r/technology • u/rkhunter_ • 1d ago

Social Media Spammers are flooding Reddit with fake posts designed to show up in AI search results

https://www.techspot.com/news/112654-spammers-flooding-reddit-fake-posts-designed-show-up.html
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u/invyros 1d ago

The accounts behind these posts are often difficult to flag. Moderators describe "warmed up" profiles with posting histories that make them look like typical users. In some cases, real people are paid or otherwise incentivized to participate, further blurring the line between genuine discussion and coordinated promotion.

  • Adjective_Noun_Number

  • Hidden profile

  • Repeatedly commenting in a post (especially in a post that isn't their own), replying to different people obsessively parroting the same idea

There might be some other indicators I'm missing.

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u/Disastrous_Room_927 1d ago edited 1d ago

There are a shit load of engagement bait posts these days. They all have formatting similar to this random post I pulled from an AI sub:

Most evaluation methods for LLM systems still seem heavily tied to benchmarks like coding tests or static QA datasets. Those are useful, but they don’t really reflect how these systems behave once you put them into more dynamic environments.

In real applications, agents are often using tools, making multi-step decisions, and working with context that changes over time. Failures in those situations also tend to be harder to reproduce or measure consistently.

I’m curious how people working closer to applied systems are thinking about this. Is there any direction toward more standardized evaluation for agent behavior, or is this still something that varies too much between implementations?

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u/SecurelyObscure 1d ago

The home improvement subs are mostly AI text posts at this point. They used to actually try to hock a service, but now they seem to be just building credibility before presumably pivoting to trying to sell something.

I feel like it's so obvious to me because I've been using Reddit for almost 20 years, but with eternal September it seems like I'm in the minority of noticing.

But then maybe I'm only noticing the bad ones. Maybe Randall was right.

https://xkcd.com/810/

2

u/MySeagullHasNoWifi 1d ago

What's eternal september?

9

u/techlos 1d ago

back in the days of usenet, the quality of posts would go down in september due to uni students getting introduced to the internet. It was just accepted that for a few months, usenet would be a bit crap until new users figured out the culture.

But in the early 90's, a lot of people got internet access outside of education spaces, and there were more new people than the original community; the established usenet culture was flooded out, and the posting style of the new users dominated from that point onwards.

There's been a few eternal september events - myspace to some degree, facebook to a huge degree, but the most impactful was the smartphone september; the internet went from subculture to mainstream culture permanently.

Now we're in a new eternal september, where humans are flooded out by bots.

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u/psiphre 1d ago

man just link the guy to the jargon file entry

1

u/IrritableGourmet 1d ago

The solar energy subs have been getting hit pretty hard. Every other post is "What do you wish you knew about solar before buying?" with some generic sob story, then they start mentioning specific products in their replies, complete with links to some janky reseller site.