Marketers and their bots have been using reddit to hype up brands. No wonder Reddit feels like shit these days.
It'll happen in the Fediverse too.
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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People downvote me when I say it. That's all cope. We're not wrong; if and when this goes mainstream, it'll attract the same bad actors just as heavily.
Of course, there are surely already a few here testing the waters.
I think there are some differences that make the fediverse more resilient to this. For example, the absence of cumulative account karma keeps out the reddit style karma farming. The ability to ban whole instances also makes it easier to kick out bad actors. Instance admins could also implement their own rules like switching to an invite based system to reduce bot spam. Also it seems to me that reddit is actively encouraging this kind behaviour to inflate their user statistics and there is no incentive to tolerate this kind of spam for a fediverse server admin.
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karma is meaningless to seo outside of account restrictions. the people doing this as a job aren't doing it for imaginary internet points
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it doesn't matter what individual instances do as long as the largest ones have open signups
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We are all rats. When this ship sinks, we will float to the next, or (decide to) drop off.
All things considered, how much would actually be lost?
The alternative being.............
This comment made me realise that the internet could have been born, lived, and died, within my lifetime.
Like phone calls, and texting, bad actors ruin everything that they touch.
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And when that happens, we move instances.
I wonder if we could make only the sign-up page of Lemmy and Piefed public to the internet, and the rest only accessible through login and verification of being actually bloody human? Could use anti-scraping measures...
If the idea of a healthy Fediverse requires people moving instances whenever one finds themselves close to bottom-feeders and opportunistic parasites, we already lost.
I see your point, though for me it's not so much the requirement of moving inasmuch it's the ease of doing so.
With traditional social media, you'd need to move entirely to another social media platform while you might not even be able to enjoy similar content. With lemmy&piefed, you can do that.
That's discord model.
Fediverse needs to have a layer which traps AI in a never-ending maze.
A never-ending maze would mean the scrapers just hammer our servers forever. Better to lead them into a honeypot and automatically ban their IP. Like PieFed does.
What about a maze that adds a few hundred ms to the response time with each request, so the load gets less the longer it's trapped?
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Most people [...] write [...] comments [...] and hope AI picks them up
Really quite sad if there's even one person out there doing that.
This is also as much of a grift as any SEO that claims to have cracked the code of getting to the top of results. Even if they have figured something reproducible, it will get fixed. If someone can manipulate a search engine to provide results different to what it would otherwise do, that's a bug they will fix
Will they though, search engine results lately seem very much like a decisive victory for the SEO slop
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God, I just hate the way these people fucking talk. Everything is a bulleted list and sentence fragments.
100% written by an LLM. They always use this tone and it’s infuriating.
People who abuse GenAI no longer can tell when the shit they post look like GenAI. They only talk to AI so it looks normal to them.
That's one of the signs of LLM output, take any idea and have it flesh it out into short article. It'll bullet point the crap out of it
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Anyone that works in marketing needs to be flogged in the streets for their crimes.
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The linkedin writing format must be banned, exhausting, unreadable and way too self important. It's not a haiku write like a normal person you lunatic. Also these bots are destroying public forums, don't expect any praise from me.
Lemmy just BLEW AWAY the LinkedIn Writing Style.
A few simple witty posts have utterly upended how we communicate on the internet.
Normal Users:
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Embarassingly minimizing the display when your boss approaches the desk.
And maybe that works for normal online interactions.
Sure, it's fine if you're an entry level Lemmy user
But you'll never change the culture of the internet.
So we came up with
Something that's
Even better than
What we used
To post like
Before
We first started using
This online
digital service
For posting our
Thoughts to
Other
Pe
ople
It's called memes.
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Wtf it literally never crossed my might to use a forum like this. So fucking dumb. It's like everyone is scrambling for a couple percent points over the next
Its likely this is designed with a plan to push advertising or self-promotion.
Eg: step one is done - figure out how to both find threads early & get your content picked up as a good answer regularly and consistently. Step 2 - start inserting 'first hand' recommendations or even just mentions of products and services.
I've already seen webpages with the most esoteric or niche product/service recommendations (like some random Indian consultancy with 2 people listed in it, and no other significant web footprint) pop up in first page web results. Its another AI deathblow to the utility of search engines.
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SEO is a grift.
The turbo-hell part is that the spam comments aren't even being written for humans to see. The intention is that ChatGPT picks up the spam and incorporates it into its training.
I worked at a company that sold to doctors and the marketing team was spending most of their effort on this kind of thing. They said that nowadays when doctors want to know "what should I buy to solve X?" or "which is better A or B?" they ask ChatGPT and take its answer as factual. They said that they were very successful in generating blog articles for OpenAI to train on so that our product would be the preferred answer.
My god. Somehow I hadn't thought of doctors using LLMs to make decisions like that. But of course at least some do.
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Gross.
I continue to have my own little cognitive dissonance about the Fediverse:
The world needs more FOSS and information needs to flow in a decentralized, democratic kind of way.
Howeverrrrr.... Lemmy is awesome for we few that it clicks with. For the good of the users and especially the volunteer admins who run our instances, I am glad Lemmy is not the big glowing target that reddit is.
Maybe we just hang out and keep the lights on no matter whether it's for occasional lost Linux users or for when mainstream folks decide to ditch oligarch-tech en masse.
Lemmy has the feel to me that reddit did back in the day. I can only imagine as lemmy gets more popular and becomes big enough for big tech to take notice, that it will become consumed by the same garbage reddit has. Lemmy just isnt big enough yet for them to try and consume.
So for now Lemmy is great, but its only a matter of time before the turds find us here too.
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Oh, this is great.
Users noticed that Google had too much bad results because of SEO and spam flooded search results.
Users added "reddit" to their search terms, so they get results from reddit, where spam and astroturfing were... there but manageable.
Now the SEO people and advertisers target reddit with AI tools, until it is so enshitificated that we have to find something else (rinse and repeat)
"No, don't leave, we just finished saturating the space with ads!"
"Why do you think we leave?"
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More than a decade and a half later and pretentious SEO fanatics still fucking make my eyes roll.
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It's all "traffic", "new users", and "engagement". I'm sure Spez is over the moon telling his handlers about all the growth.
Reddit: born full of fake users (sockpuppets), died full of fake users (bots)
Sad beep boop
What a self report. This guy is complicit in turning the age of information into the age of propaganda.
I have no idea what any of that means, and I'm happy with that.
Shitification.
It means shitification.
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Plot twist: They did not build shit, the text is generated by AI, and whatever they do is still done by third country workers.
The counter to this is a web of trust. You break the trust you are out of the web, and nodes connected you too are also out (for a period). And you need two to vouch for you
Polluter.
I don't understand the point of this. Like, you figure out how to increase traffic on certain posts/comments and there's somehow a push for this? Do they get money somehow? These people always use terminology and ceo buzzwords as if it's some big business level that people are aspiring to reach, but what's the actual point? Why would I care if my post/comment exploded? Was I just using Reddit wrong?
You mention your product in the reply and hope that some poor sap doesn’t realize it’s astroturfing and thinks they’re finding a really glowing honest review from a totally organic real person who recommended a thing they found that actually works
So it's just a grift. Makes sense, they always use grift-style buzzwords. I was about to comment on the ridiculousness of building a business solely on manipulation, but then I thought about it a bit more haha. Thanks for the explanation.
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This doesn't explain why Reddit has decided that I need multiple Hindi sub referrals every day.
Years and years of data regarding me, zero Hindi, zero Indian, zero interest, AND YET here's another suggested Hindi sub! Fantastic work.
But the Jesus ads sealed the deal, adios Redditto
apologies for my off topic ramble, but I feel better.
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I don’t post there anymore but the only time it felt like I was talking to real people was on my small state sub. That’s the only reason I even lurk. Since I’m banned from Facebook it’s the only place to get the tea.
here is to hoping that lemmy never grows
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