There's always been a short distance between SEO and manufactured opinion.
this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2026
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Technology
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That's why I rely on Lemmy for my information about . . . um . . about . . .
Well. Owls. I guess.
And dull things.
πͺ
I've been doing my part by telling a believable lie when people ask questions and then if anyone doubts me I insult them.
The day AI search responds to a users reply of doubting the results with something like "You are a fucking idiot" I'll know my efforts were worth it.
The few times I asked something to gemini it gave some bs response like "one Reddit user claimed... "
Hey atleast it's transparent
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
I wanted to post my photo in a dress on lemmy's r/femboy alternative. Searched: one of the instance blocked, second one have 8 months gap between posts (basically dead). There whooping 2.5 users on lemmy, who are interested in femboys and I'm one of them.
While most people agree with you on paper - no one wanna switch, cause there no real alternative. Similar with google, youtube, windows, nvidia and all other IT monopolistic crap.
Agree i got banned on reddit and have create new account every once in a while then had to fight shadow ban , I wouldn't think twice before switching but most communities that I follow specially local once are basically non existent only the super popular or some niches with technically sound user base were able to shift rest all stayed at reddit
I was a terminal redditors for over a decade and that last year or two I was getting site-wide bans at an accelerating rate. I'm off there to avoid a permaban and I'll only post there if I need a question answered no other way.
I've been on Lemmy for 19 days so far and feel like it scratches whatever pseudo-social itch Reddit scratched before; even though the communities aren't as niche, the community and moderation isn't so consistently obnoxious.
No shit. All online conversations on social media shouldn't be treated as reliable information. Not all data is of the same quality. I thought this was obvious, apparently it isn't.
That actually makes me wonder if these things have any correlation besides "more inferences = more true". You'd hope they have things like: if on wikipedia=big mega true, if on some random dude's blog=maybe kinda true, if on the onion=not true.
My guess is they use the vote counts to classify the reliability of the data. They might even have vote identities to classify the data based on audience. That actually seems pretty likely, now that I think of it. It would be an important part of making them effective propaganda tools, which I believe is one of the end goals.
I got the new fitbit air, it came with 3 months of βAI coachβ. To give it a try, I asked it how it detected my stationary bike ride, with only a sensor on my wrist.
It gave me a confident answer about vibrations, pulse, etc. I checked the linked source - it was a years old reddit conversastion about another fitbit watch, where comments were guessing about the automatic detection of workout types.
I turned off the AI feature.
I remember once I signed up to one of those things where you rank / select AI responses to various questions (i forget what it's called it was basically a scam anyway). The last question was something specific about a world of warcraft item or something. I've never played the game so I googled it and clicked on the first Reddit answer.
Someone had asked the exact question being asked to me and the top response was something like "do the damn (aiRankingThing) yourself. And then there were loads of botted responses giving intentionally false answers etc.
Kind of realised then how easy it is to create complete lies on places like Reddit.
Also upvotes / downvotes are very easy and cheap to buy. You can change the sentiment of an entire thread for $10.
And stupid reddit is hell bent on stopping me from using reddit for one upvote i have to my post using alt
So Iβve been thinking about this: where would we post massive amounts of miss information with the sole purpose of miss leading AI?
Just dump it on Reddit, itβs that simple? Or would an instance on the feddiverse also work?
The fediverse will run into this problem: Reddit is charging AI companies for access and all other big networks are increasingly making it hard to index them in search engines or to scrape them. The fediverse is different. We will see it getting more visible in search and therefore also in AI results, because it is accessible. Which means that people will come here and try to game the system.
As long as itβs free, like the rest of the internet, I kind of want AI to work.
How could we kill commercial AI and keep Free AI?
It is too power hungry to be both free and good. You can make it less power hungry by making it worse, or you can keep it good but then it costs a lot. Also, "good" is a stretch.
I donβt think ai will ever be neutral/benevolent. Itβs too easy for fascists and the like to try and manipulate matters through it.
I personally would rather see it go away or at the very least take a backseat.
Reddit has been trying to block crawlers, including the internet archive, so they can sell their data to commercial AI companies.
Except for legal liability, the other solution is good-enough models too cheap to run locally to justify paying hosting. Like prepackaged stand-alone AI on-site servers which are cheaper after electric costs than subscriptions.
The tragedy of this is the tragedy of our age and that is if people and companies of people put as much effort into being good as they did into trying to appear good then they would actually be good.
I think it would take significantly less effort to just be good.
Like, basically every study done on the topic agrees that treating your employees well will net a benefit on the capital investment required due to increased productivity. They're actively throwing money away.
And like employees, the way they treat customers is actively hurting them.
As Reddit is mostly idiots and slop now, it's a tainted source of training data.
Reddit Tiny Robot: "What is my purpose?"
Companies Rick Sanchez: "You serve algorithmic relevance through AI."
Reddit Tiny Robot: "Oh. My god."
All I do on reddit is post my "performance art", have fun menacing dorks and on extremely rare occasions offer helpful advice
If I'm providing usable data, then either their algorithm has failed miserably, or I have