Reddit was already heavily astroturfed before AI. There's no space on the internet where you can get as much bang for a buck with an influence campaign due to its centralized frontpage. The most obvious example is /r/worldnews, with millions of readers, a few thousand commenters and maybe 40k voters. To skew any discussion, you need at most 6k accounts, and that's giving you the kind of influence on American politics as would the frontpage of the NYT. You could hire real people for each account, and it would still be worth it.

I'm wondering how it goes with a lot of social media actually.

There were problems with the "algorithm"[0] before being intentionally gamed... but I feel like it's easier than ever to have an army of bots intentionally pointing a conversation.

I'll give you a brief example (we should not debate this case on HN but I'm talking specifically about a hypothesis that can be drawn).

In the UK, the streets are alight with the news of the murder of a young white boy at the hands of a Sikh boy. In the UK, historically, the Sikh community has been seen as a bit of an outlier in terms of how well they integrated and how tolerant they are. They are, for all intents and purposes "model immigrants".

The issue was, when the police were called to the scene of the stabbing, they immediately arrested the barely conscious boy on the ground, who had been stabbed and was bleeding from the mouth- handcuffing him and dismissing his pleas on the basis that he might have been making racist remarks.

The people in my circles are furious at the police for doing this.

However, it seems like there is an army of bots who keep trying to paint it as if it's a problem with Sikhs, or that their religious rights were the problem.

(for context, British law permits baptised Sikhs to carry a dull Kirpan knife - but this knife was not used for the incident above, it was a separate and still illegal knife to carry).

So now, online, instead of people talking about police indifference or the issues we have when we see race before trying to assess the situation: we are instead caught in a conversation about banning Kirpans for Sikhs (they have never been used in any crime from what I can tell) or how the Sikhs should feel bad or whatever.

Which is wonderful for a politician who wants to dismiss the criticism against the police as racism, but not so good for holding the police and media to account for the situation and the attempted coverup.

By being able to control the aggression, they are able to control the response, which drowns everything else out, and with LLMs the barrier is stupidly low to do this.

Creating division for your own reasons has never been cheaper or easily accessible.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Data_scand...

an agent hired by an agentic pipeline.

"we could find a nail for this hammer... or we could just hammer everything until we find the nail or make too much money hammering for a bit then sell in may and go away".

I wonder when an agent will "decide" that it's more efficent to outsource its work to humans

Why do you think that the anon-free internet will ensure there are no bots?

current bots are run and financed by humans already.

And what makes you think that current newspapers will evolve and regain trust? (as most of them are financed by 'rich' owners and therefore somehow influenced by the 'desire' of the owner).

<insert not-a-bot proof by anubis + 'pseudonymous reputation' >

I’ve come to this same conclusion. Either we accept an internet crawling with bots and astroturf, or we abandon the anonymity and have an internet with only verified humans.

Thank you. While I do not agree with him on every point (across his corpus - this one was excellent for it's time), it's a delight to re-read a Paul Graham essay.

There are a few topical short-form non-fiction writers that feel truly worth reading more than an agentic summary, and I get a visceral pleasure just following his words and logic to their well tuned conclusions.

Just reminds me how bad a lot of the AI accelerated content is these days. May have to few shot to improve my own writing :)

Some ppl do dump trash on the street intentionally, out of laziness but also for some even their actual goal is to deteriorate a neighborhood. But you're pulling in a rare edge case to what by and large these GenAI blogs and Youtube videos are intended for. By and large ppl are trying make income. They are hoping their content will be well received and they will get repeat customers. They are trying to figure out how to use GenAI in a non-sloppy engaging way.