I rececently returned to Reddit since there are no other remaining discussion venues for one of my hobbies. I looked at the new-Reddit interface and shuddered: ads are being shown among comments, and many comments are hidden by defaul because apparently discussion and community brings insufficient engagement for a modern ad-based internet business. Even if I and a tiny, tiny percentage of people are still using the old-Reddit interface, obviously the overall culture there is going to be molded by the default one.
Honestly even the curated subs I was a part of were pretty toxic or echo-chambery now that I've had time to look back
Maybe similar solutions exist for iOS, but maybe the side-loading is not as easy?
Anyway, on Windows/Chrome I use uBlock Origin and never see any ads in Reddit online. There was a lot of drama about reddit selling out in 2023 (I was sad to see Infinity die), but there are tech solutions to avoid its enshittification.
Though at this point I spend (or waste depending on PoV) much less time on reddit than I used to.
Reddits quality went downhill over the years but there is more or less no successor/competitor. It will be over and buried forever. Eternal september gets them all.
Side note: be free if you want to and dont make it dependent on decisions others do for you.
RedReader is a much better interface but lately has been having issues for me so I just haven't been using reddit. If and when they kill that client I'll be done with the platform.
1. Car crashes
2. Street/bum fights
3. Conspiracy theory content (UFOs, Anti-vax, chemtrails)
4. Anti-semitic videos (one such video was titled "Kanye was right about everything")
5. Anti-muslim videos (weirdly I get a lot of Indian majority subreddits that post a lot of hate videos about Pakistan/Muslims)
Every single one of these categories produces feelings of outrage. Reddit has just become a fucking hate machine. Not just hate toward other races, but hate toward the entire human race. Every video shows someone doing some anti-social shit, like people driving like total assholes, or running people over, or getting hit by a train after cutting off traffic, or beating each other senseless in public. In the 1990s there was a huge outcry over violence in media because of Mortal Kombat, Doom, and The Matrix, but here we are today watching actual people die on dashcams regularly. This has to be just bad for us on a really primal level
It's almost as if they like the population to be afraid.
Not saying they're not on there, but the ad blockers must be doing a pretty good job on that site.
maybe you find a suitable board on 4chan
A similar thing I have randomly come across multiple times on YouTube are videos consisting of a still AI image of a white person mistreating a black person (e.g. a white police officer screaming with rage at a black man eating in a diner) and an AI voiceover text telling a GPT-generated story hashtagged #heartwarming, e.g. "The white police officer was violent against the black man... What he didn't know was this was a highly decorated veteran!"
Some of these are clearly getting picked up by the algorithm and drawing hundreds of thousands of views. The factories behind these are probably halfway around the world but realized the race relations of a large economy can be exploited for profit or geopolitics.
Mass-produced outrage bait isn't new, and it's available in a thousand flavors. But AI has accelerated this process, at least for people who don't notice when they're getting played (or who don't want to notice).
https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1ojydgq...
https://www.reddit.com/r/themayormccheese/comments/1ojtbwz/a...
Note how that second one all uses the same script, "I have 7 babies from 7 different baby daddies!"
I instinctively want to blame AI, but on some level, I think the problem runs deeper: it's that we are for some reason compelled to consume content where it just doesn't matter if it's real or not. It has no bearing on your life. You just want to spend your time scrolling through heartwarming stories about complete strangers, or through rage-bait that reinforces your political beliefs. Ethically, I see a difference between telling you true stories and lies. But if we're being honest with ourselves... what changes if the kitten rescued from a storm sewer is actually just gen AI?
This isn't even a Facebook thing. 24-hour news networks and many newspapers perfected this craft before. Endless streams of celebrity gossip and stories about stranded / rescued pets, written for no reason other than to satisfy this weird craving among the readers.
Each step along the way lowers the bar for feeding you the content and allows it to be tailored better, but I don't know what the fix here is. Short of banning the internet and forcing people to go outside more.
See, for example, the slowly declining efficacy of banner ads, as each cohort of computer user learned to ignore them but they still retained efficacy on newer vintages of users.
I find myself squinting hard at interior design pictures on Pinterest to see if they’re real, I can never be sure with an instagram video, and even blogs and comments are getting harder to tell.
And I think the fact that I am having a harder time distinguishing reality from AI worries me greatly that I would be susceptible to misinformation if I venture outside of trusted sources.
Probably bots?
BTW, mi Instagram account is just a placeholder and I can't imagine an algorithm suggesting that content. It seems like a default suggestion.
This implies that the default suggestion isn't a data analyzed soup of what people of a given age / location / demographic / search text are most likely to respond to. Even if it is your first time to log on to a platform it is very much algorithm driven.
> I opened the comments expecting to see other people complaining
people are less confrontational the more local it is
E.g. in this recent 800+ point submission[1] a company presents their product as the ultimate alternative to PaaS, their use case seems shallow and presents their product in positive light only.
HN is a niche forum that is all about making things that scale. Most human interactions shouldn't scale, there's no space for them to be absorbed except by other humans.
Only the very top should scale down, and that can be done in more ways, some more ethical than others.
At the end of the day, people don't care if it's real or not as long as it's either entertaining or tells them what they want to hear.
There is one dude promoting his succulent repotting/resale business and he's posted like 5-8 ai generated surfer dude monkey surfing and partying with his potted succulents just in the last week. I opened the comments expecting to see other people complaining, "hey buddy take your ai-spam elsewhere" but all the comments were "cute!" "adorable" and "love this!" I just ended up blocking this dude but I am sad for humanity lol.