Any post you go to, it’s “don’t get me wrong, I love x and then write criticism
Or how every comment is something of a joke, it’s always a joke related to the post. If somebody needs help, it’s a joke. If it’s a death of someone, it’s “I’m sorry…. Insert joke”
It’s all the same. Reddit is filled with bots and the same bots are filling the ChatGPT’s information so it’s one big loop of bots
So, I was inevitably doom scrolling, and there was a reel of a super hot girl on an exercise bike, nice cleavage, etc. But upon closer inspection, it became clear to me that the video was AI. One give away was that the girl was subtly lip syncing to the music playing on the reel.. but there was also audio of a girl breathing heavily.. seemed like the AI sync'd up to the wrong audio track hahah.
It was very high quality AI, and at a quick glance it very well may have fooled me. But nowadays you really have to question everything, and always triple check yourself before assuming content as legit.
I inevitably went to the comment section, which obviously was a sad and grotesque place. I came upon one comment written by what looked like some young teenage kid based on the small profile pic. Wrote something like "oh baby gimme a chance, youre beautiful, can't stop watching, got this reel on loop" etc etc. Honestly, it kinda got to me.. like, shit, this next generation's development is potentially going to be SO fucked up bc of AI. Like, how are young kids even going to be able to decipher the difference?
So I left a reply, trying to be joking and nice as possible, but still give him a little jab, like "youre cool man, but just dont be a fucking idiot!". I told him it was AI, and how important it's going to be in the future to be able to tell the difference. It wasn't a wall of text, but I edited it a bunch, and yeah, tried to make a legit, heartfelt comment for this kid. So, i sent it.
After readimg my reply over, and feeling like i had done a good deed for the day or some shit, I looked at how many fucking comments there were.. and they alllll just said the same.exact shit. And I was like, goddamnit.. wait a minute.. and clicked on several of the profiles from the comments. Of course.. no friends, active account for like 2 weeks, no pics or bio, barely any history.. yeah.. fucking bots!! The whole lot of them, ugh. And yeah obvously this kid i just gave some sage wisdom and advice to? 100% definitely a bot 🤦♂️
That was enough internet for me that day. Yep, bot posts, with bot comments, and bot replies.. welp, the internet was fun while it lasted. Seems like it's on life support and is in critical condition at this point. Imma start working in my eulogy.
I got this reddit post as an ad. Most of the comments are LLM bots talking to eachother like schizophrenic basement dwellers. The whole thing feels surreal and I don't understand why someone paid money to propagate it.
Been scrolling through some career subreddits lately since I'm trying to move from helpdesk into a sysadmin role. Finished my last final a few weeks ago and figured I'd get ahead on interview prep. I keep seeing these detailed posts about specific companies with generic interview questions and perfect answers. The writing style is polished but kind of hollow, like it hits every keyword but nobody is actually home. A few times I've clicked through to profiles and there's nothing but similar posts across different career subs, no comments about actual work problems or personal context. It's weird reading advice from someone who might just be stitching together LinkedIn articles. I work with users all day and you get a feel for how people explain things, even in text. These feel different. Do you all report these when you spot them or just ignore and move on? I'm not sure if it even matters if the advice is technically usable.
Many of you are probably already aware of this. Most of you however aren't, which is why I want to talk about it in a dedicated thread. And no, I am not crazy, paranoid or schizo. I am just massively pissed off about this because I care.
This has been going on for the past couple of weeks and months. Almost every thread now has a bot account replying to the OP with an LLM-generated comment. The bot accounts and comments always follow the same patterns, which is why they are relatively easy to spot. Once you've understood the pattern, you'll notice them all. Have a look at the bottom of my post for how to identify them.
Even though some of the generated comments can be helpful for specific questions, most of the time they are just AI slop and/or plain wrong, or they have outdated information because of outdated training data.
Either way, I don't think it is good having a Reddit community where there are automated and non-human responses in almost every thread, especially if the thread author or other users are not aware of this. If there is no human interaction on a social-media platform, then what's the point anyway? Talk about the dead internet theory. The future is looking pretty grim. I fucking hate this...
I don't know what the intentions of the bot author(s) are. Are they trying to be helpful, or is this just an attempt of farming Reddit karma on a large amount of Reddit accounts, so they can later on sell them or influence future discussions on the site? Considering that the bots comment in other non-tech subreddits, I don't think the goal is being helpful. Maybe they are just testing the waters...
I also don't know what the moderators of r/archlinux could potentially do about this. Reddit moderation bots for example can automatically delete new threads by checking the author's account and thread contents, but I'm not sure if something like this is possible for individual comments (correct me if I'm wrong). Restricting access to the whole subreddit for new accounts also doesn't seem feasible. I guess this is something that needs to be dealt with by Reddit itself, but I'm not particularly hopeful about this.
Account name
All accounts share the same naming pattern. Unfortunately though, they are using Reddit's auto-suggestion format, namely Adjective[-_]?Noun[-_]?\d+, which doesn't distinguish them from regular accounts with Reddit-generated names.
Account age
All accounts are currently at most 3-4 months old. They therefore don't have accumulated much Reddit karma yet and they also haven't commented a lot yet. The comment spam is unfortunately spread over many different accounts.
Comments
It's typical LLM nonsense, structured in 1-3 paragraphs. They will always talk about "typical" or "classic" issues, they will pretend to have the same issue or having solved the same issue, or they pretend to be using the same hardware as the OP. And if the thread is about a new (slop) creation, they will praise the OP for their project and even say they have starred the repo on GitHub, which can be total nonsense.
The comments are posted always roughly 10 minutes after the OP posted their thread, with an offsetr of a couple of seconds. This offset may be API or token related.
Don't be fooled about the language that's being used. They will still call you "bro" or use other slang like "fr" and what not. They also sometimes include common spelling or typing mistakes like "teh".
Also, bots will almost never reply to replies made to their comment, and they will comment only once.
Subreddit activities
All of these bot accounts post in the same set of subreddits their author has defined, meaning you will see a subset of them in each comment history. r/archlinux is unfortunately one of the subreddits. They usually only post here once. The other subreddits are in the vast majority of cases completely unrelated to anything Linux or tech. So if a bot suddently talks about deep technical kernel stuff for example while their previous comment history was only about relationship advice (I'm not trying to meme here), then this is already suspicious.
Here's the list of subreddits you will see 90% of the time:
and some others which appear to be less common (from what I've seen so far).
Once again, I am not crazy, paranoid or schizo. I just massively hate the fact that some assholes think that they can turn everything into (more) shit and get away with this. So what I want to do is to at least bring this to wider attention here.
I keep seeing profiles with 2,000+ friends or thousands of followers, but their new posts get 0–3 likes. The weird part is, if you scroll back a few years, the same people used to get loads of engagement.
So what happened? Are most accounts just inactive now? Is Facebook barely showing friends’ posts anymore? Did everyone move to Instagram and WhatsApp but keep their Facebook account?
For a platform this huge, it feels weirdly empty sometimes.
Dead Internet Theory peeps, explain this one xD
My stepdaughter sent me a clip from a station outside Atlanta about a traffic pileup that never happened. The anchor looked fine but the cadence was off, like it was reading and not talking. I checked the station site and the story was gone twenty minutes later. I work helpdesk so maybe I’m just catching artifacts others miss, but it feels like half the local updates I see are the same handful of clips stitched together. The weird part is how fast people in the comments treat them as real events. If the original source disappears and the same narration keeps circulating, how do you tell what actually happened in your own area anymore?
I'm watching my web server logs tonight, looking for any bots abusing things. here's something new I've never seen before, google bots pretending to be all kinds of other bots, and 100-200 requests within only a few seconds.
it came from 2 different google IP addresses, first 211 requests within 16 seconds, then a half hour later 131 more requests within 3 seconds. the agent for these requests say Bravebot, GrokBot, DeepSeekBot, Kimi-SearchBot, YouBot, YiBot, Amazonbot, PanguBot, MoonshotBot.... and many others.
it's unlike google to send this many requests within such a short time. could it be some google AI bot going crazy?