It should be illegal to misrepresent an ad as a post or comment. This exact thing should be against the law. The boundary between advertising and social media is so thin at this point. It has to stop. It's dangerous for consumers. Corporations should have to clearly label themselves at every turn. The usage of AI to intermingle advertising and social media should be blanket illegal.

I've been on Lemmy ever since the reddit API fracas. To date, I have not seen a reason to return. I have, however, seen many reasons to stay away.

The depressing thing about all this is that this stuff actually works. Most people will happily consume whatever shit is served to them.

“With Dynamic Product Ads, brands can tap into the rich, high-intent product conversations that people come to Reddit for," Reddit EVP of Business Marketing and Growth Jim Squires said in a statement.

Gross.

I wish I could get all the mods from the subreddits that rolled over in June/July in a room and slap each and every one upside the head.

The style in which that post by Ophelia_SK is written seems exactly like chatGPT. I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly makes me feel so strongly, but it’s something to do with how sentences and paragraphs are constructed. They always have the same cadence with the commas and how thoughts are laid out. It’s got that generically positive tone as well.

Kinda cool though, I feel like I’m becoming able to spot these. It’s like being able to spot a photoshop by the pixels. I’ve seen quite a few shops in my time.

Does any body know of an open-source reddit alternative? God, I wish that existed :/

I love how marketing people are so abnormal that they need tips on not sounding like a bot.

I'm looking forward to their "Dynamic Product Ads" system to coming back to bite them in the ass when ads for Nestle products appear next to posts talking about whatever horrific thing Nestle is doing this week (and similar things).

And now ensues an arms race, in which advertisers attempt to plant adverts into comment sections naturally, while reddit attempts to stop them doing it for free.

No company with shareholders can ever avoid enshittification.

The day Spez decided to turn his shitty circus into an IPO, was the last warning bell.

Did anything that happened from last year tell anyone anything over there? No because a large amount of Reddit users are lost causes, they can't cope getting outside their comfort zone. They're like Facebook users, too drugged up on their insatiable need to be righteous, to be validated, to feel like they're heard and to play up to an audience who more than likely would not like them if they met them in person.

Soon we're going to find Spez saying the exact same thing Mark said - "Dumb fucks".

Will it apply to porn subreddits?

“Hey u\i_love_big_tiddies, we noticed that you love big tiddies. Could we interest you in our new product: AstroCam Super Binoculars, so you can look at big tiddies from as far away as a quarter mile?”

I know it's a real problem and all, but dear lord does Lemmy in particular love that word.

Fixed link

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/reddit-sneaky-ai-spam-bots-compete-to-sell-you-stuff/

Well, I just stopped using reddit so this is good timing.

I think it’s harder to post to Reddit as a human being than it is as a bot. You have to read like six paragraphs of text (which doesn’t show up on old Reddit) to make sure that your post is formatted correctly, and then a mod will look through your comment history and ban you because they read everything you’ve ever posted and discovered that you own a car or something.

I really would like to quit Reddit but I have to admit that Reddit has a lot more variety in terms of content, so I'll keep using it until Boost for Reddit finally breaks for good.

50% of the content on Lemmy falls into four categories:

• Posts complaining about Reddit
• Linux memes
• Commieposting
• Porn

There's something sad about society losing a such a unique source of knowledge, but hopefully we've collectively learned something about the dangers of trusting proprietary solutions.

Anyone found a reliable way to search across Lemmy instances they can share?

It has definitely become more noticeable on Reddit that huge numbers of either compromised or sold accounts are being used by bots to sell shit. They are in basically every thread now, getting upvoted to appear more legit until someone calls them out and they delete their content.

Reddit is definitely on the way down. And a decent amount along the way. But unfortunately, it still is the best option for a modern day message board. I want to use Lemmy more, but there just isn't enough content being posted by enough people.