I've noticed an odd and possibly disturbing trend on Reddit lately
I'm not sure where to bring this up and I wanted an outside perspective. This may seem like I'm doing the same thing here but I honestly just want to know if anyone has any insight. The trend in talking about is the act of creating a reddit post in the form of a question. I've seen so many posts on Reddit popup that are just questions or screenshots/pictures with a question as the title.
For instance in gaming subreddits I'll see a post with the title of something like "What do you think is the best game in X series?" And they will have a screenshot of what would be the perceived most popular game in a franchise like final fantasy or halo or something. This is only one example, I see so many questions constantly in my home feed.
Is this some kind of concerted effort to train an LLM or is it simply some unspoken advantage that karma farmers use to drive engagement? Or am I simply just diving into conspiracy theories created by my own ignorance?
Nah, these started juuuuust before the AI stuff popped off. I unsubbed from /r/gaming when they suddenly started flooding the subreddit a while back and waited for these kinds of posts to die down before resubbing. This was definitely before the AI splurge. I think it's just stupid easy karma farming.
I wouldn't be surprised if it could be repurposed for LLM training or be posted by LLMs to bait user engagement. But that is definitely an off-branch from the original reason these cropped up.
I'd say they've always been around, but have only gotten more popular since the reddit redesign and the general movement towards "engagement" instead of "discussion".
You've also got about 40 different subreddits these days that are thinly veiled politics with similar levels of obfuscation ("what do you think of controversial politics thing that we all know what everyone already thinks??" topics and what not).
It's all a downstream consequence of gamifying a system that they don't have the resources, desire, or mentality to moderate/improve. Plenty of people are happy engaging with these low effort topics that are just repeats of discussion that have been had 1000x before, no bots or LLM's required.
I noticed it right after all of the mods quit from the API changes. New mods came in with lower standards.
I don't think it's standards so much as that they haven't experienced all the iterations through the years that are the reasons for rules against so many different title types.
There's next to no transmission of mod knowhow between subreddits. All the mod spaces died years ago. New mods will take years to realize why those rules all the "old guard" mods put in place over the years are smart rules to have.
Speaking of karma farming, it used to be that self posts did not count to link karma, so there was an incentive to link to an unnecessary, tangentially relevant image when asking a question.
These days I expect posting such images is primarily done to increase engagement.
Note that GPT 3 came out like 1-2 years before they threw a chat UI on it and the public at large became aware. There was tons of buzz on places like Hacker News (and to a lesser degree Reddit) about it when it was just an API, and people were already making toy projects that integrated with it. There was even a GPT 2 version of Subreddit Simulator, iterating on the original Markov Chain version, several years before that.
I was already suspecting GPT astroturfing was going on way back then. I haven't really used Reddit since the API apocalypse, so I assume it's just become worse.
And non-LLM repost bots have been an epidemic for well over a decade. One account would recycle an old thread that performed well, and other accounts would verbatim copy comments and basically recreate threads, farming plausible activity. Then the accounts would likely be sold to marketers or other nefarious types.
IIRC, our own @Deimos created subreddit simulator!
I believe so, yes. And AutoModerator too, I think?
I don’t know much about our founder but is he rich from any of this stuff he’s made?
Rich in self satisfaction and knowledge, I'm sure!
I can't speak to his personal financial situation but as far as his projects are concerned it seems very unlikely he could have made much off them
Ooh - is it still live? Is it possible to try it out?
It's not live anymore, but you can still look at all the old posts at r/SubredditSimulator. It wasn't really something you could "try out", it was just bots talking to bots, but it's cool and often funny to read! Although it certainly feels quaint in comparison to the LLM era we're in now
Wow, what a time capsule. It evokes today's Reddit experience, the insane conversations I remember seeing 5 years ago, and plenty of uncanny valley emotion about real/unreal posting all at once.
Thanks for this.
A "fun" idea that has been nagging at the back of my head is the idea of a real user who decides that continuing a conversation isn't worth their time, but instead of simply letting the conversation die, delegates future responses to an LLM.
I recently had something like this happen on r/rheumatoid. I responded to a user's question about RA and medications, then they posted subsequent questions in response to each of my answers.
I realized they were using an LLM after they posted two questions in a row that were enclosed in quotation marks and had better grammar and punctuation than the original inquiry. I don't think they were doing it to troll; it seemed like they were very young, trying to get a thorough response, and weren't sure they could come up with all the questions themselves. The original question seemed quite authentic, not like an LLM bot trying to harvest answers.
Footnote: The only reason I'm using Reddit at all these days is because of a couple of forums where I can't get comparable experiential information anywhere else. Like, "Does anyone have recommendations on a source for business clothing with assistive fasteners?", or "How did you get your insurance to approve drug X?".
I have occasionally myself debated creating such a bot that allows me to bait a Reddit Idiot(tm) into arguing endlessly with an LLM. But I truly feel that there are enough bots (or even just idiots) on Reddit that I would just be contributing to Dead Internet Theory. It wouldn't add anything but more noise.
See, I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing.
My thoughts on LLM sabotage are admittedly not quite what I was originally proposing. The thing with most bot comments on Reddit and other sites is that the people running these accounts desperately want to pretend to be both real people and acting in good faith, generally because they are either being paid or have some sort of agenda.
But what if your agenda is to get people to stop paying attention to Reddit? To me, I can think of no better way of doing that than leading a user on with an LLM, and then purposefully tipping your hand in a way that causes the user to realize that they had been arguing with a machine this whole time.
I remember about 10-12 years ago seeing a rule on /r/askreddit against "DAE" (does anyone else) posts, as these were generally uninformative karma farming posts. Tale as old as time, I'm afraid.
I forgot that r/DAE started in ask reddit. I remember the trend after that was to post your own crazy story in the form a question about a specific experience/situation and say "I'll start"
And now this is the top post on askreddit: How do you all feel about Trump’s administration holding completely private interviews with Epstein’s sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell but doing no interviews with the victims? This is basically a longer version of saying DAE Trump is bad? Askreddit was never the peak of reddit quality or anything but I'm pretty sure this type of "question" used to not be allowed there. But now every day something similar is the top post on that sub*: a topic in the current news with the most obvious possible bias framed as a question.
*and on other subs (like said elsewhere in this thread) it's basically questions about your favourite colour. r/movies has the most simplistic possible questions posted every day which is kind of interesting because it limits posts to an extreme (tons of automod filters) but yet these ones get through that. I guess some of them do lead to decent conversations in the comments, but still. It's like going into 5th grade and having the kids ask you questions - current example, "what's the best car chase?" is a post there right now lol
Here's a snapshot of r/AskReddit from 17 years ago. Maybe I'm not understanding what's different in your observation, but I'd say there's nothing new about this kind of post.
Ninja-edit: Of course there's tons of room for Dead Internet Theory hypothesizing here, and it's plausible that "someone" is seeding the site with these threads because they generate the most engagement. I buy that. My conspiracy theory of choice is that Reddit's doing that themselves (with some AI-enhanced auto-generation) to make the site seem more active than it is, and to try to maintain cultural relevance, or the appearance thereof. Do I have proof? Of course not.
It's entirely possible that it's bot activity - there's been tons of bot activity on Reddit for years, even before LLMs became widely available. The go-to tactic back then was for bots to repost popular posts from 2-3 years prior, often with other bot accounts which would come in and post the top comment/comments. I wouldn't be surprised if there was also bot-driven upvotes early on to get those posts into the 'Hot' feed.
On the other hand, there's not really any reason to assume this is LLM activity - I don't think this would be a particularly useful way to train an LLM - but there is, or at least was, value in high-karma accounts which could be wiped and sold to be used for astroturfing and advertising. So it could just be good old-fashioned karma farmers, although it wouldn't be surprising at all if there are karma-farmers out there using LLMs to generate posts.
Yup, as someone involved extensively with moderation on reddit for years I can fully confirm this. Bots and semi-bots (third world content/spam sweatshops) have been an issue for years.
It could be LLM related. But what likely is happening here is that they are simply trying to pad an accounts to make them somewhat look like regular users so they can spam further down the line without getting caught straight away.
This has become extremely common in relation to controversial political topics too. They will ask the question "what do you think of (person x) doing (controversial thing Y, phrased negatively and over-simplified)". It's usually always built as a leading question with no actual support for the conclusion its trying to lead you to.
It's extremely lazy and my best bet is it's just an easy way to karma farm and rage bait for engagement. Just reinforces the echo chambers.
Oh thank God. I thought it was just me reading these.
I know it's not the same, but I always call these "recovery question"-style posts.
You know the ones that feel so inorganic and are like "your superhero name is the last two digits of your social security + your mother's maiden name!" Or some shit like that.
I'm exaggerating, but these posts are clearly engagement bait and it drives me mad how well they work.
Also, no one mentioned it yet, I think. but Reddit now pays you for getting a lot of upvotes and awards. People are incentivized to karma farm
Not sure about the format, but I've definitely seen a trend of increased unnecessary drama posts getting massive upvotes in specific gaming subs with many of the comments being the usual meaningless cheers and boos. If it's not bot ragebait driven by reddit itself I don't know what would be. I've started to just unsub from them and stick to the niche subs that aren't showing signs of that yet.
I'm still happy to not actively engage with reddit at all and just continue to view it passively until it completely dies.
R/retrogaming is my favorite ridiculous example of this.
My "main" reddit account -- that I'd created in November 2020 -- recently got banned, and honestly, I didn't even try creating a new one this time around.
reddit for me is DEAD. Even outside of "major" "front page" subreddits, the experience has degraded for me. The quality, effort, care people put into crafting successful reddit posts in the pre-2018 circa is not longer there, and censorship has gone off the charts. LLMs and bots LARPing as LLMs only made things worse post ChatGPT.
reddit is going through what I'd call "Quora-fication" -- the site is being overrun with bots with super low quality engagement bait to trap those dumb or unlucky enough to still be present on the site.
Somewhat-relevant thread