So there's a delusional take you see on twitter Etc. All the time. From both sides of almost any issue but especially anything related to Russia, elections, Etc. You see people who respond to normal criticism or an abundance of criticism (usually relatively earned by how bad their takes are) accusing their detractors or those who disagree of being bots or astroturfed Putin or Clinton agents... The implied premise being that only lumps of code or Chinese sweatshop workers employed by bad faith actors could hold views that disagree with the complainer. That only bots or paid shills could oppose Ukraine, or support Clinton over Bernie, or Biden over Trump... Etc.
I used to dismiss these complaints... but now I feel I might owe a general apology.
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I've noticed since TheMotte moved to its new Site that the Quality of a lot of Comments are just off. Not that the takes are bad or low quality or have odd opinions But that they're Bizarrely and Unnervingly detached from even the barest context of the discussion itself. Stuff completely out of character for even a bad rulebreaking poster on the motte.
Short comments that don't engage with any arguments presented, or even engage with the context of the discussion... but that Immediately tangent off on some culture war point utterly unrelated to the discussion, and then not engaging wit any replies (often with a single external link)... I've seen weird shit on twitter so I've dug into a few of these accounts... and all of their comments are like this, short snipes that never engage even 1 or 2 comments deep with anyone who replies. but that are slowly wracking up a history on the platform...
And then today I was hit by a smoking gun, this Comment:
“The Ukraine conflict is one of the clearest examples of good vs. evil in the past century"
You said it! Look at how despicable these people are!
Video: Ukraine Soldiers Sing Praises Of WW II Era Nazi: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4H-yMmNh5Cs
And now NPR is just casually rehabilitating the Nazis: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/03/1084113728/a-closer-look-at-the-volunteers-who-are-signing-up-to-fight-the-russians
Now the links are to real pieces of media, The Jimmy Dore Show and NPR... both respectable enough... and there'd be little to suggest this was a bot trying to manipulate the discussion... except for one thing:
No one had said the quote he was replying too...
Indeed I know where he got the quote. It was from a discussion/long take weeks before in relation to Ukraine, and would not even have fit the discussion in that piece, since it was a meta-discussion about how figures discuss Ukraine relative to other wars. I'd quoted it back then as an example of something we'd think was delusional and completely detached from intellectual rigor if said about Iraq 1991 or WW1...
Indeed another comment making the opposite argument used the same quote and drew other quotes from the same two week old discussion... except arguing the opposite way (pro-Ukraine)... And likewise replied not at all to having it pointed out that nothing they quoted was at all mentioned in the actual thread or discussion that was being had.
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This obviously killed the discussion in that thread... when half the thread becomes comments quoting things, points and arugments, that were never said, and the other half must become replies saying in effect WTF!?
Well you can't have a discussion any more. Any organic back and forth between actual mottizens was killed. And obviously none of these either schizos or bots responded to keep discussion going.
Now if this becomes the norm it will kill the space...
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But its also really unnerved me with regards to the rest of the internet.
The "Dead Internet Theory" doesn't feel like a theory anymore. The Motte is an obscure space with discussion levels high enough you notice if an actor isn't actually thinking or engaging with what's been said... and 2 out of 15 comments in that thread were Fairly undeniably bots....
On a site that's only been up a few months.
What the hell must it be like on other forums? Newspaper comments? YouTube comments?
Hell 4Chan had to implement Capchas for every comment to avoid the problem.
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Notes -
I don't have any special or serious insights to add to this discussion.
But it does seem like one hypothesis you can't eliminate is that /r/themotte was overrun by bots, to which your thinking calibrated, and when we moved the bots all stayed behind on reddit and what you're complaining about is just what talking to regular people looks like...
No.
If bot activity is widespread it starts showing telltale signs really fast, and then kills discussion. This is why Twitter conversations never really go anymore than 1 reply deep now, if you try you get burned really fast.
On twitter, if you say something about a key issue and a bot brigades you they run through a series of replies copied right of some UR post they mined... you only notice when you ask them if they're a bot and ask them to reply with the color of mint, only for them to reply to that challenge with yet more text copy pasted from some article that supports whatever position they're shilling.
"...and that's why the donbass is essentially Ukrainian"
"Wait that didn't engage with anything I said. are you a bot? What colour is the sky?"
"When you look Crimea however there's..."
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I've never seen anything like that here,... where entire bot reply chains happen to create the illusion of 50/50 or greater support for one issue... and after you notice and start calling it, they keep going and following the script... so maybe I'm talking out of my ass and blowing a few bad/non-sequiter comments out of proportion...
But its the kind-of thing that you don't forget if it happens to you and it paranoia poisons all your future interactions.
Its possible in my experience here one person schizo'd out, and another didn't read the ariticle and took their detached out of context quotations as representative... but it something I've grown paranoid about and wanted to gauge everyone else's sense of the vibe
If you watch Youtube economics videos, you will see a lot of this sort of thing in the comments:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=WN-YkZ8YTlM&lc=UgwWe_CeXm7MVMSDom14AaABAg
One tell-tale sign is the use of real names, rather than things like Queefburglar69.
Quite a lot of effort for minimal advertising, but I suppose that the cost of bots is much lower.
Which comments do you think are bots?
The highlighted comment and those below it.
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I’m not sure about this. The kind of person who searches extremely niche economic forecasts videos on inflation from small think tanks is surely more likely to use their real name and not QueefBurglar420
I'm not sure if you know many economists. It's hard enough to get them to not use names like QueefBurglar69 in their academic papers...
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I...I’m not sure that’s true.
Perhaps it depends on the economist. But i’ve noticdd wide differences in names according to video content
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That is absolutely amazingly blatant. It's terrifying to imagine when all that will be done flawlessly by AIs without Indian accents so strong you can hear it when they type.
Will the internet even be usable at that point, if you couldn't search for anything without getting fake conversations generated on the fly to con you?
There tend to be arms races with this sort of thing. So things like Zoom may become more important to prove that you're human, and then as quality AI video becomes possible, maybe there will be complex "Show a smile, then a frown, then dance the Limavady Jig" tests.
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