Is the title here implying users will be chatting with bots run by the companies? Why in the world would they do that?
Clearly the purpose here is to weed out fraud and abuse more easily by analyzing chats between users. I'd welcome it. I'm pretty sure some dating apps already do this, both with text and images, but ChatGPT is probably better at it.
It's one of the purest examples of short term business thinking I can imagine. Will this goose this quarter's revenue? Heck yeah. But there may not be a dating app market at all in three years once the public realizes that "dating apps" are just fancy wrappers around ChatGPT built to "drive engagement" by making damned sure you don't actually ever enter into a long term relationship with an actual human.
It seems dating apps will be leading the way into fulfilling the Dead Internet Theory.
Can't get those sweet, sweet AI stock bumps without a press release.
Anyhow, I expect them to announce something a lot more innocuous but do something a lot less innocuous. It doesn't have to be exactly what I said, which would be pretty blatant, though personally I have absolutely no problem imagining it would happen, but it'll be something that if someone just directly described it to you without sugar coating it you'd find offensive, I guarantee it. The game theory all but guarantees it; if $YOU don't do it, someone else will, so it may as well be $YOU. Basically a tragedy of the commons.
Maybe Tinder and some of its competitors will all self-destruct in that way, or retreat into being a kind of lowbrow spamware network for loners. But if so, there will still be a market demand from people who want to meet other humans to reproduce with, and other companies (both existing and new ones) will create new offerings to serve those people. The idea that ‘game theory guarantees’ that everything just turns to shit (which seems to be your view) is evidently wrong. Parts of the economy sometimes self-destruct in that way, but when they do, they leave fertile ground for new things to emerge.
If 'the public realizes that "dating apps" are just fancy wrappers around ChatGPT built to "drive engagement"', they'll salt the earth for any future dating apps. Fertile ground is not guaranteed.
This distrust is already building around us right now, it's not a theory. I don't live in Silicon Valley and I think that can sometimes help serve as a counterpoint to an excessively SV-view of the world here on HN sometimes. The normies in my life are already talking about this sort of thing, unprompted by me. Dating apps may be the vanguard but there's plenty of things charging behind them.
Game theory does not guarantee that everything turns to shit; that sort of glib summary makes me think you don't know what the tragedy of the commons even is, or the obvious application to a race to the bottom in this particular segment. Again, it's not like it's some brand new hypothesis that dating apps do scummy things to drive engagement; I gave an example. I find people's touching child-like faith that a known-scummy portion of the market won't do some other scummy thing once the opportunity presents itself to be simply incomprehensible. Plenty of people aren't nice, especially people already doing scummy things. Psychopaths are real and do real things to real people in the real world, not some sort of hypothetical construction dreamed up by disconnect ivory tower psychologists as a theoretical test case.
> they'll salt the earth for any future dating apps
Baseless assertion. If people get sick of dating apps because they somehow all end up being full of bots, someone can make a new dating app where the primary selling point is that they prevent or minimise bots, maybe using some kind of human vetting process. Many people would then use that app.
> faith that a known-scummy portion of the market won't do some other scummy thing
I have no such faith. I did acknowledge that parts of the market can degrade, and that you might even be right that bots will ruin most existing dating apps. That could happen. But the idea that this would definitely spell the end of all dating apps is just an assertion you are making with no evidence.
Well, it's pretty widely known that a lot of dating websites are full of third-party bots, trying to get you to follow certain instagram/premium snapchat/onlyfans profiles - and pushing romance scams, financial scams and suchlike.
It's also pretty widely known that a lot of the big dating websites started out with a bunch of first-party fake profiles and activity, because nobody joins a dating website that doesn't have any users. Usually once the site becomes successful though they get rid of the first-party fake activity though.
So first-party bots and bots that are active right now on the major sites are both plausible. Just maybe not first-party bots that are active on the major sites right now.
Not in the dating game, but all I've heard is that it's the company themselves creating a giant fraudulent community of "hot young singles in your area". AI will only make this worse.
50% or 0% are both interesting goals, but the headline implies that the website is some test of free will. If you get 0%, then it shows there is an algorithm that predicts your performance, and the Kolmogorov complexity is finite. That algorithm is the inverse of the one the website is using.
If we conflate "free-will" with "ability to generate truly random sequences" then the goal should be to generate a completely incompressible, unpredictable sequence, which 50% would probably be closer to.
Exactly! This is a strategy that works even for markets without network effects. It just gets even more amplified (and profitable) when network effects exist.
In todays terms the equivalent would be an invite to a closed Gillette page/group/discord that has exclusive videos from the latest influencers (or whatever teenagers like and talk about).
For example OOP could get their daily cat based dopamine fix from a myriad of online sources, most open or easily bypassed but they want to see this one particular cat which is behind Meta’s wall and requires additional payment (in terms of data) from them.
The only real news here is that Reddit mods are power mad tyrants, which is nothing new at all. AI generated art has just given them newer, funnier ways to be in the wrong.
"Power" moderators, that is people who moderate a large number of subreddits, are untenable. It is not possible to effectively or fairly moderate dozens of communities, even if you were to spend all your waking moments doing so. This is, in part, why it's so common for popular submissions to be locked or deleted because "y'all can't behave".
The people that do so are largely doing it for their own self-gain (e.g., self-promotion) or because it makes them feel important. I had a very low stress job for a few years and ended up as a moderator for over a dozen large subreddits, including a few defaults. Socializing with Reddit's prominent moderators was enlightening.
Why do Reddit moderators do their work? They are paid in power. They get to decide what viewpoints are seen or not by others. That is a very compelling wage. And of course they all think they're doing a service by advancing their ideology because of course their ideology is the right one.
That may be true of the big subreddits. I moderate a small, niche one simply because I was visiting it every day for years and then they needed a mod. I saw it as a chance to improve an online space that I liked.
This is a common pattern with all organizations, but especially charities, non-profits, or volunteer roles. At first, the work is done by those who love that cause, and commonly some combination of
- the cause becomes prominent enough that there is influence or prestige associated with the role now, that it attracts power-seeking personalities
- the original founders are too burnt out to care, or clueless/trusting such that they get outmaneuvered by savvier entrants
Personally, I see it as the entropic drift of an organization away from an original cause or mission (order) towards a vehicle for the pure exercise power (chaos).
That's an extremely reductive claim. Can you really not think of more mundane reasons someone might find themselves moderating reddit?
It's hard to imagine "ideology" being relevant to the vast majority of reddit... Do you really think the moderators of ELI5 or PeopleFuckingDying or some obscure porn reddit or whatever are primarily concerned with "ideology"?
I used to help moderate a poker forum. I was a professional poker player, and an extremely active user of the forums. I don't recall pushing an ideology beyond "keep discussions constructive and topical."
The person you just replied to was a mod. Are you implying that their work was somehow about pushing an ideology?
Of course it is. That does not entail that forums moderators (myself included) are exclusively motivated by a desire to push an ideology, which was the topic at hand.
Nor does "subjective" entail "ideological" unless you're going to torture the term ideology being having a useful meaning.
We're not talking about forum moderators, really, but power moderators. Someone who mods a random topic they like is probably decent at it and not trying to push something. Someone whos gotten themselves in a position to mod 10+ of the largest subreddits on reddit is probably not doing very much actual modding and is very much trying to push something.
The person above stated "Why do Reddit moderators do their work? They are paid in power." They appear to be talking about moderators in general, not just power mods. The root comment here also appears to be talking about mods in general (with little idea what they're talking about, AFAICT).
> Nor does "subjective" entail "ideological" unless you're going to torture the term ideology being having a useful meaning.
What is your useful definition of "ideology"? Why isn't "subjective" included in your definition? Why would including "subjective" in your definition make it less useful?
Before hearing your response, I'm going to guess that you're thinking ideologies need to be "significant" for them to be an ideology. I'm guessing you don't think that subjective opinions are ideological because you don't think they're important enough to get that label.
Reddit mods have a habit of blocking/censoring views they don't agree with, (mainly all on one side, consistent with their ideology). That doesn't mean it applies to every subreddit, but if it weren't a widespread problem do you really think anybody would be talking about it?
Reddit's larger subs, particularly their political ones, are 100% content farming and ideological cults. Subs with hundreds of thousands of millions of subscribers that regurgitate twitter screenshots with timestamps removed, and where dissent is often banned. Antiwork, Latestagecapitalism, WhitePeopleTwitter, and many others.
Related, I got banned from entertainment for saying an exchange between jk Rowling and a trans person wasn't "mocking". I didn't defend her, I just called out a shitty title.
When I messaged the mods saying, in essence, "y'all are dumb and need to distinguish fact from opinion" they flagged me for harassment, which is one demerit away from a sitewide ban.
I know some mods are decent, and it's better in smaller subs with some actual purpose (city, hobby) that isn't memes, violence, porn or politics. Any of those categories, and with subs of any large size, and it gets really scummy really fast.
It's common knowledge now that abstaining from politics is taking the side of the oppressor. This has the effect of giving many subreddits and other topical communities a political orientation even if politics is nominally offtopic. To give an example, it is increasingly hard to find an online knitting community that tolerates conservative viewpoints; most have followed the lead of Ravelry.
This absurd beyond belief. Knitting has precisely nothing to do with politics, so I struggle to imagine what "conservative knitting viewpoints" even are. Or liberal ones, for that matter. Cross-stitching is a tool of systemic racism? Purl stitching is inviting the illegals to tukk-urr-jurrbs?
To me phrases like "abstaining from politics is taking the side of the oppressor" are just so damn American. You guys, more than any other nationality I've met, tend to dive head first into whatever ideology or sect or even hobby you happen to get into. There are, of course, people who are "extra" in every viewpoint or occupation. But more so for Americans.
>This absurd beyond belief. Knitting has precisely nothing to do with politics, so I struggle to imagine what "conservative knitting viewpoints" even are. Or liberal ones, for that matter. Cross-stitching is a tool of systemic racism? Purl stitching is inviting the illegals to tukk-urr-jurrbs?
Apparently politics definitely leaked into that community a few years back. I recall reading stories about it back then.
I am not part of that community but if it behaves like almost any other online community, any accusations of racism seem to always create a backlash that lumps the conservatives leaning folks within the group to racism whether the conservative has outright committed any racism or not. There tends to be a guilt by association that seems to happen often—where if you have opinion “A” (some standard conservative opinion on some subject not directly tied to racism) you must also have opinion “B” (some fringe race-oriented opinion sometimes found in conservative circles).
So folks just stay silent and try and just knit (or focus on whatever interest of the group), afraid to disclose any political opinion in a non-political interest group for fear of the label. Then…they get called out because if there isn’t overt acknowledgement by concerned members of the “correct” political ideology. That results in the abstaining is oppression attitude. You then find these kind of communities creating rules that don’t just discourage political conversations but rules attempting to exclude people who may fall into a political viewpoint altogether.
I don’t know if it’s distinctly American, but it definitely seems to happen here a lot. To be honest, I find it all ridiculous.
> There tends to be a guilt by association that seems to happen often—where if you have opinion “A” (some standard conservative opinion on some subject not directly tied to racism) you must also have opinion “B” (some fringe race-oriented opinion sometimes found in conservative circles).
To be fair, U.S. conservatives are only reaping what they sow. The overtly racist wing of conservatism received such a drubbing after civil rights went through that they had to scale back the racist rhetoric and talk about social and economic policies that disadvantaged certain races, but appealed to traditional ideas about federalism and small government. So now whenever anyone talks about federalism and small government, it is assumed that there is a racist agenda lurking behind those appeals because historically, there was.
So it’s ok then to tell some 80 year old lady who just wants to share knitting things with other knitters that she is no longer welcome because some knitting activist asked her if she voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and she said “yes”?
Sorry, but that is just hateful and completely unnecessary.
One example of the top of my head: knitting is probably one of the most heavily gendered hobbies, which carries a ton of political baggage with it wrt gender politics.
No, it's not "common knowledge" that abstaining from politics is siding with the oppressor.
That's an unfalsifiable ideological assertion that has been well-socialized, but that doesn't make it fact and lots of people disagree with it, because it's an opinion, and it's one that presupposes a Foucaultian worldview of human dynamics as being able to be distilled down to pure power struggles.
It's absurd to see that bandied about as truth just because it's "common knowledge." I bet in Communist China it was "common knowledge" right before the famine that killing the sparrows would bolster the harvest, too.
So the implication you're drawing from this... which was the topic at hand... is that all knitting forum moderators are motivated exclusively be the desire to espouse an ideology?
Please don't troll or make bad-faith arguments on HN. This post contains two instances of moving the goalposts and using extreme language for strawman attacks.
People are pointing out that moderation is often biased and that the power of controlling the narrative and topics & viewpoints that are allowed is a motivator for many moderators. Your strawman argument that "all moderators" being "exclusively" motivated is just rhetoric to try to win against a claim no one is making.
Sure, yeah. I doubt most knitting forum moderators wake up thinking "gosh I'd better get to that knitting forum to prevent the Nazi camel from getting its nose into the knitting tent," but I don't know any knitting forum moderators.
The comment I was replying to - "all individuals of class X are motivated exclusively by vicious desire Y" - isn't a truth-seeking comment, and I think we can do better.
> This is, in part, why it's so common for popular submissions to be locked or deleted because "y'all can't behave".
But they have no problem digging into downvoted comments and deleting them, even if the system already did the job for them (put the downvoted stuff at bottom and hidden).
Maybe this is already well-known, but I saw another behavior recently on some subrreddits where a lot of new posts are seemingly getting a single downvote to a score of zero. I suspected there was some troll doing it, so I went down the line and gave about 20 or 30 of them a single up vote back to one, refreshed the page, and most of them had immediately gone back to zero. I think the mods must have a button for squashing a post without actually deleting it, and on some subs they use it for a huge number of the posts.
There is also just a massive amount of bots on reddit. Unidan, a old famous redditor, was involved in a controversy where he would use bots to down vote all the posts made at the same time as his own posts so that his posts would be more visible. He's not the only one doing things like that
13of40 was talking about a single button that mass downvotes multiple comments. None of the default (nor popular) clients support this functionality, but you could script your own version using the reddit API.
I was talking about a button that sets the score for a single submission to zero and makes it stick. I know the numbers are fuzzed, but I don't think fuzzing will take something with a score of 1 and show it as 0.
> I don't think fuzzing will take something with a score of 1 and show it as 0.
If one or more people decided to mass downvote new submissions (which isn't exactly uncommon), or the submissions are controversial, they will show as 0 even if they're actually -/+ 2 (for example).
If you decided to mass upvote them you will initially see the total increment by one, however, subsequent refreshes will show you fuzzed numbers. I believe the more active you are (e.g., upvoting 30 posts in the span of a minute), the more aggressive the fuzziness will be.
> I think the mods must have a button for squashing a post without actually deleting it
No, Reddit does not provide such a feature. And setting up an outside bot farm to hide posts makes no sense for mods who can already just delete a post outright.
I wonder if/how a hard limit on number of communities moderated would work? Make it so one person could only mod 2-3 subreddits. Unfortunately, this would require some work from Reddit the company to keep those same powermods from just making new accounts so probably won't happen.
They already have rules about making secondary accounts to evade bans, upvote yourself, etc. If anything it'd probably be easier to enforce a "no moderating a bunch of subreddits across multiple accounts" rule since it's mainly bigger subreddits that matter, and "mod teams of big subreddits" is a smaller group of people to monitor.
And if there was really some big conspiracy to skirt around this system they'd have to organize on a platform outside of reddit, ensure everyone is always accessing through VPNs so reddit doesn't notice multiple accounts modding from the same IP, and hope no one ever defects and exposes the underground moderation ring.
It'd be logistically easier, I just doubt Reddit is going to put forth the money and staff time required to enforce it. Current enforcement is based on reporting, I believe, and don't reports go to mods first.
And they definitely will organize off site. Discord is huge for this. I also bet they would use VPNs since a lot of them have the barest hint of tech knowledge and a burning ideological conviction they're doing something important.
> hope no one ever defects and exposes the underground moderation ring.
Man, whoever had the balls or ovaries to do that would be immediately smeared and mobbed.
>They already have rules about making secondary accounts to evade bans, upvote yourself, etc.
If that rule was enforced, huge swathes of the so called power mods (and admins) would be removed. That's probably why, much like Twitter, they declined to hire me on to work on anti-abuse technology.
The so called humans in the loop are evil and replaceable.
Reddit just doesn't have any incentive to do this - you're talking about people who are doing free labor for them. Maybe it's got problems, but if you get rid of the power mods (and don't change the structure to add any incentives like pay), you probably just end up with a bunch of unmoderated communities that then die off.
The laziest thing to do is to not do anything and let someone else moderate. While the disagreements over moderation are normal, complains about volunteers being "lazy" for not doing impossible are absurd.
Hardly. Volunteer positions come with responsibilities. No one is forcing them to waste their time on moderating an internet forum, but they chose to do it for whatever reason and then chose to be lazy and actively harmful.
The complaint here is about moderation tactic that is not actively harmful or abusive to people and ease their own load when threads become too much. Complaining about that is absurd.
No. The purpose of a subreddit is to let users engage. Excessive locking decreases user engagement and is harmful, not to mention that it punishes users (who are no longer able to continue a already started conversation in the comments) for violations of others.
>"Power" moderators, that is people who moderate a large number of subreddits, are untenable.
At least you know it's just one person, spread across multiple contexts.
I had a string of unusual behaviors when I ran /u/dontbenebby, culminating in being involuntarily being made the moderator of several Snapchat related subreddits around the time that Reddit let you view analytics and things I was posting were getting six or seven figure views as I dodged literal assassination attempts every time I tried to take a peaceful walk in the woods.
For context, I was (in)famous for not logging IPs, or even numbers of pageviews as far back as when I dropped that Facebook zero day on my blog and virtually planted myself in the middle of the protests against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and then went on to lecture class full of CMU students they should use strong anonymity tools and careful opsec if organizing protests in oppressive regimes like Tehran or Times Square as I threw up an image of a dead protester on the screen.
I meant what I said then, and I mean it now.
And maybe I spoke offline with whoever made me the moderator of a subreddit I never visited, for an application I have never used? In that case, let's share it with the whole class the three core points my art was intended to drive home:
1.) They are going to nuke Penn Quarter, not Pittsburgh.
2.) It is not my problem if you drop dead of a heart attack because you fucked around and found out.
3.) I am an alumni -- that means I can do whatever I want.
Reddit is a worse echo chamber than Twitter ever was.
I gave up on it when I got banned from certain subreddits for posting quotes from congressional testimony. If you post anything that deviates in the slightest from the moderator's viewpoint, you get banned.
The end result is an echo chamber that's getting tighter and smaller, excluding any diversity of opinion. It's no way to run a business.
Reddit's business is to house all of the echo-chambers, though, isn't it? That seems like a great business to be in, during this Heyday of Echo Chamber Construction™.
All of the like-minded echo-chambers. They seem to have no appetite for certain heresies and have walked back Aaron Swartz' original emphasis on free speech as a virtue.
> All of the like-minded echo-chambers. They seem to have no appetite for certain heresies and have walked back Aaron Swartz' original emphasis on free speech as a virtue.
Reddit is ultimately amoral, despite the sensibilities of its moderators, imo. They want to sell ads and IPO, thus they've been increasingly purging communities, posts, and individuals that are either not advertiser-friendly or create trouble.
Even as a casual user of the site, I have noticed a sharp increase in the number of submissions and comments that get Removed by Reddit (i.e., administrators) for no reason. I think they just went completely 'mask-off' after the debacle with Aimee Challenor.
It's not just the mods, the users on Reddit are equally awful and contribute more to the echo chamber imo.
The UK politics subreddit used to be one of my favourite subreddits back in the early 2010s. Back then it was quite a small community and while we had differences of opinions I think it's fair to say we enjoyed each other's company. But around the time of the Brexit vote, then Trump shortly after that, the subreddit started getting flooded with reactionary, low-effort comments and anyone who tried to provide a nuanced opinion or alternative view point was typically downvoted and insulted.
I along with a few other long-time commenters were mostly in favour of Brexit at the time so we would constantly be downvoted and insulted whenever we wrote anything in favour of Brexit. And the worst was when a post made it to /r/all because then you'd an even larger flood of low-effort commenters just downvoting and insulting everyone with a different opinion.
And this wasn't even just minor insults, this was people telling me to kill myself and that I'm a horrible person literally everyday. I'm not sure how much this was a political subreddit thing vs Reddit generally, but it was honestly ridiculous the stuff people would say to me there.
Needless to say, I obviously left the community shortly after 2016, but I've seen similar things play across the site since. There seems to be no room for a difference of opinion there anymore. The mods if anything are just an amalgamation of the average Redditor.
The users being a horrible part of the echo chamber stems from echo-chamber-promoting moderation. Mods instaban (shadow ban) anyone and everyone in an extremely automated fashion based on a long list of rules and filters. You're only left with people that perfectly toe the line.
Fun fact: there's a popular car sub that will ban you for mentioning dealer markups in a disparaging way. That's right: if you say that Joe's Toyota tried to upcharge you $15k for a Camry, you'll be banned for life!
Reddit mods are ineffective or harmful a lot of the time, but so is Reddit itself in how it incentivizes thankless moderation and oversized and noisy communities for the purpose of ads and their upcoming IPO. Most non-niche subreddits could be replaced by ChatGPT at this point.
Many just look like RSS feed of news outlets, except moderated by morons. And obligatory wide reaching TOS where the discussion about say how fighting games could be more accessible to new players gets removed under "no content for fun or entertainment allowed" TOS point...
For real. From the headline I thought this was going to be a "ban" from an art department or marketplace or something of actual value, which would actually be news. Being banned from a subreddit for an arbitrary/idiotic reason is just reddit as usual.
It is still surprising - at least for me, I've been using Reddit for years but mostly niche subs, nothing popular - how such a petty power warps people's minds. I dread to think what a real power does then.
But in this case, the mods can't win. If they let AI art take over, HN will be condemning them for putting artists out of business. If they refuse to allow AI art, HN condemns them anyway.
On the contrary, AI will put a lot more artists in business by drastically expanding the range of artistic works than can be created and kinds of people who can create great works. Hanging a rectangle still painting on the wall is of limited appeal in the age of smartphones and VR. Imagining being able to paint walls and ceiling of entire house with aesthetically appealing, one of a kind art, for the same effort as currently required for a small still painting. A lot more people will be interested in paying for that and they will be willing to pay a lot more.
This would probably make the situation worse. You'd remove the incentive for people who moderate for the good of their own community, leaving only those who do so for the power they get (which are probably worse mods, though I don't have a citation for that).
Not sure if that would not create more problems, but there should be some accountability when they behave like a-holes. The mod in question could have asked for proof (draw live on webcam? - not an expert, just wondering) or peer analysis instead of just silencing the artist.
Then another user contacted the mod to complain, and got this reply:
https://nitter.bird.froth.zone/MeaririForever/status/1607826...
That mod has become toxic and imho should either apologize or be removed asap.
Small hobby subreddits are the best subreddits, and among the only ones I visit. I don't usually have problems with those mods. Anything front-page, or remotely popular to a wide audience, are where the worst mods (and posts / commenters) are.
"If you aren't the customer, you're the product" apparently is a lie. You're the product no matter what. Unless I missed it in the article, I doubt paying $100 for the advanced tax prep excluded me from this.
"Leave your friends and family, abandon the area that you grew up in for 30 years" is not really practical advice. Maybe it works for you, but it does not for other people.
You are right about this though: it is supply and demand. And currently there is a lot of regulatory capture on the supply side. Meanwhile there are new investment vehicles on the demand side.
I don't know what the solution is, but when I watch my local news, not a week goes by that I don't see a headline about a developer trying to build some high density housing, but local residents show up to some board meeting and complain about it until they reduce the density. The reasons given make no sense. "It's not part of our community plan"... So change the plan??
Most young professionals have to leave their friends and family behind to move to the big city for their career and then live a miserable life away from the people that made their life meaningful. This is my perspective.
Clearly the purpose here is to weed out fraud and abuse more easily by analyzing chats between users. I'd welcome it. I'm pretty sure some dating apps already do this, both with text and images, but ChatGPT is probably better at it.