and astroturf, or we abandon the anonymity and have an internet with only verified humans.

[awbvious]

It is a false dichotomy that abandoning anonymity must happen with verifying humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge-proof . The only trick is who holds the infrastructure for the proofs. A single person or small group like, oh, the one(s) behind World Coin? People on ycombinator might know that one. Sufficiently decentralized, FOSS, /true/ non-profit (like Wikipedia), maybe. (Ironic I mention Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales' WT.Social never did take off.)

Further, the challenge is not completely autonomous bots that are somehow separate of humans, never has been, all code on Earth has and will have a human imprint even in the wildest AGI fantasies. The first false dichotomy is anonymity and veracity, the second false dichotomy is human and bot. And tho biggest challenge comes from a specific human-bot combination, the Cory Doctorow Reverse Centaur (though Centaurs also complicate things). One human can suddenly impact the "volume" of discourse, like a magic hidden megaphone that somehow no one can detect at a dinner party where the lights are too low to see who is talking. /And/ if there's a door check at the party, it's easy to transport someone who makes pennies a day to show up at the door, look like anyone you want, and then come inside with a magic hidden microphone that you provide them.

I think it's less about proving human, more about proving /reputation associated with an entity/. It's not about whether "awbvious" is human, but whether "awbvious" is committed to acting human. Committed to not use a hidden, magic megaphone. Committed to not using hidden, magic megaphones with others. Which I am.

[bavell]

Another option - we keep the wild west unverified web, dotted with islands of verified/vetted spaces.

[homarp]

so back to compuserve and 'gated' knowledge (like on discord)

[taurath]

Or a different sort of Internet appears. free and open internet is polluted with commercialization and greed, eventually cleaner spaces will be created with stronger restrictions like geo, social trust chains, and cost of posting going up so high it’s uneconomical to spam. What good is a single international internet for social media when everyone is bots?

[homarp]

Why do you think that the anon-free internet will ensure there are no bots?

current bots are run and financed by humans already.

And what makes you think that current newspapers will evolve and regain trust? (as most of them are financed by 'rich' owners and therefore somehow influenced by the 'desire' of the owner).

<insert not-a-bot proof by anubis + 'pseudonymous reputation' >

[pixl97]

Yep, in an anon free internet if you can get a bot running it's worth even more than on the anon internet because you know exactly who the data belongs to that your capturing, and you can attempt to directly influence known people.

This and the myriad of poor people that exist will have financial incentives to sell their identity to groups that will run bots behind them.

[kmfrk]

People might be more prone to referring to "submarines" on HN: https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html.

[peterbell_nyc]

Thank you. While I do not agree with him on every point (across his corpus - this one was excellent for it's time), it's a delight to re-read a Paul Graham essay.

There are a few topical short-form non-fiction writers that feel truly worth reading more than an agentic summary, and I get a visceral pleasure just following his words and logic to their well tuned conclusions.

Just reminds me how bad a lot of the AI accelerated content is these days. May have to few shot to improve my own writing :)

[omgJustTest]

My "oh sh* moment" with GenAI is ongoing and is watching all the correlated financials unwind when TSMC said "we can only support so much"[1].

Very few things in life experience exponential growth and assembled systems don't often stay that way if they don't become sigmoidal. ie its exponential and end is nigh xor its exponential then sigmoidal xor linear.

Also a bit hilarious to believe that a single 3 month cycle at TSMC could determine a severe amount of propped valutions.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/tech/943066/tsmc-ai-demand-struggle...

[Lplololopo]

But it would still be very ignorant to just not follow it very very closely and take it serious if something throws a lot of signals like AI and Robotics does.

We are in 2026, supply chains are highly optimized which means we could make and deliver a lot of robots in a relative short period of time.

We also have solved all fundamental issues we had 20 years ago like communication thanks to the internet, translation and co.

We know have a system, which can be copy and pasted and run in parallel with a snap of a finger.

If (and this If is not that crazy) some breakthrough happens tomorrow, this can be used the day after tomorrow.

I currently say that it could become very very interesting in 5-15 years. I still follow AI very closely and i do not have the feeling anything is slowing down.

And independent of something happening, a lot of people did not find jobs due to this AI investment, a lot of jobs already disappeared too.

[omgJustTest]

Long-term is not what ppl are arguing for and that's not what the stock multiples imply.

Companies like Nvidia, up 1000% since 2023, clearly cannot rely on "oh you'd get returns in 5-15 years". They (Jensen and others) are arguing for AGI in a year (he said this at a talk at Stanford ~ 1yr ago).

Long-term, ie 5-15 years there will be many technologies that change the world. Some will come from transformative tech, others will come from other places.

Financial instruments, investors etc have timelines.

Blowing timelines can risk the future if not properly aligned, especially in correlated risk. See the internet bubble, where it was clearly important but took 15 years to recover after the 2000 boom/bust.

In general, longevity risk can include the financial instrument timelines, it can include other technical factors about the technology, and it can also be that the boom serves important people too soon with gains, real limits are imposed, and then the whole system resets until the real limits are overcome or resolved.

[omgJustTest]

Downvotes aside, there are real risks in the ability to meet demand.

Geopolitical and other risks exist here. The future isnt doom and gloom but it isnt exponentials and sunshine either.

[riazrizvi]

Spam and slop is to GenAI as pollution is to Industrialization. GenAI is beneficial generally but it comes at this cost.

[voidnap]

No. Pollution is a byproduct. Spam and slop is quite literally the product in many cases. GenAI generated blogs or websites or youtube videos are the point for those creating them, they are not incidental outputs along the way.

And GenAI to mass produce misinformation and propoganda is a whole other thing. You see this right now with the Alberta sepratists in Canada. Comparing this to pollution like a means to an end is dismissive.

[riazrizvi]

Some ppl do dump trash on the street intentionally, out of laziness but also for some even their actual goal is to deteriorate a neighborhood. But you're pulling in a rare edge case to what by and large these GenAI blogs and Youtube videos are intended for. By and large ppl are trying make income. They are hoping their content will be well received and they will get repeat customers. They are trying to figure out how to use GenAI in a non-sloppy engaging way.

[GaryBluto]

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [e-mail] and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[y-c-o-m-b]

I think this guideline needs revision and furthermore probably shouldn't apply in this case where it's not a direct accusation against someone in particular, but rather a general statement.

[awbvious]

I agree with this. I also agree with the general spirit of "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [e-mail] and we'll look at the data." I feel the spirit is definitely in the right place.

It's a tough nut to crack. I had a feeling that was the catalyst to my post. Am I completely inadequate? Why is it I can't create some perfect vibe app? I felt every prominent post I was seeing at the moment was saying my personal experience was invalid. It was so visceral, it was /too/ visceral. I got suspicious.

What was gnawing at me was the humility and nuance seemed missing in what I was seeing / was prominent. "I whipped up this code in seconds..." is usually--in a good faith scenario of telling such an experience--followed with some variant of "granted, it helps that I have twenty years in software engineering and could tell it was not slop. And my job has me using AI tools all day, whether I want to or not, so I already have a fair amount of prompting/tool skill to avoid slop. And, of course, this was a big win, but there were a ton of time wasters before that got me nowhere before and after this. And if I look at the negatives of what we give up--copyright theft, resource waste, ponzi-ish VC subsidizing token costs to create moats that probably won't happen but regardless is anti-competitive, financial trickery with tech-washing to cement broligarch status quo--not sure I'd make the trade they claim necessary for this win. But yeah, it was kinda neat when I took one second to look at it in isolation, before I remembered I live in a cyber dystopia and this tech doesn't seem to be leveling the playing field as much as the entire apparatus is making it seem bleaker."

Do I expect everyone to do this? No. Do I expect /no one/ to do this? No. Should I wait until one or more people reads an email to address my feeling before I make a comment? ...

I'll admit, I actually don't know on the last one. But I stand by my feeling. And I appreciate the feeling of this rule. But I also feel "degrades discussion and is usually mistaken" should be examined. Is it possible that "usually" is because astroturfing works both ways? "Usually" refers to a higher quantity of X over Y, which is exactly what astroturfing is about. Is it "usually" mistaken when brought up in good faith, carefully, and with nuance? One can call that making a "general statement."

I don't post about this topic constantly, I don't astroturf about astroturfing, a threshold hit me to make this comment, a threshold should be examined with this account and that comment. I think I am in line with the spirit of this rule. And I like the spirit of this rule. Beyond I am not sure.