This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Reddit, AI spam bots explore new ways to show ads in your feed
#For sale: Ads that look like legit Reddit user posts
"We highly recommend only mentioning the brand name of your product since mentioning links in posts makes the post more likely to be reported as spam and hidden. We find that humans don't usually type out full URLs in natural conversation and plus, most Internet users are happy to do a quick Google Search," ReplyGuy's website reads.
Oh, don't sell em so short. Like sell em short, but they deserve a bit more credit. I'm pretty sure at this point they're birthing entirely new forms of enshittification over there that we haven't even realized yet.
It should be illegal to misrepresent an ad as a post or comment. This exact thing should be against the law. The boundary between advertising and social media is so thin at this point. It has to stop. It's dangerous for consumers. Corporations should have to clearly label themselves at every turn. The usage of AI to intermingle advertising and social media should be blanket illegal.
These editorialised post titles are so stupid.
So... is it safe to assume reddit is suppressing it and handing out bans?
“With Dynamic Product Ads, brands can tap into the rich, high-intent product conversations that people come to Reddit for," Reddit EVP of Business Marketing and Growth Jim Squires said in a statement.
Gross.
rich, high-intent product conversations
these people make me so fucking sick i cannot
i cannot believe this site i spent so many sad years posting on in high school, with pure heart, posting purely out of a desire for interesting interactions and the potential to make insightful, peer-reviewed contributions that others could enjoy, has turned into such fucking dead-eyed garbage.
"how do we turn our users into money"
Jfc people came to Reddit because up until now they were getting replies from real people with that have no financial interest in the outcome. This completely subverts everything people valued about Reddit. This fucking guy.
It makes me so mad...it's like a company butting into a conversation me and a friend are having in person.
I've seen these same kinds of posts, obviously ads and less obviously by AI on Lemmy every once in a while which started maybe a month and a half or so ago? Makes me wonder if they were testing their shit over here.
I would not be surprised at all if small scale testing occurred here. It actually (unfortunately) makes sense since the Lemmy API is free to use. They could just trickle out bot comments and gauge reaction.
I'm still waiting for the day when actual ads across the internet drown in AI-generated advertisements pointing to no real product or service. Perhaps that'll make attention industry collapse?
If you're looking for a side project idea, here's one.
This is a similar idea to culture jamming, people would put subversive books in libraries and book stores, change labels on products in supermarkets, etc. It's not a bad way to draw attention to something people are already accustomed to seeing.
We all knew this day was coming. And, I suspect, knowing this is precisely why most of us are here.
We should welcome new refugees after a new exodus ; good.
