That would be an unmarked ad. I don't think that's legal in many places

Yeah, I've noticed that a bit lately anyways. Maybe I'm looking up stuff that has less of a community on Reddit, and thus has less discussion, but I have absolutely noticed some comments have a single product name-drop with little clarity for why they liked the product. It starts to feel like they're just ads (generated or otherwise) meant to trick you into thinking Reddit users are liking the product.

AI is going to just make it worse, and cause Reddit to not be a good goto for actual reviews and discussion on pros/cons.

I wanted to figure out what game hosting sites were good and Google pointed me to reddit...every thread was full of boilerplate ads for different sites. The comments were the most obvious, marketing-approved sentences I've ever seen

Especially since being immune to censorship is kind of the point of the fediverse.

If you're even a tiny bit smart about it, you can start hundreds of sock puppet instances and flood other instances with bullshit.

Here's my prediction. Over the next couple decades the internet is going to be so saturated with fake shit and fake people, it'll become impossible to use effectively, like cable television. After this happens for a while, someone is going to create a fast private internet, like a whole new protocol, and it's going to require ID verification (fortunately automated by AI) to use. Your name, age, and country and state are all public to everybody else and embedded into the protocol.

The new 'humans only' internet will be the new streaming and eventually it'll take over the web (until they eventually figure out how to ruin that too). In the meantime, they'll continue to exploit the infested hellscape internet because everybody's grandma and grampa are still on it.

You’re two years late.

Maybe not for the reputable ones, that’s 2026, but these sheisters have been digging out the bottom of the swimming pool for years.

https://theconversation.com/researchers-warn-we-could-run-out-of-data-to-train-ai-by-2026-what-then-216741

Amazon itself a prime source of enshittification

I Turned Bottles of Amazon Drivers' Pee into a #1 Bestseller. Amazon don’t care about their workers’ bladders, but do you know what they do care about? Selling stuff.

“I only do this because I have no other options,” he says. “Other people who go slower just end up getting fired.” I let Christian leave, and hail some more drivers. They all confirm that this is, largely speaking, how their life looks. I hear about how female drivers often develop urinary tract infections from holding it in for too long. Then a dispatch manager I bump into by chance confirms that the “disgusting” bottles of urine outside of fulfilment centres are from Amazon drivers. ​​“We have a point system where, if you pee in a bottle and leave it in the car, you get a point for that,” they tell me. I ask: How many bottles until they’re in trouble? “Ten bottles.”

It kinda seems like the end of the Google era. What will we search Google for when the results are all crap? This is the death gasps of the internet I/we grew up with.

I ran into this issue while researching standing desks recently. There are very few places on the internet where you can find verifiably human-written comparisons between standing desk brands. Comments on Reddit all seem to be written by bots or people affiliated with the brands. Luckily I managed to find a YouTube reviewer who did some real comparisons.

“New poison has been added to arsenic. Should you stop drinking it? Subscribe to find out.”

The problem is the magnitude, but yeah, even before 2020 Google was becoming shit and being overrun by shitty blogspam trying to sell you stuff with articles clearly written by machines. The only difference is that it was easier to spot and harder to do. But they did it anyway

The only thing we reasonably have is security through obscurity. We are something bigger than a forum but smaller than Reddit, in terms of active user size. If such a thing were to happen here, mods could handle it more easily probably (like when we had the spammer of the Japanese text back then), but if it were to happen on a larger scale than what we have it would be harder to deal with.

maybe the world needs a reboot, just get rid of it all and start from scratch

That would destroy all the old good vintage stuff and leave us with machines that immediately fill the vacant space with pure trash.